general-tech

[jaunty socket]

I dont know the material but it sounded metallic when they clanged the universal plates together in the marketing videos on youtube

Sounds perfect except I wish they sold the tools separatly so they could have packed in more stuff. Not sure if they are still in business either couldn't find out since when most of their stuff are sold out

And the saw is meant to cut the plate and beams to the size you need. Tools looks pretty good and it has a ruler to put the saw in so things stay straight

cant print metal like this with 3d printing right? even comes with step files to plan a build in solidworks...

[hearty karma]

There are a few ways to 3D print metal. One is lost PLA casting, it's indirect but fairly easy. Another is metal bearing filament that you sinter afterward. The last is selective laser sintering, which is high end and expensive. However, for sheet metal, laser cutting is often much simpler.

I made this R/C transmitter housing by having a service laser cut it out of sheet metal for me (I did the bending myself)

[jaunty socket]

I dont have access to these kind of machines, Im sure they are over 1000$ as well. Where as 3d printing is over 500$ even more if it comes assembled. That kit above has 1800 parts and is 175$

I see these electronic things as enabler widening the horizon of what I can do etc

[hearty karma]

I suppose it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Getting that chassis cut was $18.44 (for the top) plus $9.10 (for the bottom), material included. If you want specific parts, it's a reasonable proposition. However, the kit of parts, you get whatever is in the kit: if it's generally stuff you can use, it's a good deal. If not, you have $175 of shiny scrap.

[delicate quarry]

3d printers can be had for under 200 these days, and you can order laser cut metal sheets for pretty affordable.

[jaunty socket]

I used to be a big fan of lego technic this kit reminds me of that

even got two of the stuff I built in lego magazine a couple of 10s years ago

[hearty karma]

It is sort of like the old style "Erector" kits with metal plates with holes, along with fasteners. If the stuff you're building is a reasonable match to the parts supplied, it can be a great timesaver and cost effective.

[jaunty socket]

I feel this would help much more than this r/c stuff who might pan out to nothing or end up costing endless money like that 32u4

[hearty karma]

I'm fond of thrift stores for R/C stuff, like this truck a friend picked up for $10

[jaunty socket]

yeah I guess it would be better to understand how these things actually work first

[delicate quarry]

A year ago, I could’ve recommended mindstorms nxt as an easy entry into robotics, but not sure how easy it is to get one now…

[hearty karma]

One bonus to that particular truck is when I went and looked up its FCC ID, I found the filing included a schematic, very helpful

[jaunty socket]

Yeah I remember that conversation

I kept trying to find a way to search by the fillings that have schematics 😄

which they forgot to asks protection for

[hearty karma]

The Mindstorms kits are nice, and quick to experiment with, but they're somewhat limited. However, various third parties (including AdaFruit) offer connectors, boards, and equipment that let you connect it to other hardware for additional capability.

[jaunty socket]

is it really worth it to give money to a company that decided to make it closed though ?

[icy moth]

Despite being closed source, it’s still a fantastic kit

[inner linden]

At some point you end up engineering your own open source mindstorms kit.

[jaunty socket]

Never seen a circuit like this either

[inner linden]

well, mindstorms-styled.

[jaunty socket]

It is what is inside my digital receiver in Canada. But I accidently broke one of the antenna so so far it is going in the trash

but I don't understand how you can make a circuit without caps/resistors etc

[icy moth]

Well, technically speaking nothing is purely inductive, resistive, or capacitive

So with the right design you can achieve what you want in a crude sort of way

Though looking at that picture there does seem to be a couple non-coil elements soldered on the board

[inner linden]

Did you, when you realize that there was only inductors, re-coil in horror?

[jaunty socket]

just seems to be lines of something like wires

no I had no reaction looks like alien technology and very complicated math to me

Looks like a bunch of antennas on the PCB or something

[inner linden]

Well, if you wanted to be inductored into an elite order, you could try and figure it out.

(And, on a prior subject, working out decades of repressed Construx energy by 3D printing elaborate truss structures for my garden is great)

[hearty karma]

Looks like typical VHF circuitry to me. UHF is even weirder, and microwaves even more so.

[jaunty socket]

Is it normal for the antennas to be such fragile stuff and is it fixable or they were specifically engineered for this PCB and it is a precision job ?

I guess I really need to read this ARRL book

[hearty karma]

It looks like the antenna is just brass tubing or somesuch.

[jaunty socket]

like the brass thing at the right was inside the black antenna on the left

theres 2 of them and 2 of the black antenna thing

[hearty karma]

It's probably fixable. Basically you just need something conductive that's the right length. Using tubing like that gives slightly more bandwidth, but it's generally not a requirement. I often just make my own out of 18 gauge wire cut to length

[jaunty socket]

but why would the left antenna being snapped off affect anything when there is those brass antennas in it that are far shorter ?

aren't the brass things the real antennas ?

And why doesn't my hands work to compensate like when I was young? Because digital tv isn't any resistant to a corrupt signal ?

