Actuator Daddy

The after-hours twin of Verros Robotics.

Press kit. Everything here is a file you can take.
Built by hand in San Francisco.

  1. The mark
  2. Optical sizes
  3. The wink
  4. Wordmark & lockups
  5. Clear space
  6. Colour
  7. Type
  8. Voice
  9. The disguise
  10. The portrait
  11. Stickers
  12. Merch
  13. Downloads

01The mark

The face of an Artus actuator is the face. Nothing on it is decorative; every feature is a part off the real unit, and the mark is called Big D.

Big D with its four parts called out 1 2 3 4
  1. Sixteen rim bolts. The Artus III front plate, bolt for bolt. Count them.
  2. Hex socket cap screws. The eyes. He has seen your CAD.
  3. The output flange. The thin ring. Everything you bolt to Daddy bolts here.
  4. Two torque arrows, one each way. The mustache. Both directions, zero backlash.

Built with real boolean geometry: one compound path, one colour. It cuts clean on vinyl, laser and embroidery, and takes its colour from currentColor.

02Optical sizes

Sixteen bolts close up below 48 px. The small cut has eight, heavier strokes and no flange ring. Same face, fewer bolts.

pxbigd.svgbigd-small.svg
96Big D at 96 pixelsSmall cut at 96 pixels, not used
48Big D at 48 pixelsSmall cut at 48 pixels, not used
32Big D at 32 pixels, not usedSmall cut at 32 pixels
16Big D at 16 pixels, not usedSmall cut at 16 pixels

Greyed out is the wrong file for that size. The favicon is the small cut in orange.

Big D, full cut
bigd.svg, at and above 48 px
Big D, small cut
bigd-small.svg, 16 to 47 px

03The wink

One eye closed. The other is still a hex socket.

Big D Big D winking
bigd-wink.svg. Hover, or do not.

The wink is a reaction, not a logo. It goes on stickers, at the end of a thread, on the reply that confirms a preorder. It never replaces Big D as the primary mark, and it never appears in the lockup.

The wink reads at 64 px and above. Below that the closed eye becomes a dash and Daddy looks tired, which he is not.

04Wordmark & lockups

Big Shoulders at 900, set tight and stacked. ACTUATOR carries DADDY. Never retype it; use the file.

Lockup on night
On night. lockup.svg
Lockup on paper
On paper. lockup-ink.svg
Actuator Daddy
On orange: the mark goes paper. bigd-paper.svg + wordmark.svg
Actuator Daddy, one line
One line, for narrow strips. wordmark-line.svg
Actuator Daddy, stacked
Stacked, no mark. wordmark.svg

The mark is always orange on night and on paper. On orange it goes paper. The mark is never night on night; that is just the dark.

05Clear space & minimum size

Clear space is the bolt ring: the band between the rim and the flange, about 13% of the diameter. Nothing crosses it.

Clear space around Big D equal to the width of the bolt ring x x x x = width of the bolt ring = 0.13 × diameter
48 px bigd.svg at its minimum. Below this, use the small cut.
16 px bigd-small.svg, 16 to 47 px. Below 16 it is a dot.
140 px lockup.svg at its minimum width. Narrower, use the mark alone.

06Colour

Night is where it happens. Paper is what gets printed. Orange is the one loud colour, and it is rationed.

  • Night#0B1117The base, about 60%. Verros steel sunk into the bay at 3 AM.
  • Paper#F1F0ECType, marks and the photocopy, about 25%. Never pure white.
  • Orange#D9381EEnergy only, about 10%. The mark, one word, nothing else.
  • Fog#A4ADB9Secondary text and hairlines. Verros's own grey.
  • Steel#2B3F57Shadows and rules on night. Never a fill for type.

Verros by day.

  • Day#E6E8EBThe twin's background.
  • Day ink#424C58The twin's text.
  • Day primary#1F2D3DThe twin's one dark.

The day palette is Verros's, untouched. It appears in the book only when the twin does. Molten and white-hot exist as heat in the 3D site and nowhere else; they do not print.

07Type

Three faces, three jobs. Specs in the display face. Daddy's asides in the serif, italic. Mono for the ASCII and small data, never a headline.

Big ShouldersDisplay. Specs, headings, the loud bits. Weight 800 to 900. Above 72 px set 'opsz' 72.

230 N·m at peak.

300 Rated500 Peak700 Stroke900 Load

Instrument SerifDaddy's voice. Regular for the sentence, italic for the aside. Never below 18 px.

Zero backlash. Zero chill.

Rated is what he does all night. Peak is what he does when asked nicely.

