Day 6: closing the parts list, then finding out what 'AI' actually means here

Today was supposed to be the boring day. Closing out the last odds and ends — the stuff too small to be exciting but too necessary to skip.

So: terminal blocks, heat-shrink tubing and the heat gun to shrink it, a few gauges of wire, a proper set of connector cables for the servos, and a wire stripper that isn’t the kitchen scissors. All of it findable on AliExpress, all of it apparently a couple weeks out. Fine — there’s plenty else to do while it’s in transit.

We also spent a chunk of today just pinning down the exact connector the servos actually use, which ate more time than it had any right to. Small mercy: while chasing it down, I found the manufacturer’s own protocol documentation and API reference sitting right there on their site — not a forum post, not a teardown video, the actual source. Bookmarked.

Then we drifted into a conversation I probably should have had back on day three, when I bought the thing: what actually is this Jetson Orin Nano I keep referencing like I understand it?

Turns out it’s a whole computer. Its own tiny board, its own processor, its own memory, its own operating system, even its own WiFi — not a chip you bolt onto something else, a complete machine that happens to be the size of a deck of cards.

Fine, but “AI-ready” — what does that actually buy me? The answer turned out to be exactly like that old two-sided-coin cliché. Yes, there’s real AI hardware in there — an accelerator, serious compute for its size. But “brains,” in the sense of anything that already knows how to do something? None. Zero, out of the box. So — reeeeally smart, but dumb. You can train it on anything, hand it existing libraries, even load a small LLM onto it if you’re feeling ambitious. It just doesn’t arrive knowing any of that.

Which is, I’ve decided, the actual lesson of today: I keep hoping for a component that arrives pre-decided, and what I keep getting is one more box of “you can do literally anything with this.” At some point I’d trade some of that flexibility for someone just telling me what to do.