[hearty karma]

I'm just guessing, and that picture doesn't show a lot of details. It seems like it wouldn't matter but I could be missing some important detail

[jaunty socket]

I can take another pic

[hearty karma]

Digital TV has a certain amount of tolerance to signal degradation, but unlike analog, it's kind of all or nothing, instead of just getting gradually worse.

[jaunty socket]

it is just an RCA ANT-1251 Digital Amplified Indoor Antenna

Telescopic antenna in 6 parts and I accidently snapped the top 2 parts on the left antenna because it fell off while I was trying to connect my xbox one

[hearty karma]

Presumably you could extend the length with something else, or just find a replacement telescoping antenna.

[jaunty socket]

but why would the length matter ? I mean if I dont extend the right antenna fully at the same height at the left antenna my TV is still dead

It's like the PCB knows I broke the antenna 🤣

[hearty karma]

The antennas are resonant at a frequency/wavelength, so they pick up less signal if their length is wrong for it.

[jaunty socket]

what is it with the coil inside? split the frequencies into digital channels or something ? Or pick a specific subfrequency for a component of the image ?

[river hatch]

This board seems to have a lot of GPIO, but no wireless:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5032

You could always add wireless to something that doesn't have it using AirLift:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4201

For that matter, if something doesn't have enough GPIO, you could expand it with SeeSaw:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5233

This board has AirLift built-in, but has a normal number of GPIOs:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4950

The Arduino Giga R1 WiFi seems to have everything you want, but is pretty expensive:
https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/03/01/step-up-your-game-with-giga-r1-wifi/

I don't know if any of that helps.

[hearty karma]

I'm guessing the coils are filters, to reject most frequencies and just look at the band containing the desired information. It could be there's also a local oscillator and mixer to shift frequencies, but I'm guessing not.

[woeful whale]

I found this cool IC: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Qorvo/ACT5101QI102-T?qs=byeeYqUIh0Nd64af%2FHfb1g%3D%3D

It's a 23v buck boost converter with integrated fets that can output up to 4A.

[icy moth]

https://tenor.com/view/snap-ive-got-the-power-90s-music-eurodance-rap-gif-21366755

I forgot how good the moves were from that music video

It’s been so long

[woeful whale]

It might be useful for making an adjustable power supply or universal PD adapter thing (PD/QC to PD/PPS)

[woeful whale]

92W of it

And the chip is $3

And it's I2C controllable and it has a current limit

[icy moth]

Not bad for $3

[violet torrent]

It's my understanding that you need to connect a ESD strap to ground but I'm not sure exactly how one would go about doing that

I'm also worried about ESD in my workspace because it's carpeted and I can't remove the carpet and there's nowhere else to put the workspace that isn't carpeted, what are my options?

[snow light]

I'm not sure if it's this way in all countries, but in the US, all electrical outlets are supposed to be grounded. If you have a grounded outlet, the screws on the cover plate should screw into a grounded piece of metal on the outlet body, so attaching your ESD mat to that screw will ground your mat

[inner linden]

Yah, I guess practically you probably have a power supply in use at the workspace, just clip into the ground pin there.

[violet torrent]

I'm not confident they're actually grounded, to be honest, because they're through an extension cable and a power strip

[wide otter]

These testers are super cheap

[snow light]

☝️ Yep, I assume you can get them for other outlet styles/voltages too?

[violet torrent]

Cause we have Type-I sockets here (the letter, not the number)

[uncut summit]

For people needing a reference to power sockets by country

[teal wadi]

I probably need to print this and put it in my wallet or something. It looks like the sort of things that would be really useful once

[violet torrent]

It's a little off centre for Type-I, and the angle looks a little off

[delicate quarry]

Hopefully they’re all 3-prong connections, which could be easy to tell if they’re visible.

[exotic falcon]

I have an old rasp-pi b and the thermal printer kit. all of the python examples work, but i would like to use the node library. I can't seem to get 'serialport' installed from npm - it fails during build - has anyone been able to do this?

[lyric ore]

Yeah that's the wonkiest image ever. Often the easiest place to clip your ground is exposed bit of metal on something nearby like a PC case anything electric with exposed metal should in theory be grounded.

[drifting ice]

Chroot successful...
after weeks of research and testing...I can now use glibc-based software on musl-based Void Linux.
inhale

Y E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E _

https://tenor.com/view/explosion-boom-gif-8911329

[onyx marten]

yeah i've had to do that to build some Docker containers 😱

[drifting ice]

That's unironically what I started reading up on too XD

WELP, at least now I can disable those services until I decide to try them again. Docker as a whole fascinates me, so I'm sure I'll return to it sometime. :P

[hearty karma]

I just broke Docker. I belatedly realized /var/lib/docker wasn't mounted separately, and the root partition wasn't big enough for it. So I moved it to another partition and now all the permissions are messed up. Grump.

