Dr. John Vial

Small Robotics Tips For Beginners | get started at | PhD In Robotics

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

Best robotics banter of 2026 while out in the filed:

"Go PROMPT yourself!"

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

I just tried /goal for a big refactor job with GPT 5.5.

Oh wow, it just keeps going until either its done or I run out of tokens.

8 hours of slow, deliberate refactoring.

I quite like it!

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

Want your robotics field PC to share data with the world but don't want it to be exposed on the internet?

Use a cloud service like AWS or cloudflare and have it upload data to a public bucket, then build a simple web page that renders that data.

Simple architecture, easy to do and its usually free if you keep your data small and your web hosting to be a simple static page.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

btop is my favorite terminal interface at the moment.

It shows me system processes, CPU load, GPU load, hard drive space, networking.

And it looks so cool doing it!

sudo apt install btop

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

Don't let your robot turn into a thermo-mix.

Something that can do everything kind a ok, but if one part of it breaks then the whole thing is useless!

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

GPT 5.5: don’t make the whole app Haskell just because you like Haskell

Me: Lets do it anyway!

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

@GreeneElizabeth Whatever get the job done the fastest, but I’m still a fan of Ros, at least I get an architecture I know has worked for tones of other robots. And should scale as my robot complexity grows

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

When building your Minimum Viable Robot, use as much off the shelf as you can.

It's super tempting to want to write or generate all the code from scratch, to build your own electronics and circuit boards.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

@CyberEthanAI lol it’s just a Mazda 2 seat belt ! And this one is bog standard base g1 model, no fancy control included

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

J the robot all buckled up and ready to visit uwa and meet channel 7 news!

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

You'll tell yourself that you are building IP, but actually you are just wasting time.

Your minimum viable robot just needs to prove the problem can be solved and someone will pay you.

Everything else is premature optimisation.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

If you can't have hard conversations it will happily draft a diplomatic non answer so no-one on your team knows whats actually been decided.

And it will keep telling you how awesome you are as you do it.

So be careful.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

AI will amplify your worst traits if you let it.

If you're a lazy developer it will happily cut corners for you until nothing works.

If you are a micro-manager it will happily design a scheme to encourage every employee to quit.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

Yet in the age of AI I wonder if anyone has turned their agent to the firmware on this thing and gotten useful stuff out of it?

Have you tried fixing your old Lytro Illum?

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

Has anyone done any hacking on the Lytro Illum SLR camera?

It seems roughly once a year I get the Lytro camera out and see if it's useful. This time it's because I currently have a tough computer vision problem and I wondered if this light field camera could help.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

But sadly the firmware is locked down, and all the repos are for the earlier model. It seems that Lytro just made a cool piece of hardware and then disappeared, leaving all these units lost and unsupported.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

@ooeygui This is a good idea. I usually don't use MCP servers as I like to just ask the chatbot to run the commands, but I can see myself booting this up next time I run into something problematic

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

When Error Messages Hide the Real Problem: A ROS 2 Lesson

Opaque error messages are a special kind of frustrating. They tell you something is wrong, but not what or why.

I hit one recently that perfectly illustrates this.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

Why put shoes on J the robot?

His feet are perfectly good, and made of grippy rubber. But man, I don't want to have to figure out how to replace a worn out foot when we could just switch shoes.

Thankfully he's a humanoid, so there are plenty of shoes for him!

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

If you hit "sequence size exceeds remaining buffer" when mixing ROS 2 versions, now you know: check your distro compatibility first. You'll save yourself hours of debugging.

[Dr. John Vial @JohnVial]

The real lesson:

ROS 2 distros are only guaranteed to work with their own version. Humble with Humble. Jazzy with Jazzy. This is reasonable—it's how versioned systems work.

But the error message doesn't tell you that's the problem.