We present the NeuralNexus Arm, an open, low-cost 6-DOF robotic manipulator built by an undergraduate engineering team, together with the design decisions and debugging experience needed to reproduce it. The arm is driven by a single STM32H743 microcontroller on a custom printed circuit board (PCB) and combines two stepper-driver strategies on one controller: push-pull 3.3 V step/direction outputs for onboard TMC2209 drivers on the three wrist joints, and open-drain outputs for external CL57T and DM542 drivers on the three high-torque proximal joints. We describe the mechanical design, mixed-driver electronics, interrupt-driven firmware, a MATLAB/Simscape-based inverse-kinematics pipeline, a browser-native control interface using the Web Serial API, and a lightweight vision pipeline for object localisation and autonomous pick-and-place tasks. We also document non-obvious hardware and firmware failure modes encountered during the transition from a development board to the custom PCB as reproducibility guidance. All design files and firmware are released openly. The platform actuates all six axes under coordinated control at a 2 kHz update rate and executes both manual and pre-recorded motions from the browser interface.
Benjamin Goldblatt, Paolo Pedroso, Farhad Modaresi +2cs.AR cs.AI cs.SE
We introduce HighTide, an evolving AI-assisted benchmark suite. Specifically, the contributions are: (i) a diverse open-source suite spanning multiple design languages and technology nodes, (ii) Bazel-based incremental RTL-to-GDS compilation with remote caching, (iii) AI-assisted design curation through twelve agent skills covering the design lifecycle, flow optimization, tool reference, and meta-maintenance, backed by per-design decision logs that serve as long-term memory of tuning rationale across the suite, and (iv) an infrastructure with RTL compilation verification for stable releases. The suite is publicly available and designed to grow with the open-source hardware ecosystem.