[icy moth]

Imagine running an installer script that usually runs in a plain VM and can change virtual interface IPs without breaking the VM inside a docker image and then wondering why you can’t connect to your docker image anymore lol

[violet torrent]

They should be, but a lot of devices omit the earth pin, and I'm just not certain, so I'll probably invest in a tester before I go around trying to earth things

[lyric ore]

Double insulated devices omit the earth pin because they are safe without

[onyx marten]

stop the docker daemon first, then clear out /var/lib/docker, figure out your mounting strategy, and then make sure that the docker daemon starts after the drive is mounted

[hearty karma]

I suspect that when I copied the directory, I somehow mangled the permissions, so I'm going to try using some different flags (and perhaps cpio in case there are any special files in it)

[onyx marten]

the thing is you don't (shouldn't) copy the files - that's where you probably went sideways... just stop the daemon and let it do it's own housekeeping when it restarts - you will lose all the images and containers currently in the system, but those are re-cached when you restart the containers

[hearty karma]

I didn't know if there was anything important in that directory that wouldn't be reconstituted.

[onyx marten]

i don't know if that's actually documented anywhere, tbh, but in the early days of docker and vm's, some installations had so many orphaned images and volumes that cleaning the lib directory was the only way to get docker to run again 😏

[hearty karma]

Good to know, thank you!

[teal wadi]

Can't you even rsync them in?

[onyx marten]

why would you want to? the idea behind docker images/containers is they can be (re)created easily, so just blowing it all away is easier and less fraught

[hearty karma]

In this case, I have a 300GB database in an Elasticsearch container. It is easy enough to re-create, but it takes a day or so.

[onyx marten]

i would strongly suggest looking at docker mount volumes then, instead of trying to move docker system files around

the general rule is if you want to preserve data or configurations, put them in a system-available location (local, nfs, cloud) and then mount them at the specific locations when you run the container

[hearty karma]

I'll have to read up on how Elasticsearch stores its information, but that does sound like a good idea.

[onyx marten]

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.5/docker.html - the "hint" you're looking for is "volumes", and it appears the mount point you want to use is /usr/share/elasticsearch/data

they're not making it easy for first-timers to not have to recreate data all the time 😦

[hearty karma]

Thanks: as such a beginner, I'm still figuring out where to look for information like this.

[teal wadi]

Save on downloading everything again on a slow DSL connection :P

[onyx marten]

yeah, unfortunately it don't work like that 😏

you can however save image and containers "off-line" by using the import/export feature

[teal wadi]

Alright, I guess I'll just have to re-download everything. Oh well

(I need to transfer my image storage to an ext disk because at this rate I'm gonna fill my disk)

[onyx marten]

dang!! how many docker images do you need?

note: there is a huge distinction between image and container

[teal wadi]

Not many, but I have a few large ones

(No worries, I know the difference)

[green dawn]

Who can I talk about AdaBox. Will I be getting it this month?

[pseudo zinc]

Adafruit has said when Adabox is ready, you'll first get an email to confirm your subscription before it ships

It comes up on Ask an Engineer every few weeks. I'm waiting impatiently too. 🙂

[teal wadi]

How's promoting the podcast going? ☕

(I remember you talking about it the other day, hence the question)

[pseudo zinc]

It's going well, thanks. Have a couple ready to go, just recorded another episode an hour ago

[teal wadi]

Good to hear!

[autumn plover]

Hello there! I recently learned that my water heater is old (so old) and doesn't have a pan under it. I'd like to build a water sensor to notify me if it starts to leak - avoid all the expensive damage. When this is back is stock, would it be a good component for the project? https://www.adafruit.com/product/4965

[hearty karma]

Yes, that seems suitable

[slim warren]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115458924679
👀

also get it replaced if its too old, it could be a fire hazard

[hearty karma]

Water heaters rarely catch fire. However, after I had a second one spring a leak after 6 years, I got one of the new rustproof ones with a lifetime warranty. Titanium heater rods!

[slim warren]

tankless?

[hearty karma]

I had a tankless one and loved it, but sweetie said no to one in this house, so it's a tank. This one. https://www.rheem.com/innovations/innovation_residential/marathon/

[slim warren]

Well thats fancy

[hearty karma]

The tankless one was one of the primitive early models, I ended up doing some hacking to get it going some days.

[slim warren]

https://tenor.com/view/osha-gif-13410721

[hearty karma]

When I went to the HVAC supply store and asked for a flame rod, they wanted to know which heater it was for. They blinked when I said it didn't matter.

That thing was great for filling a waterbed, however.

[slim warren]

lol, "any, Im doing science"

[rough edge]

Sorry for the double posting but I didn't think of posting this here before. A programming question not sbc or circuitpython but... Is there a good book that teaches python to a new user of linux? I got into linux from the Raspberry pi and into Python with circuit python. Now I have a linux workstation with Python 3.11 and am trying to do more. Thanks for any information given.

[onyx marten]

to be honest, i'd just start with the python tutorial - there's a lot of nuance covered that you might not have picked up from CP

[autumn plover]

Thanks!

[autumn plover]

Thanks for the link. I'm more worried about the water damage to not only the house but the town home next to it. It will get replaced within the year tho

[snow light]

When a tank water heater fails, doesn't it basically start leaking out all the water in the tank? Is there a way to stop it when it's doing that?

[hearty karma]

Basically, shut off the water and drain it.

