News– Crow's Contraptions

May 02, 2026

New nVidia Cert Aquired!

After a needed, fantastic beach vacation with family and good food, I jumped straight back into my goal of lifelong learning and earned NVIDIA's Building LLM Applications With Prompt Engineering certificate. There was a guided workshop where our instructor walked us through the Jupyter notebook for the certificate program, showing us the various examples they present before the final assessment. At the end of the all-day workshop, he walked through one possible solution, which, due to cloud issues, ended up not working on my instance. So now we're in the world where you can have the exact same code and it not work [Narrator: Always has been]. Thankfully, due to having to sit down and actually learn what Pydantic was instead of just hearing about it and nodding along like I knew what they were talking about, I was able to swap a JsonOutputParser for a PydanticOutputParser, since the LLM wasn't following the prompt closely enough for the looser parser to handle. This meant I had to do another workaround downstream to get the data back in the expected formats for the rest of the assessment, but after the main workshop I was able to get a stable cloud instance and complete it! I also met some great folks involved in robotics, so it was a great way to end my vacation and made coming back to Mississippi a little easier.

Feb 21, 2026

We're Still Here!

Post-Fern Update: We're Still Here

Hey everybody! I know it's a bit delayed, but I wanted to update y'all on the status of Crow's Contraptions post-Winter Storm Fern.

Our beautiful town was directly in the worst of it. We got more than an inch of radial ice on every single tree branch, power line, and fiber optic line for miles around. This led to a blackout lasting around 8 days for us(some people here still are without power, keep them in your prayers), a ton of trees damaged on our property (we had to chainsaw our way out of our driveway early after the ice accumulated), and the loss of our fiber connection around 1:30 AM January 23rd.

As of today, that's 29 days without a steady connection to the outside world, which has significantly hampered our typical workflows. Our design station, print farm, and upload pipeline all depend on that connection. We've been running on coffee shop WiFi and intransigence to keep things moving.

Just because the ice has melted doesn't mean the damage it caused has gone away, and in some ways it's even more dangerous now, although thankfully improving by the week in the places most people go. Still a long road to recovery. In some ways, it's all we can do to survive even now, but we're resilient and will adapt to this new normal, remembering those who have lost their lives to this storm and its aftermath(RIP gpg, you are missed).

We Haven't Stopped

We are still taking orders. We've actually picked up a major B2B opportunity and are producing a custom branded merchandise run right now. We'll have more on that once the production is complete and we can show rather than tell.

The printers have been running, even if they'd prefer having Internet. The LAN/local WiFi and SD cards still work, and the CAD laptop is as happy at High Point Coffee as I am. Jason and I have been on the grind even when the infrastructure wasn't cooperating.

What's Coming

We've got new products on the horizon, new capabilities we've been quietly building out, and a new workflow that should improve our video production capabilities. (You're asking, what videos? And yeah, I know. There's dogs involved, often when they are not needed, which has greatly slowed production.)

We should be getting internet back any day now. At least, I hope so — there are fiber trucks and trailers parked outside almost daily.

How You Can Help

If you've been thinking about placing an order, now's a great time. Hueforge graphics, custom prints, branded products, whatever you need designed and built — we could use the work, and storm recovery doesn't pay for itself. Every order right now helps us come back stronger on the other side of this.

Hit us up at socmedia@crowscontraptions.com . We survived Fern, and we're going to keep growing despite the temporary setbacks and required storm cleanup. We look forward to helping bring your ideas into reality.

Jun 20, 2024

What Times We Exist Within

As many of you who know me personally know, I try to stay on the forefront of technology. Rarely am I as impressed as I have been with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I've had a coding project that I kept putting off since around Easter, and while I had most of the pieces figured out, I didn't have them put together. So tonight, since I just got some more consulting business on the AI side, I sat down with the new Sonnet model and gave it two of the project files. The first and larger one was the speech to text part, where I had identified the place where I could inject the Anthropic API calls for talking with Claude. The second was the conversation code I had written with the API calls. The thing is, I used a fake loop in that code, and it wouldn't actually be a real conversation if I used that code. So, what did I do? I just told Claude 3.5 Sonnet to merge them, keep most of the code the same, rewrite the fake loop to be a real one, and explain what it did. So it proceeded to do exactly what I wanted on the first try, in about 30 seconds. Oh, and it saved tokens by saying in the comments where to copy the boilerplate code from. Not to mention saving me mental stress. I still can't believe it worked on the first try. Now I was able to use Piper TTS to finish making a full speech-to-text-to-AI-to-speech program for the robot. This may actually warrant our first big Youtube video!

Mar 17, 2024

Little bits over time

Tonight's entry is about the power of doing small things over time. I've been building a robot platform for just over a year now(with a few multi-month breaks) and it's finally coming together into something that's a little more presentable than an impractical laptop that resembles a Christmas tree wrapped in lights(without the lights). However, I had a good demonstration of it(outdoors, no less) and despite a little spark to liven things up at the beginning, the actual tech demo of the individual recognition software worked great. I had it identify one of my mom's friends and tell her it was good to finally meet her, and gave her a compliment. As cool as that is, it's just one of the many capabilities that are present or will be. I'll write some more about this later. For now, let's celebrate the wins. I also got the e-stop working off just an accelerometer, which is awesome. That means if it hits something unexpected it will automatically cut power to the wheels. I designed it so that it's 'instinctual' to the robot. More on that later. It wasn't all victory, though. I'm having some difficulties with some other motors. It'll work out though; I've identified a possible solution and am ordering the parts to fix that, as well as a new build plate for the holographic effect. More on that later(ha). It's a good thing nobody reads these. But anyway, I've got to move on. This was tonight's little bit over time. I'm hopeful that I will get into a more regular cadence.

Nov 18, 2023

Been A While

Well, if you know me, you know that if I haven't posted on here, it's because things have been busy! I've been printing lots of color lithophanes, but one of the downsides of them is that they must print flat. This makes it hard to display them as there's no great way to hang them. While I work out a solution for that, I'm designing this lightbox which is the featured image of this blog post. I'm not done with the lid yet(trying to figure out whether to make it ornate or allow another picture, or have the option for both), but I'm about to print the test fit article.

I've also been making keychain tags, which if you came here because of those, welcome! We make a lot of bespoke things here, and the list of things available in the store is only going to grow. Having said that, I'm going to consolidate some of my things and work on getting Jason's Creations better integrated with the site.

Thanks for listening, and stay tuned. I'm going to try and be better at posting, since I want to help build Crow's Contraptions into a community of makers, builders, creators, and dreamers. Feel free to comment about anything below, we should be pretty responsive!