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Products that do what I’m Building a Nerf Dart Missile Defense System [video] does
I’m building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air. I’ve worked on other projects in robotics and object tracking (perception for self driving cars), but this has a whole different set of challenges. Nerf rival rounds travel at over 100 feet per second and shooting them out of the air requires aiming systems that are precise to less than half the width of a human hair and timing precision of 600 times faster than the blink of an eye. This is the first part of the series of me building the project (and my first video!) so I’d love to hear what you think!
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I got pretty good at (and very addicted to) the lunar lander game from a few days ago... so I decided to make an autopilot for the lander based on what I felt like was the best strategy! Now I can have perfect landings every time without lifting a finger :D Writing the autopilot code was a lot more fun than I expected! It felt a bit like programming a robot. Source code: https://github.com/szhu/lunar-lander-autopilot Original lander HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506
2023 · szhu.github.io
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Heya. I created a flexible collision engine for broad detection in C that's also pretty fast. Personally that's my best, so I wanted to show it here. Although... still not as fast as DragonEnergy's one that supposedly handled millions of agents bouncing off each other every frame on an old i3, haha. I hope I get better at this! He set the bar pretty high for me. I was considering including some small function that tries finding the nearest entity, although I think it might be better to simply use query for that matter. Perhaps in the future I will get a good idea of how to do that more…
2023 · github.com
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Jun 2026 · github.com
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We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
2025 · tinytpu.com
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Hello HN! My name is Patrick, and I am a junior at my High School’s FRC robotics team FRC 341 “Miss Daisy” (yes named after the movie). Every year, during the first weekend in January, a new robotics game is released (no it’s not battlebots). The game could be about launching balls into a goal, climbing monkeybars, or placing cubes on a see-saw. This year we were challenged to build a robot that could shoot orange foam donuts into a goal about 6 feet in the air. Here is a yt video with the game animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9keeDyFxzY4&t. After we received the game…
2024 · chiefdelphi.com
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After training calculator agent via RL, I really wanted to go bigger! So I built RL infrastructure for training long-horizon terminal/coding agents that scales from 2x A100s to 32x H100s (~$1M worth of compute!) Without any training, my 32B agent hit #19 on Terminal-Bench leaderboard, beating Stanford's Terminus-Qwen3-235B-A22! With training... well, too expensive, but I bet the results would be good! *What I did*: - Created a Claude Code-inspired agent (system msg + tools) - Built Docker-isolated GRPO training where each rollout gets its own container - Developed a multi-agent…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, I’m sharing a small open-source project I’ve been working on: a native C++ ballistic solver that computes launch angles to intercept moving targets in real time, under gravity and air drag. Instead of relying on vacuum assumptions, closed-form equations, or lookup tables, the solver formulates the intercept as a nonlinear problem and solves it numerically using time integration and iterative methods. The motivation came from game and simulation scenarios where simpler approaches tend to break down: - moving targets - strongly curved trajectories due to drag - real-time constraints The…
Jan 2026
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Hey HN! I'm someone who both flies and programs drones. I've often struggled to make my drones perform perfectly, especially when the environment changes like a gust of wind. To solve this, I’ve trained ML Models to replace the Control Loops currently in charge of controlling most drones. These models perform better than Control Loops, require no tuning, and retain this performance in many more situations than Control Loops. Requiring no tuning also means that the same model can be used for multiple different drones/configurations, so it works out of the box. A high level model is also…
2024 · youtube.com
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_Vector Defense_ is a retro vector graphics style tower defense game (demo). This was a holiday "weekend" project. I wanted to recreate some of the fun I had in the past with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDefense and one other (Android?) game that may predate GeoDefense, but which was fixed grid and placement. Creation Details I "wrote" this in English. 99% of my development came from carefully articulated directions and requests from me to Gemini 3 (usually planning mode, in Antigravity IDE). Music is also AI generated via Suno.com, from my prompts. SFX are samples…
6d ago · michaelteter.com
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2014 · kortaggio.github.io
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We wanted to test if a smaller model like GPT-4.1-mini could beat its bigger brother 4.1 at the game Tic-Tac-Toe using only context engineering. We put them in a 100-game tournament. For the smaller model, we gave it a few examples of winning moves from past games right before it made its own move. The results were clear. Without the examples, the smaller model struggled against GPT-4.1. With the examples, its effectiveness increased by nearly 200%, and it consistently won. It's a simple demonstration, but it shows that a smaller, faster model with good, timely examples can outperform a more…
2025 · github.com
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Hi All, We built a prototype telepresence robot to go up against AnyBots. We're using an iPad as the control system and for FaceTime video conferencing. It took us a couple weeks to make. We demoed it this morning for the first time: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2BXM9PYaXY0 The next version will be taller and thinner. What do you think? Do we stand a chance against AnyBots? Thanks, David
2011
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2019 · indirobotgames.nl
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2013 · eschnou.github.io
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Hey folks, Check out a project I built over the past few days .. a lego mindstorms robot that autonomously drives around a track using vision/neural networks. It was coded entirely in Python. I did a short write-up and would love to get feedback. link: http://slowping.com/2012/self-driving-lego-mindstorms-robot/
2012
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