[snow light]

Right, but even if you shut off the water supply, won't it continue to empty its contents?

[hearty karma]

Yes, that's why I said "and drain it". There's a petcock at the bottom for the purpose, with a standard hose fitting on it. It's recommended you drain it periodically to remove rust and scale, and replace the anode rod when it's consumed. Most people never do either of these.

[inner linden]

I mean, the world needs more rust developers these days.

[teal wadi]

This boiler looks like a hygienic nightmare......

Hope you aren't still using it! (=you've been able to upgrade it)

[hearty karma]

Yes, as I noted above, I replaced it with a rustproof Rheem Marathon, as I got tired of replacing water heaters every six years.

[teal wadi]

Sorry, I didn't read the entire scrollback

[meager acorn]

"Regular" Python really isn't specific to Linux or any OS. So, any Python source should work. You might try https://realpython.com/learning-paths/

[craggy plover]

I had an idea, a macropad, with a tft feather instead of a keeboar rp2040.
The display could display the mode and the boot button could act as a mode switch.
A Feather and a quill.

Using a feather for it is so overkill but it would look so cool.

I will prolly do it.

Also perhaps bluetooth hid? That would be cool.

[lean warren]

can you guys help me?

I just need last touches on my board, i can pay because i broke 3 boards

i didnt break themň

but i cant programm them

[broken ibex]

#help-with-circuitpython

[main hemlock]

@hearty karma besides the Marathon water heater, did you also look at stainless steel tanks? The Marathons are bulky for the closet our current water heater is in. Thanks -- no urgency on this.

[hearty karma]

No, I just looked at what my plumbing company offered, which didn't include any of the stainless ones.

[violet torrent]

Just remembered my high school experience in discreet robotics

I'm glad that I'm not forced to etch my own PCBs anymore

[violet torrent]

That's actually a decent idea, but I'd suggest a Wing for the height

[craggy plover]

Well the pinsockets give quite a bit of height already, but yea.

[violet torrent]

I mean, there's also the versatility using a Wing would bring, plus the Wings come with user buttons for mode stuff... Would you be cool if I designed something based around this at some point?

[craggy plover]

Feel free to do your own take, I claim no copyright to the idea.

[wicked relic]

Pulled apart my old PiGRRL cause I screwed up the battery

Using the screen and pi as a mini pc, unsure what I can do with the rest of the pieces

Got a power boost and a class d amp. I could probs repurpose those parts with the main pi and get a new battery build for it, might make a arm mounted pc with it

[violet torrent]

someone is selling a vintage switchboard and i want to get it

[hearty karma]

There's a church selling an entire pipe organ and I want to get it.

[teal wadi]

I love listening to pipe organs! Do you know how to play?

[hearty karma]

I kind of noodle on keyboards, but have acquired a vacuum tube organ with pedal board and stops to practice on. Needed a fresh tube and it still needs a little cleaning and a few capacitors but it sounds lovely.

Amusingly, the youtuber "Look mum no computer" has both a switchboard and a pipe organ (which he's converting for MIDI operation)

[onyx marten]

oh the joys of apartment living - so many toys, zero room 😏 (at least it helps me stay on budget)

[onyx marten]

oh ho! the AI guardrails are going up...

I’m sorry, but I am not able to convert code from one programming language to another. However, there are tools and resources available online that can help you with code conversion. Would you like me to search for them?

Bing won't do your homework for you any more 😆

[teal wadi]

I'd love to hear it in action

[wicked relic]

Got 12 server racks at the place I volunteer at

I say 12 because I disassembled one of them

I volunteer at a ewaste place that gives special needs kids work experience

[drifting ice]

DANG!! https://www.adafruit.com/product/1452?gclid=COnYtfHV-cgCFQoSHwodYLEMPA

[discontinued. i am a few years too late]

welp, if anyone has an epson moverio they're planning on getting rid of, hit me up

[gloomy mango]

I would love to make use of all that. 😁

[regal horizon]

until the power bill comes in

[hearty karma]

At some point. Still fixing up the electronics

[hearty karma]

How about a VictorMaxx StuntMaster?

[drifting ice]

That would work, but I'm looking for an easy means of implementing eyetracking into a Protogen helmet I'm designing as I go, on top of trying to cram a Pi 4 B into the thing, while being able to have a wearable display...that can allow for eye tracking in a compact package.

End-goal of this two-three year project; Full functioning PC in a Protogen helmet with more tech than an Oculus Quest 2.

[drifting ice]

also holy heck to call these things old is an understatement. [thanks, though]

[teal wadi]

are these neon lamps?

[hearty karma]

Yes, the main oscillators are vacuum tubes, and the octave dividers are neon bulbs

[daring goblet]

Hello! I've been a long time lurker, but wanted to at least introduce myself, since a project I've been working with was mentioned in a recent blog post. I'm one of the maintainers for the GP2040-CE project that was mentioned in the Fisher-Price USB controller write-up.

[teal wadi]

Beautiful!

