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date: 2026-04-12
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# 2026-04-12

### Morning/Afternoon — Active social day

Volleyball clinic, burritos with friends, pickleball. Good balance of movement and social time.

### Afternoon — Campus

Launched 3D print for the mini 6DOF arm parts — will have everything ready to assemble tomorrow. Working on paper experiments now.

### Robot arm — overnight print + tomorrow plan

Small robot is printing overnight, will be done by morning. **Tomorrow's goal:** wire up, assemble, and calibrate the full mini arm. Should be tractable in one day.

**Double-jointed de-risking plan (before building double-jointed arm):**
1. Write a test script with two motors clamped side by side individually — verify they move together correctly
2. Then clamp them as a joint — verify no internal resistance (e.g., different timing / firing out of sync could cause motors to fight each other and break)
3. Only after both tests pass, proceed to double-jointed arm build

Don't skip this — the firmware-level behavior of the motors in a double-joint config is unknown. Breaking motors by rushing would set things back.

**Exciting trajectory:** Once we de-risk (a) single small arm, (b) double-joint mechanism, and (c) small double-jointed arm — scaling up link lengths is easy. Could have a full good robot by end of month.

### Sunday plan

- Khanega in the morning
- **Gym:** Deadlifts + separate Stairmaster session (no volleyball/big cardio tomorrow)

### Weekly packing system

**New rule:** At the start of each week, pack two bags:
1. **Gym bag** — all gym clothes for the entire week in one go. No daily packing.
2. **Izzy bag** — spare clothes to keep at her place.

This eliminates: daily outfit decision-making, stuffing clothes into backpack (creates bloat), scattered laundry across locations. All laundry stays consolidated. One clean system instead of ad-hoc daily scrambling.

### Reflection — Claude Code agent integration

The past few weeks have largely been about integrating Claude Code agents with context across my whole life. The goal is to remove myself from the loop on many things and be able to ask fully-informed questions that span all parts of life and project work. Within the PARA project specifically, the key insight is that each part of the project should be connected and iterating together rather than having disconnected agents working in isolation. This has been beneficial and is still an active area of exploration.

### Tonight — Finance tasks

- Set up Roth IRA
- Set up a finance tracking tab/system

### Evening plan

- Gym + shower
- Dinner at Izzy's aunt's
- More work tonight on experiments