Future

About Neufangled Robotics

Neufangled Robotics is an open source hardware startup founded in North Carolina in 2025 by Nathaniel Nifong.

Our mission is to give people an organized home.

We prioritize robots that are narrowly effective at something that helps today rather than a general purpose robot that may be in devopment for years.

We put function over form. Our process is to identify a task that people would rather not spend time doing, design a machine to solve it that keeps cost low, and then make it camoflage itself in the home as well as possible.

Pushing for more useful household capabilities

Stringman has come a long way. motion, networking, and video are stable enough that a large corpus can start to be accumulated. The biggest challenge that remains is successfully leveraging foundation models in this unusual embodiment.

• Clutter Picking Model The most reliable model trained so far on stringman is naavox/dit-grasp-3 Which is used strictly for the task of picking up objects. Being narrowly focused, it almost always does what it should, which is to pick upm whatever it sees in the gripper camera. It's used as part of the configurable clutter pick and place task.
• Evaluating New Architectures Most of the more recent models trained for stringman are aimed at an episode format consisting of finding an object, picking it, taking it to the requested destination and dropping it. Several foundation models have been fine tuned on the task, but it remains elusive due to the large cross embodiment problem.

Events & Demos

I'm heading out to the west coast this summer to attend open source conferences and show off Stringman. If you want to talk robotics in person, here's where to find me.

• Open Sauce 2026 I'll be attending Open Sauce this coming July (July 17-19) in San Mateo. I'll be available in SF for a few days afterwards as well.
• Teardown 2026 Neufangled Robotics is also heading to Crowd Supply's Teardown conference (July 24-26) in Portland, OR. Crowd Supply is an enthusiastic supporter of open-source hardware.
  
  If you'll be at either event, email me or send me a message on Discord to coordinate a meetup!

The Long-Term Vision

We aim to be the most developed and well tested provider of cable robots in the United States, and since they will always have a cost advantage over other embodiments, that there will always be a health base of cable robots solving household problems.

• Project Playroom Update The software and hardware are in place to launch a public-access Stringman robot. This will allow anyone to remotely drive the robot from a web browser and test its capabilities before committing to a build. We are ready to go, but we're currently still looking for a suitable physical location to host the setup at a decent price. It's not easy to find a 250 sqft room in the RDU area under $500/month with internet - if that existed someone would be living in it.
• Future Product Ideas While ceiling-mounted cable robots remain our primary focus, we have several other long-term projects in the conceptual phase. First, a scaled-up, outdoor-rated cable robot. Second, a self-organizing—or at the very least, highly searchable—drawer storage cabinet to eliminate workshop clutter. Also, just because it re-uses our existing components, a garage target practice device.
  
  If these concepts interest you, or if you have features you'd desperately want to see in them, feel free to add your thoughts in the #ideas channel on Discord!

Built for Real Life

We dogfood our products — meaning we test them in our own homes with kids — to ensure that we're creating an end-to-end solution that is truly adapted to real life problems. Whether that means inconsistent lighting, ceiling fans or apple sauce, we are ready for it.

In my time as an engineer, one phrase comes back again and again - Untested code is broken