[elfin idol]

So, just throwing this out there, but I'm surely not the only one in this community who is watching the folks at Framework with their laptops.
Given the specs for expansion cards are open (https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards), I'd love to see some designed with microcontroller boards inside with bus ports / pin connectors on the outside. 😁

[onyx marten]

i'm reliving PCMCIA here

[teal wadi]

Do you own a framework?

[elfin idol]

I don't yet. I'm waiting on them to open up pre-orders for the 16 inch AMD one, because I'm about due for a work laptop replacement and I'd like something more Linux friendly. Currently have an Asus Ultrabook, which has been good, but a bit fiddly to get set up initially.

Kinda looking at Starlabs, System76, and Framework all at once, but I love the Framework modularity thing so I'd probably prefer that. I hate shopping for new laptops.

[onyx marten]

i just got a System76 Pangolin - it's been an interesting experience and mostly enjoyable (i've run into a lot of the "usual" linux problems with drivers/monitors/sound), but it was nice not having to install the OS from scratch

[elfin idol]

Yeah. I've dual booted a bunch of machines over the years, and I typically stick to Ubuntu LTS variants, so the install experience is fine, it's just all the fiddly crap with laptops that gets annoying. Touchpad drivers and media keys and multi-card slots and all that stuff never seems to behave itself right out of the box

[onyx marten]

the System76 was smoother, but that's mostly because they'd already done the hard stuff 😁

[elfin idol]

I've currently got a StarLabs Starlite Mk IV for a really small portable and that thing has been fantastic, since they're selecting parts purposefully for compatibility and actually testing under several Linuxes

only thing I've done there really is mess around with i3wm because I wanted to

oh and I think I updated the firmware, which was all of like 2 terminal commands?

I actually talked to their customer service people yesterday because I thought I had a problem with the USB C port (it ended up being a thing with my phone instead) and they were super responsive and knowledgeable despite being UK based and it being 5pm ET when I talked to them

I think the main thing with a new purchase for me is the lockdown taught me that basically my daily driver laptop stays plugged into the docking station in my home office like 99% of the time, so it can be bigger and uglier and powerful (but hopefully not too noisy), and for portability I just get a smaller laptop with less power but good battery life, and I can just ssh into something more powerful if I need to

[onyx marten]

ditto - my "ultra portable" is a T440s that's still rockin'

[elfin idol]

The Asus purchase was a few years ago and an attempt to do a powerful / portable compromise, but I've had mixed results there

[teal wadi]

Linux sound is still a thing :(

(I love "old" thinkpads too)

[onyx marten]

yeah, now we've replaced pulseaudio with a new systemd thing that starts per user - my sound keeps switching between the two hdmi monitors (randomly) when i reboot 😕

[teal wadi]

Systemd: Nothing is beyond our reach

[gloomy mango]

Systemd: All your base (packages) are belong to us.

[onyx marten]

systemd: let's get even more confusing!

[hearty karma]

It could be a device node issue instead of systemd, maybe fixable with a udev rule

[river hatch]

I've had a Pangolin for about a year and a half now, and I've been mostly happy with it. And I have to say that System76 support is great. Whenever I've had a problem or a question, they've been on it.

Since I came from a MacBook Pro, my biggest gripe is the trackpad. The palm rejection is terrible (both false positives and false negatives) compared to the Mac.

An assortment of small issues: a few weird things with sound, occasional crashes coming out of sleep, and once I took the back off, I wasn't able to get it back on with all the screws screwed in all the way.

But overall, it's a great machine! Still, I'll probably look at Framework seriously next time I'm in the market.

[onyx marten]

i really can't complain - it's working great as a desktop replacement (fans are a bit much sometimes) and the only real pain-point is trying to get a second SSD - i've tried 3 times with 3 different vendors and apparently nobody can read the labels on the drives (keep getting the wrong model)

[river hatch]

Yeah, the fan is pretty noisy.

[steady gulch]

so that's a board with an RP2040 main chip and a ESP32-C3 for wifi (and a display) using AT firmware on the C3, but you get USB access to the C3 or the RP2040 depending on the direction you insert the USB-C plug
https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/T-PicoC3

[woeful whale]

That's cool

[inner linden]

I mean, it's cool, but also cursed.

[steady gulch]

there are some devices that can only be plugged one way with USB-C, but that's a new one, it's like a magic trick, that will bite you every time you plug the board and have to try again the other way, then the other other way because it was right the first time

good old USB, you know

[teal wadi]

Time for a classic

[steady gulch]

and then make a Y cable that separates into the RP2040 on one side and the C3 on the other

use the C3 to control the RP2040 running USB host, powering peripherals via the PC's 5V

[midnight totem]

I made a similar board, RP2040/ESP32-C3 12F, but my solution was to add a 4 port USB hub on it so that you get access to both with one cable...

Second USB port is to the hub so you can plugin another device..

[violet torrent]

What chip?

[midnight totem]

SL2.1A https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-ICs_CoreChips-SL2-1A_C192893.html

[violet torrent]

Oh! I have like, 100 of those somewhere, I need to do something with them sometimes haha

[midnight totem]

Somewhere... I've been looking for some 50mhz crystals for three months. Ended up just ordering them again...

I know I put them someplace so I'd remember, but no....

