BlinkThorLabsA Week Teaching MentorPi to Follow a Line (And Actually Understanding Why It Works)
Monday to Friday, one road mat, one stubborn ceiling light, and the moment lane_detect.py finally made sense.
Every engineering note
45 write-ups across 8 disciplines, newest first.
Building MentorPi-A1: From a Box of 3D-Printed Parts to a Robot That Drives Itself
Ackermann chassis, ROS2 on a Raspberry Pi 5, and the specific joy of hearing a buzzer confirm your first boot actually worked.
The Model Was Right and I Wasn't: A Steering Story About Trusting Simulink Over Instinct
I was ready to blame the servo. The model had been telling me it was something else for two days.
Automated Parking: Why Path Planning Is the Easy Part
The trajectory math was solved decades ago. Here's where the actual engineering effort goes instead.
Building a HIL Rig for MentorPi-A1's Battery Pack, and What It Caught Before We Ever Charged It
The real cell arrived three weeks late. By the time it showed up, the simulated one had already failed on us four times — for free.
Traffic Sign Recognition: From Pixel to Decision in Three Pipeline Stages
Detection finds it, classification names it, temporal fusion decides whether to trust it. Here's the full path.
Blind Spot Detection: What Drivers Get Wrong About It
Not a driver-facing FAQ. A corrective for the misconceptions that show up in our own sales decks first.
Lane Keeping Assist: The Fight Between the System and the Driver's Hands
A conversation that actually happened, more or less, over a whiteboard and two cold coffees.
What Adaptive Cruise Control Actually Feels Like to Tune
Process noise tuning matters more than your motion model — and jerk matters more than either, if you're the one sitting in the passenger seat.