I had the privilege of working with Don back at JPL at the time he invented the rocker bogey. (I wrote the software for the first prototype with a computer on board.) Not only was he brilliant, he was also a really nice guy. I didn't appreciate at the time how rare that combination of traits is among humans.

To my astonishment, it turns out Don doesn't have a Wikipedia page (though the rocker bogie suspension does).

This guy has incredible videos on hiking gear, examining common claims scientifically and rationally. He never gave any hints as to his professional background, so as not to taint his arguments with appeals to authority. It makes perfect sense that he grew up in this environment, doing engineering work for NASA as a kid!

I know this guy from his videos over the years on hiking topics, like how to safely purify water with the minimum fuel and how to pack calorie efficient food.

His videos are incredibly well researched, very in-depth, and absolutely zero fluff. Very much feels like his cycle is to get intrigued by a topic, spend a year deep diving into everything that's published, extrapolate what he can from there, then summarize it in a 1 hr video.

This is really Youtube at its best.

Deep dive into a niche topic, expert led, compelling storytelling, and professional production.

Not sure how/if something this could have been created / shared 20+ years ago.

This kind of mechanism is fascinating. I built a four-wheeled version and even that is beautifully smooth when one wheel goes over a bump because the chasis maintains an average orientation based on the positions of all the wheels. The video shows an 8-wheeled one but it still only has two rows of wheels. I've wondered how to generalize it to an arbitrarily sized grid of wheels so a vehicle would be like a flexible mat that conforms to the ground. I couldn't work that out but I'm no Don Bickler. FEA software has a feature called "RBE3" which models an even more general case of any number of "wheels" and they can also move in any direction while still keeping the orientation of the "chassis" (dependent node) rigidly determined by their average displacements. The "R" stands for rigid because every part is rigid or completely free - no springs! There seems to be nothing like it in machines or nature but it's a beuatifully elegent and seemingly natural mechanism - if it was possible to build.

Most of my comments on hacker news are to point out something incorrect or mischaracterized. All I can come up with here is that this is a brilliant and heartfelt and entertaining documentary. Thanks to OP for posting.

Best not read the comments until you've watched at least the first four minutes of the video.

Apparently the first Mars Rover operated on only 5 watts of power. A common bathroom nightlight draws ~7 watts.

The rocker-bogie suspension is fascinating because it solves a real constraint problem with elegance rather than brute force—reminds me of how the best engineering often comes from working within limitations. As someone who's debugged systems under resource constraints, I'm curious whether the garage iteration process actually made it into the final Mars rover design, or if it had to be significantly redesigned for the extreme thermal/radiation environment.

Is this the same guy who developed the Spyderench?

https://spy-derco.com/catalog/details/T01/SpydeRench-trade-/...

https://multitool.org/blog/spyderco-usa-spyderench