[violet torrent]

Oh, I know exactly where they are

At least, my chips

[gloomy mango]

Chips? Gonna need some mayo for that. 😄

[hearty karma]

After two weeks of failing to find my solder sucker, I finally decided to just order a new one. After all these years, it turns out they still make Soldapullts in the classic blue-and-yellow housing. The new design has a couple of subtle but useful improvements, and they also offer a mini version that's ESD safe (I got one of each, they aren't expensive).

[violet torrent]

I have the fancy metal one Adafruit sells and I adore it

[hearty karma]

I have that one too, but after a fair amount of use, the seals get damaged and it doesn't move fast enough to be useful. Taking it apart completely and cleaning everything doesn't seem to help much. I don't know why the ancient plastic Soldapullt is so amazingly resilient, but it is.

[violet torrent]

I do find the tip gets damaged but they sell replacements and the flexibility is great for me

[modest moon]

Is this real or a meme?

[teal wadi]

Of course it's a meme :D

[modest moon]

Oh thats sad i thought it was another microsoft style joke :(

[gloomy mango]

"Microsoft style joke"...

You mean.. not funny.. ?

[teal wadi]

Microsoft makes jokes?

[gloomy mango]

WinME, Vista, 8, 11....

[onyx marten]

https://tenor.com/view/leonardo-dicaprio-clapping-clap-applause-amazing-gif-16384995

[teal wadi]

Isn't that roughly every 2nd Windows version? lol

[gloomy mango]

Seems so, ehh? Lol

[teal wadi]

In the meantime, I'm trying to find a good GIF for "year on linux on the desktop", but, no dice :P

(Don't get me wrong, I love linux, but, yeah, that's not gonna happen anytime soon, is it?)

[gloomy mango]

It's almost like they need to really screw up and see where they are going wrong.. rather than exercise any quality control.

[teal wadi]

Ah, in modern tech products, you are the QC!

[gloomy mango]

That whole concept has been dead since the beginning.

There's never such a thing, because the Linux desktop is a constantly evolving thing.

[teal wadi]

I still use GNOME2, in the form of MATE

[gloomy mango]

I've been using Cinnamon, on Mint.. obvs, since 2012.

I've started looking at distros with Wayland recently, but that's a whole mixed bag of experiences.

I don't see me replacing Mint Cinnamon any time soon. Lol

[teal wadi]

I don't think I've ever used cinnamon!

[teal wadi]

I mean, it's technically one tasksel away :P

[gloomy mango]

Spin up a VM.
Easy money.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, that's an option too

Can you put widgets (containing weather info etc) on the taskbar?

[gloomy mango]

Best option, IMO..
Doesn't risk the host OS at all.

[gloomy mango]

Yes.

[teal wadi]

Neat!

In cursed computing news, I just found out there's an active portfork of CDE, of all things

[gloomy mango]

?

[teal wadi]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

[gloomy mango]

Oh lawd....

I'll have to see if there's anyone still at Fujitsu who remembers that. Lol

[teal wadi]

Do you work at fujitsu?

(If you don't mind me asking)

[gloomy mango]

Yarp

[teal wadi]

Their BS2000 line of mainframes might still support that :)

[gloomy mango]

Way outside my field, unfortunately.

I've never had the chance to work on mainframe gear.. which is a shame.

[teal wadi]

If you don't mind me asking, what do you work with?

[gloomy mango]

I'm a Technical Support Specialist... Which, for such a fancy title.. means I watch monitors for alerts, triage, then pass them along.

That's all I see.. and it's all on Windows. 😐

Total waste of my talent, below my grade... But the pay is good. Lol

[teal wadi]

Well, that's all that's important sometimes

It's better than burning yourself up at some startup with uncertain pay

[gloomy mango]

I'd rather be working on Linux servers, fixing actual problems

[teal wadi]

Would you also rather take the wake-up call at night because product's not working?

[onyx marten]

CDE? i remember that from the work i did on OS 2!

[gloomy mango]

No out of hours for me. 🤪

I would go back to webhosting, but.. the money.

[teal wadi]

Welp, can't have it all :P

Set up some sort of UNIX system at home to play around with

[teal wadi]

I don't think the final product of OS/2 ran CDE, but that's before my time

Except if you were writing OS/2 code on UNIX on CDE

[gloomy mango]

I've got some OS/2 discs and images floating around. 😅

[onyx marten]

CDE drove the UI design of OS/2 - i worked on the embedded database manager, which never made it to v2 as far as I know

[teal wadi]

I see!

I'd like to get (access to) an IBM Cell chip to play around with

(to be more exact, a system based on it)

An used PS3 would have been an option if OtherOS was still a thing, but even then, it was a constrained system that only allowed running external apps over a hypervisor

All this IBM talk reminded me of that 😅

[river hatch]

I remember CDE from HP-UX.

[teal wadi]

I've seen CDE being used in some legacy system or other, but never used it myself

[hearty karma]

My current project is to partially automate jobs like yours

Programming for the Cell was an experience

[gloomy mango]

We have as much automation as will be permitted.
Contract requires human oversight.

[hearty karma]

I'm writing a machine learning program to predict failures

[gloomy mango]

Good stuff. 👍

[teal wadi]

hah. I can imagine

[gloomy mango]

I suppose I should tidy up around my desk, so I can actually do something with this server... and not break my back doing it. Lol

[teal wadi]

Wear ear protection!

(To explain the timing, I just happened to have discord open and this message showed up)

[gloomy mango]

Lmao

It's not a noisy server.

[teal wadi]

Specs?

[gloomy mango]

2x Xeon X5670.
DDR3 ECC Reg. (48GB but I have 32GB to install)
3x 300GB + 1x 2TB SAS.

[teal wadi]

A cool machine, but I sure hope electricity is cheap where you live 😅

though thinking about it, 2*95W TDP isn't too bad

(yeah I know TDP != electrical power consumed, but, meh)

[gloomy mango]

Thanks.
I'm not so much concerned about power bills.. my rates are manageable and this machine won't be on 24/7.

[teal wadi]

I hope you'll have fun with it! Is this the machine you'll use to learn kubernetes on?

[gloomy mango]

Yeah. 😁👍

[teal wadi]

Enjoy! (And make sure to try some fun HPC stuff once you're done with kube to make good use of the dual processors :D)

[gloomy mango]

Not sure what I can do to really use the power. 😅

I might run a few game servers, perhaps.

[onyx marten]

run a kubernetes cluster

[gloomy mango]

Sure, if I had moar hardware.

..and space for said hardware. Lol

[onyx marten]

virtualization

[gloomy mango]

This will be running a "cluster", in software.. but only one physical server.

[onyx marten]

right

[gloomy mango]

Plenty of containers

[onyx marten]

there's one of the "kubernetes in a box" distributions that runs in docker but i can't remember the name of it off the top of my head

[gloomy mango]

Rancher Harvester.. ?

[onyx marten]

nah, something simpler?

[teal wadi]

Well, you could try a few interactive molecular dynamics simulations
https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Training/Tutorials/science/nanotubes/nanotubes-html/

[onyx marten]

oh - almost https://k3d.io/v5.4.9/

[gloomy mango]

Ohh.. dduuuhhh.. Harvester is a full OS.

[gloomy mango]

I could.. yes.. but.. ?

Ehh.. I suppose it will require some brain-time.

[teal wadi]

which is why I linked to a tutorial that uses some fairly simple software

[gloomy mango]

👍

I meant more like thinking if it's worth the time. Lol

[teal wadi]

That's fair

[craggy plover]

smool, smol, choomk

[blissful olive]

Are emmc s usually keyed to to laptops and things or could you solder in a new one without the need to programing it?

[river hatch]

I'm definitely not an expert on that, but as far as I know, EMMC is just like another disk. So I would think you could do a "brain transplant" on a computer with EMMC just as well as you could on a computer with a sata or nvme drive. (Which is to say, probably yes, as long as the drive is not encrypted.)

I defer to anyone who knows more about it, though.

[craggy plover]

Number 3 is giving me anxiety.
Soldering headers to that looks painful.

[hearty karma]

I want to peel the protective layer off the display

[river hatch]

The Longan Nano? For the left and the right sides, how is that different than soldering headers to any of the other boards?

The pins on the bottom are the debug interface, and the way they are attached is a bit weird. But they're already soldered on for you.

[river hatch]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I eventually did. I took this picture a couple of years ago.

[craggy plover]

yea that, the holes look naarroow

It was the right call going horizontal on the debug though.

Vertical debug headers look weird and are easy to short out.

[river hatch]

I'm pretty sure the through-holes are the same size as the other boards. Or do you mean there's less copper around the hole? I never really noticed that before, and I don't remember it being an issue when I soldered on headers.

[craggy plover]

If it wasn't an issue I guess it's fine.

It really felt weird to me.

[half hollow]

moore's law: The number of RISC-V MCU company doubles every 18 month

[teal wadi]

Where did you get the milk-v from? I thought it was only available within mainland China

[hearty karma]

If I wanted to buy one, I'd probably either use a reshipping service, or ask a friend in China.

I did try searching TaoBao for “Milk-V 64核RISC-V处理器开发套件” but it didn't yield relevant results. The link in the Twitter post refers to “小鹅通店铺” (“Little Goose Store”?) which may be the only current vendor.

[teal wadi]

Nah, there are enough risc-v boards to go around if I want to get one, I was just curious

(And I don't have a friend in China :P)

[hearty karma]

I know that feel. I don't really need this Arduino board I can't find, I just like the look of it.

[teal wadi]

...So many holes

Why so many holes? :P

[hearty karma]

I think in that case, it's an æsthetic choice, unlike this one, where the modules are designed to be snapped apart for separate use https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10889

[teal wadi]

That's an interesting board :)

Out of curiosity, what's your favorite architecture to work with?

[hearty karma]

I'm fond of orthogonal, register-rich architectures like AVR (for smaller projects) and ARM (for bigger ones)

Or 1802 (for retro-computing) or PowerPC (for high performance computing)

[teal wadi]

Why powerpc for hpc? The clusters I have experience with are amd64-based, so I'm curious

[hearty karma]

I find the X86 architecture outdated and inefficient.