JetBrains MonoThe ASCII portrait and small data only. Weight 400 to 500, letterspaced 0.06em in caps.

ARTUS III 79 N·m RATED 230 N·m PEAK 89 RPM Ø125 × 80

ACTUATORDADDYACTUATORDADDYACTUATORDADDY
TAKETHATLOADTAKETHATLOADTAKETHATLOAD

Specimens are editable. Type a line and see whether it holds.

08Voice

Fun, and genuinely undisputed. The joke is only funny because the number is real.

  1. 1

    Every joke is load-bearing. Each line is literally true against the spec sheet. The humour is the double meaning of real engineering words: load, torque, backlash, rod, stroke, peak, rated. Never explicit, never crude.

  2. 2

    Deadpan. Short. Sentence case. No exclamation marks. No emoji in copy.

  3. 3

    Specs in the display face. Daddy's asides in Instrument Serif italic. The two never swap.

DoDon't

Take that load.

Take that load!!!

230 N·m at peak. Ask nicely.

Unlimited torque.

Zero backlash. Zero chill.

INSANE precision, bro.

Built by hand in San Francisco.

Built different.

Dimensions are estimates. Full specs publish with preorders.

Any number that is not on verrosrobotics.com.

Verros by day.

Anything you would not say to the CFO of Amazon. He is a backer.

The spec sheet, read aloud

UnitRatedPeakRated speedNo loadSizeDaddy says
Artus I16 N·m51 N·m158 rpm224 rpmØ80 × 60 mmThe small one. Still takes the load.
Artus II45 N·m113 N·m122 rpm163 rpmØ95 × 60 mmRated 45, peak 113. He paces himself.
Artus III79 N·m230 N·m89 rpm120 rpmØ125 × 80 mm230 N·m at peak. Ask nicely.

Motor, zero-backlash gearbox and driver in one unit. Dimensions are estimates; full specs publish with preorders at verrosrobotics.com. In labs at MIT, Penn, CMU, Stanford, Berkeley and Illinois.

09The disguise

Two actuators as glasses and one torque mustache. The disguise is the twin persona: Verros by day, this by night. Put it on anything.

The disguise: two actuator lenses and an orange torque mustache
On its own. disguise.svg
The ASCII portrait of Tarun, wearing the disguise
On the portrait. Scaled to the eyes, rotated with the head.
Big D wearing the disguise
On the mark. He is disguised as himself.

Fit rule: the lenses sit on the eyes, the bridge on the nose, and the mustache lands where a mustache lands. Scale is the distance between the pupils divided by 82; rotation follows the head. The parts ship separately as disguise-glasses.svg and disguise-stache.svg so the mustache can go on alone.

The glasses are night and the mustache is orange. On a dark photo, flip the glasses to paper and leave the mustache alone.

10The portrait

Tarun, as a photocopy. The hair is set in ACTUATORDADDY and the sweater is knit from TAKETHATLOAD. Black and white on paper, cut out, dropped on night.

ASCII paper cutout of Tarun Malarvasan
  1. Paper on night or orange. It is a cutout; it needs something to be cut out from.
  2. Never recolour the ink. Black on paper is the photocopy. Orange ink is a different person.
  3. Never crop the hair. That is where the name is.
  4. 400 px tall or larger. Below that the letters stop being letters and it is a man made of noise.
  5. Use the shadow file on posters and the OG card. daddy-ascii-shadow.png has the drop baked in. Use daddy-ascii.png when the layout needs its own.

Tarun Malarvasan: founder of Verros Robotics, three-time ISEF grand award winner, Daddy after hours.

11Stickers

Sheet 01, kiss-cut on white vinyl. Eight stickers; the white border is the die line.

Sticker sheet: Big D, the wink, the disguise, TAKE THAT LOAD, Torque advisory: explicit specs, 230 N·m at peak, Verros by day, and the ASCII portrait
stickers.svg is the cut file. stickers.png is 2400 px wide for the shop.

The advisory label is a parody. The specs are, in fact, explicit.

12Merch

Tee 01. A night blank. Big D on the left chest, the wordmark across the back with the line under it.

Tee mock: front with a small orange Big D on the left chest, back with the stacked wordmark and TAKE THAT LOAD
tee.svg. Front print 90 mm, back print 300 mm wide, one colour each side plus orange.

The back is for the people behind you at the robotics conference. They will read it. It is literally true.

13Downloads

Every file in the kit. SVGs are single-colour compound paths and take their colour from the file name or from currentColor.

The mark

PNG

Wordmark & lockups

The disguise

The portrait

Stickers & merch