I'm starting to wonder if I wanted a robot
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I've said a few times that I was going to build a small robot called Sankome. Recently, though, I noticed something a little troubling.
Maybe I didn't actually want the robot itself.
This is a problem. I had been saying I would make it, and now I was no longer sure whether I really wanted the thing I was trying to make.
For a long time, I wanted to make something myself, put it out into the world, and make a living from it. But I was never very sure what to make, or what direction my work should take.
What I wanted was "to make something." There was not necessarily anything I wanted to do after making it. Even when I came up with ideas, most of them felt temporary. It was hard to find something I could stay excited about for several years.
Over the last few years, I had been aiming toward making and selling a small robot. Shirokuma MAKE includes a mix of things now, but originally it was not a software account. It was an account for hardware projects.
In the last few years, I have also worked on hardware-related projects outside my own work. Actually trying it made me feel, in a very concrete way, that hardware has a different kind of difficulty from software.
With software, if you put something in an app store or publish it as a website, you can at least get it to people. Of course selling it is still difficult. But the cost of producing one more copy is very small.
With hardware, even if you can get past the difficulty of making the thing, shipping it is another matter. Each unit has a material cost. If I assemble it myself, that time is taken directly from me.
The electronics side also has its own loop. You design a board, order it, wait for it, test it, fix it, and order it again. Just developing the thing costs more than I first expected. There is time spent waiting for boards, and time spent spreading parts across the desk, assembling them one by one, and then fixing things again.
CAD software is expensive too. I have stopped counting how much hardware-related equipment I have bought for home. There are legal constraints as well. Costs that a company can absorb are often quite heavy when I try to take them on as an individual.
With software, working alone still felt possible. With hardware, the more I moved forward, the less confident I became that I could do it that way.
But this is not simply a story about giving up hardware and going back to software. Around the same time, through building my outliner, I started to see what kinds of things I can keep working on.
When I use something every day and feel, "I wish this part were a little easier," the reason to fix it comes from inside me. It does not have to be supplied from the outside.
I think I probably cannot keep working for a long time on something I do not genuinely want.
Cute. Sounds fun to have. I do want that, of course. But that level of wanting probably does not last for years. I use it every day. I would be in trouble without it. If I were the customer, I would buy it without hesitation. Unless the wanting is that strong, it is hard for me to keep making something by myself.
When I thought about Sankome again from that angle, I got stuck. Do I really want a small robot like Sankome? I imagined it sitting on my desk. Would I touch it in the morning? Would I look at it between work sessions? Would I keep it powered on for days?
When I asked those questions, I could not nod as strongly as I expected. I felt like I might get bored of it over time.
That changed how I saw the project.
What I enjoyed was not the finished robot itself. It was the process of making it. Drawing the circuit, writing the firmware, and seeing it move the way I expected was the most interesting part. The finished object was a byproduct. What I wanted was the process.
If that is true, maybe what I should be making is not the finished robot. Maybe it is a tool that supports the process of making one.
I have a 3D printer, but I get stuck at the point of making the shape. That was the hardest part for me while working on Sankome. I started CAD and 3D modeling from almost zero. I have an image in my head: this much roundness, parts placed around here. But when I try to turn that into a shape in CAD, my hands stop.
Recently, I have been building Ohaco to make that part easier. I want it to let you make 3D forms as if you were snapping blocks together. Even if you have a 3D printer but get stuck in CAD or sculpting tools, I want Ohaco to help you get from an idea to something printable.
I still do not fully know whether I really want the robot itself.
But right now, I very much want a tool that makes the process of making a robot easier. I will keep working on the outliner too. For now, I am building Ohaco alongside it.
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