ako — te reo Māori: to learn, and to teach
A patient teacher that watches you at the lathe.
Point a camera and a microphone at a real manual lathe. ako watches what you do, talks you through a project step by step, checks your technique, and keeps you safe, from your first start-up to real turned parts. It coaches. It never touches the machine.
Open source · MIT or Apache-2.0 · an idea at the invitation stage · Aotearoa New Zealand
ako has no wires to the machine and no power to stop it. Only the human stops a manual lathe. ako watches, warns, verifies, and withholds approval, and when it is not sure, it says so and asks you.
Where ako cannot see something reliably, it does not pretend to. It hands the task back: measure it, work it out, tell me what you found. Honest engineering, and better teaching than a confident guess.
Before any cutting unlocks, you pass a camera-verified machine-control certification: know your stops, prove you can stop on command, keep clear. A camera can be the patient observer a workshop checkout needs.
ako is at the idea stage, and this is the moment to shape it, whether you run a lathe, teach in a workshop, or build realtime AI. There is nothing to install yet, only thinking to argue with.
Learning a manual lathe is a doorway into the trades, and the doorway is narrowing as the people who teach it retire. ako is being thought through in the open. If it pulls at you, come in early.