2024: Teaching Robots how to Drum

or Little Drummer Robot

30 Dec 2024 - atrodo - Song: Little Drummer Boy by Lindsey Stirling

Its once again self reflection time, and this year I have more than usual to reflect on. While I did write one blog post along with a flurry of work at the beginning of the year, the unfortunate reality of the second half of the year slowed progress down significantly.

As usual, some hard statistics to start:

Made 18 commits
Changed about 18 files to the tune of around 1200 inserts and 140 deletions
Wrote 1 blog post

After the last blog post, work on the robots got slowed down by a very large rabbit hold of (successfully) bringing the WebGPU native API to perl. It all started because I saw that WebGPU native had a standardized C header file, which I felt was a good challenge to port. After all, perl does have some pretty good tools for accessing C code directly.

After that I was able to start working again for a few weeks. After that though was what really slowed me down: a move that sucked all of the free time out of my fall. All of that has finally started to settle down here at the end of the year, and I’m starting to slowly regather the codebase back into working memory.

That does mean that there is not a significant amount of difference from the last update. I am still in the process of rebuilding parts of the robot’s brains to understand 8 note scales properly instead of the 12 note confusion I had. That process is taking quite a bit of time, and there’s enough bits that all assume/require 12 notes that getting all working in one go takes some effort to say the least.

So here’s to a new year and some new robots learning how to drum.