Flojoy

My Work @ Flojoy

At Flojoy, I have been involved with several key projects:

• Tech lead on the robotics and reactive projects within Flojoy

• Working with the founder, Jack as well as JX to raise funds for the company

• Designing demo projects and public examples that show what the system can actually do

Flojoy Mecademic Integration

The Zeroth team and I built an integration between Mecademic Industrial Robotics and Flojoy visual programming. The hard part was making robot control visible enough that a user could see what the arm was about to do before it moved.

The “Pour Over” Demo

During a walk in Seattle, I stumbled upon Artly, whose robot barista absolutely blew me away. When I got the opportunity to work with Flojoy, and I learned that Flojoy needed a demo with real hardware, the robot at Artly immediately came to mind.

The “coffee demo” involves the Mecademic Industrial robot executing a nice pourover, programmed entirely in Flojoy.

The idea of the demo was that Flojoy is so intuitive

, it’s easier to get the robot to make a pourover than to learn the technique yourself.

Reactive Flojoy

My conception of Flojoy — visual functional programming.

My biggest contribution to Flojoy was the proposal and design for the Reactive Backend — a project which turns Flojoy’s previously run-once flowchart into a live, reactive control panel for any source of data, a lot like LabView.

Previously, Flojoy computed an execution graph and executed code on the completion of previous dependencies, but only once, and to watch for changes the entire flowchart needed to be completely re-run.

The reactive design changes this, instead creating a graph of observables (subjects in RxPY terminology) and using them to automatically re-compute parts of the flowchart as dependencies change in real-time.

This reactive rewrite also allows for Flojoy’s robotics functionality.