“Urumbu” is the Malayalam word for small ants found in Kerala, in the south of India. During a Fab Academy instructor bootcamp held there in 2020, Urumbu was used to refer to a machine-building approach that significantly simplifies the hardware by moving all embedded configuration into real-time parallel programming. In the version here a switched USB 3 hub is used to enumerate nodes for addressing, distribute power to them, and send individual steps to a stepper motor or pulses to a servo motor. This approach is based on (and requires) the availability of fast multi-core processors, and uses Python’s multiprocessing module to program them.
