A million years ago, I was in grad school working on a Ph.D. In Biomedical Engineering. My experiments all relied on various research-grade robotics.
Generally speaking, if you ever see something listed as ”research grade,” it means that the object or code in question was hacked together by someone figuring it out as they built it. It will do the job it needs to do, often with a staggering level of accuracy or precision, but the user interface is usually on par with smashing one’s face into a wall for several hours. You are basically guaranteed that there is no documentation or user manual, and that the operational instructions are handed down from one generation of grad students to the next through oral tradition.
Heaven help you if the last user has already graduated.
The most, uh, memorable robot I worked with was named Heathcliff because my friend and I who were stuck using it are both lit nerds, and that was the biggest jerk we could come up with.
While programming Heath was its own nightmare, we had to rebuild the power and safety systems from the ground up before we could even get to that trial.
See, as with its namesake, Heathcliff had some problems. Among them was the fact that one of the safety systems could very easily be circumvented. At some point, someone did exactly that, and years later, when a control equation blew up, so did Heathcliff, shearing an expensive load cell completely apart and putting a hell of a dent in a solid-wood door from the force of the metal handle flying across the room and into it. Thankfully, that was the extent of the damage, and no grad students were physically harmed in the making of this catastrophe.
As we were locked in a small, windowless room with this hunk of metal, trying to figure out what the heck its creators had been thinking and how to exorcise the demons it seemed to be made up of, a pattern emerged:
We would find a problem.
We would spend time figuring out a solution.
Said solution would be time-consuming and expensive, but it would solve the problem and let us move on with our lives. We resigned ourselves to moving forward.
I, feeling overwhelmed and craving escape and chemical enhancement, declared that if we were going to do this, first, I was going to need some coffee.
We would decamp to the campus coffee shop, and there would be a line.
As we were waiting in the slowest-moving line in history, one of us would say, “What if we…” and then propose a solution that was 10% of the cost and effort of our current plan and solved the problem as well or better.
I finally got coffee, and we did plan B instead.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
When you find yourself stuck, or getting wrapped around the axle on some seemingly impossible or overwhelming task, or just can’t figure out what the next step is, some people will recommend you lash yourself to the mast, stay the course, and don’t get up until you’ve cracked it.
For me, that is seldom a path to success or happiness. Get up. Move around. Fix a cup of tea. Have a quick chat with a coworker. Go to the coffee shop on the corner. Take a walk around the block (or the building, if the weather is foul). Then, come back and see if anything has shaken loose. Please note: at no point am I advising you to “twiddle a rectangle until you achieve enlightenment.” Outside of very specific, targeted queries, this is probably not what you need. But a little bit of gross motor activity, a little bit of time waiting on something while staring into the middle distance, or a few minutes of moaning about your problems to a sympathetic ear can put you miles closer to a better solution.