Ekami

A better software stack for robotics, to replace ROS 2: https://peppy.bot/

A framework to make robotics accessible and easy for everyone (ML engineers/firmware engineers/vibe coder/people with no technical knowledge) where all the stacks have clear separation so every speciality can focus on what they do best.

https://peppy.bot/

Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place?

Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.

how so? When you buy a phone, do you care about how it's built?

True... I'm in the first crowd personally

https://peppy.bot a robotics framework to replace ROS 2, currently working on automatic nodes resolution so pulling a working software for your robot is as easy as doing an `apt get install my_robot`.

The goal is to enable devs from all fields (embedded devs/AI engineers/vibe coders) to work on their own stack without ever having to worry about the other parts of the robot stack.

Hey, too bad you've shut down, looked like a great project.

I notice you don't have shared memory transport, nor do you support runtime composability (I think?)

We're using Zenoh in the backend, we didn't try to reinvent the wheel on that front.

I'm also a little confused on what serialization format you support - is it an entirely custom one?

It's cap'n proto, but abstracted away for the user so he doesn't have to think about it.

BSL feels great, but I found it scared off some people

Agreed, but we're building a SaaS in parallel, PeppyOS will be 100% free and open source but we don't want another company to build a SaaS on top of it, that will be the only restriction of the BSL license, otherwise it's the same as Apache 2.0.

The website claims “30hz polling rate”, “2ms latency”. Not sure if that is a best case or just for that demo.

This is just example cases but in fact it can go as high as you want as long as your hardware allows it

BSL will just prevent people from creating a competing SaaS product on top of PeppyOS, nothing will prevent anyone from using it for free commercially

Feedback noted, thanks! > Does this have any compelling selling points to convince someone to switch other than 'less overhead than ROS 2'?

At the moment it's pretty raw, but we'll eventually turn it into a "no fuss entry into robotics".

Our goal is to make all of this super easy with the installation of a single script. We're also working on a SaaS in parallel which will allow you to fire up the whole stack in your browser, 0 setup required (you pick the robot you want and it runs in a sim in your browser). Then, when you're satisfied with the result you just run a bash script on your Jetson board and everything will work the same on your real robot.

Very interesting. There is nothing that would prevent PeppyOS nodes from running on the GPU. The messaging tech behind PeppyOS is Zenoh (it's swappable), it can run on embedded systems (PeppyOS nodes will also be compatible with embedded in the future). That being said, at the moment the messaging system runs exclusively on the CPU.

Fun fact, we've been using pixi to compile everything Python related internally. In fact PeppyOS was even started with pixi as a base layer (but we pivoted away from it since the project is in Rust and Cargo is the de-facto toolchain). We support uv by default for Python (since it's what's the most used these days) but pixi is already supported, see the note on this page: https://docs.peppy.bot/guides/first_node/

Hey, good points, we have plans to create a ROS2 bridge in the near future. We definitely won't be able to catch up with huge ecosystem that ROS2 has created over the years but we will rewrite the annoying parts, that's for sure.

A little, less-known hack is to be hired as a freelancer/contractor, from there you just prove your worth and ask for a long time position. It allows you to bypass the multi-round interviews, have a greater negotiation power (cause they know what you're worth) and just stop loosing crap on bs tests for X and Y.

This is what I did and it worked well for me. Before doing that I never went through interviews that had more than 3 rounds.

French Polynesia, not in the list tho

If you're not a US person the best setup would be a single-member LLC in a state like Wyoming (Delaware is more for corporations). I currently have an LLC and if you structure it well you could even get all the perks of being incorporated in the US while paying 0 taxes (pass-through taxation). Check out firstbase.io, they can handle all the bureaucracy for you.

Last time I was at a machine learning meetup where Rand gave a speech about the features of your framework he told us that for the speech recognition part you were using Google/Apple APIs, only the NLP/NLU would be handled by you. Is it still the case? Because I don't think Google does "privacy by design" and when someone sells me a product with that brand I expect it to be 100% private, not half private.