Migration successful!

Back in my master’s in robotics days, I built a few tools to simplify creating, debugging, and simulating models and robots. Robotics workflows are rarely smooth, but my philosophy has always been: if it’s painful to do once, try to do it only once.

So I Dockerized those tools and exposed them via WordPress on DigitalOcean. It began as a way to improve my research workflow, but soon I realized others might benefit too.

Fast forward eight years.

The site still works, and, to my surprise, over fifty people a month still use these tools.

I knew it was time to give the site some attention, but I didn’t want to disrupt existing users.

What started as a quick cleanup turned into a Google Cloud rabbit hole. In hindsight, using Docker was a great decision back then. Since each tool was already containerized and stateless, they fit perfectly on Google Cloud Run. I cleaned up the code, split the services, and redeployed them on infrastructure that’s more stable, scalable, and free under Cloud Run’s generous tier. To protect my budget, I also set up a guardrail that stops serving if my monthly budget is reached.

The original toolbox lives on, now cleaner, faster, and more future-proof.

Find the tools under Projects:

• 🔧 Mesh Cleaner Clean and process 3D mesh files for physics-based simulations.
• 🧿 Model Viewer Visualize 3D models and robots directly in your browser.
• 🤖 IKFast Generator Generate analytic inverse-kinematics solvers from .dae files using OpenRAVE’s IKFast.

These tools were invaluable during my master’s—especially computing inertial properties for dozens of objects and cleaning up meshes for simulations. Later, during my research assistantship, I relied on the tools for inverse-kinematics work on robot manipulators. Fast, reliable tools like these really made a difference.

If you’re still using any of these—thank you. I hope the migration went smoothly. If not, feel free to reach out and let me know what’s broken.

For nostalgia, here’s a little album of the old site: