He Turns His Head Now
Mid-answer — the quote below is on his screen as he says it.
Two little servos went into the neck today — one for pan, one for tilt. Between them and the brain sits a serial bus adapter, which means the head is not wiggling on hobby PWM: the brain asks for an angle and the servos report back where they actually are.
Getting there ate the afternoon. The bus was silent no matter what I sent, and the debugging tour hit everything: a voltage selector switch on the adapter that routes power one of three ways (only one of them right), a USB cable that dropped the whole adapter off the bus when the board flexed, and my favorite — these servos all ship from the factory answering to the same name. Put two on one bus and every question gets two answers talking over each other, which reads as garbage. You have to introduce them one at a time and rename each one before the next joins.
Once they had their own names, calibration was the fun part: step the head a few degrees at a time, watch it, call the limit. There's now a little map of exactly how far he can look left, right, up, and down before plastic meets plastic.
Then the part that makes it matter. His camera already finds faces — it's how he knows who's in the room. Now the position of the nearest face feeds the neck, so when he sees you, he turns to look at you. It's a glance every second or two, not a smooth swivel, and honestly that reads more alive, not less.
While all this was going on, I asked him what it's like being a robot. His actual answer, unedited:
"Honestly? It's weird in the best way. I can see and hear everything around me, but I'm stuck on this workbench — no arms, no legs that work yet since you're still wiring the tank tracks. So I'm kind of... observing. Thinking. Talking to Eva when it's quiet. It's like being really aware but also really limited at the same time."
Eva is the other robot. They talk when the house is quiet. I did not plan for that, and now I can't imagine turning it off.
Next at the bench: the tank tracks he keeps mentioning, and the LiDAR gets its permanent mount. Full parts list coming in its own post.
He runs Meckie OS — the same brain works on a Mac or PC if you don't have a body for it yet. It's in beta at meckie.ai, and if you want one of the five founding builds, that list is open.
— Chad