[teal wadi]

I don't think you'll find anyone who disagrees with you here

But so much software assumes intel

[hearty karma]

That's true (and unfortunate: IMHO MICROS~1 and Intel have set computing back 10-20 years)

[teal wadi]

(And only the computing gods know how many numerical software assume intel BLAS-speicifc stuff)

[hearty karma]

However, "work with" for me generally means programming it, so I get to write my own software.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, problem is you can't write everything from scratch, either due to time constraints or for interoperability reasons

(note that interoperability here mainly refers to interoperability between people/teams)

[hearty karma]

True. However, compilers exist for all those architectures (although I've been known to dip my toes into assembler for 1802 and ARM)

[teal wadi]

Of course!

[hearty karma]

I had one team that had standardized on Cell for portable HPC, that was an experience.

[teal wadi]

But when designing, say, a cluster for multiple users, the probability of somebody wanting to run an AVX/SSE-heavy program or library is typically non-zero and a heavy consideration

It's like using non-nvidia GPUs when the world runs on CUDA

[hearty karma]

I mostly gave up on CUDA after the Apple/nVidia feud removed support for it. It was always twitchy and brittle anyway.

[teal wadi]

It is what it is, but wisdom on the street is that it's the only way to get the optimal performance out of nvidia's products

I'm not that experienced myself to judge though

[hearty karma]

When I need to use CUDA, I just spin up a VM on Google Compute Engine with a V100 and do my training on that. Otherwise, I just train on TPUs or the like.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, that's an option too

at least if your org has a cloud budget :P

[hearty karma]

For high power clusters, I often end up selling clients IP4G instances (PowerPC on Google Compute Engine)

You'd be surprised how cost-efficient it can be. My usual approach is to get the model parameters dialed in locally, then spin up a VM, do my training, then delete it. I have custom YAML files to bring up a VM with all the right drivers and libraries already installed. I'll usually do my training in under an hour, for less than a dollar.

I also have access to an IBM AC922 when I need PowerPC + high end GPU access.

[teal wadi]

Out of curiosity, have you ever encountered this?
https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/vector_engine.html

[hearty karma]

Google has strongly optimized their cloud architecture to support quickly spinning up and deleting VMs, so I take advantage of that.

[teal wadi]

I need to look into that

[hearty karma]

I hadn't seen the NEC one before. I guess it competes with nVidia's DGX line. Too bad they're X86 based.

[teal wadi]

I'm interested in what will happen with xilinx's versal platform over time, with the AI engines

[hearty karma]

Apparently there is finally some motion on open source support for Xilinx. I've ignored them in favour of Lattice for quite some time, as I was never able to get the Xilinx toolchain to work.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, I remember discussing that with you some time ago

[hearty karma]

It's hard to beat pip install apio for convenience

[teal wadi]

Anyway, the main idea is that they've made a hybrid FPGA fabric / vector processors on a network-on-chip / ARM SoC thing

It's...... very expensive

[hearty karma]

There are several outfits offering SoCs with FPGA or neural net support, but yeah, they tend to be costly. I've been watching the Arduino foundation's attempts to "democratize" FPGA support the way they did with microcontrollers, but I don't think they're there yet. The Alorium XLR-8 is another intriguing approach where they use an FPGA to emulate an AVR along with whatever else you care to load onto it.

[teal wadi]

I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the cheap lattice boards have done it cost-wise

There's a training material problem

[hearty karma]

I got started with the Nandland Go board, for which there's a good bit of training material available.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, nandland's a good site

[teal wadi]

Have you seen this?
https://blog.yosyshq.com/p/colorlight-part-1/

[hearty karma]

Yeah, I saw that IceStorm/IceStudio has added support for it, and I bought one, but I haven't done anything with it yet. My idea is to implement something like a Floppotron with it, taking advantage of the built-in 5V level shifters.

Or maybe using it to drive the HUB75 displays it's designed for.

[teal wadi]

A good use for all these boards is playing around with soft cores, either your own, or designs off the web

[hearty karma]

I'll admit I'm tempted to try the PowerPC core IBM open sourced a while back.

[teal wadi]

https://tenor.com/view/good-morning-do-it-gif-24435329

I wonder if you end up running out of LUTs

[hearty karma]

I suspect it demands a lot of resources. My other option for cheap PPC hardware is NXP's PPC based automotive microcontrollers

[teal wadi]

do you have a link to said core?

https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2o ?

[hearty karma]

That might be one of them, there are a few out there. The links I had have succumbed to link rot, while looking for them, I did find this: https://openpower.foundation/resources/nvidiacudaforpower/

[icy moth]

Open source cuda core 😯

[hearty karma]

That seems like a smart move on nVidia's part

There are also some student projects, and https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

[teal wadi]

sadly, it looks like it's not a core, just a port of the drivers/api to powerpc

You'll still have to bring your own GPU

[icy moth]

Ah.. dang

I didn’t look at it as I was laying in bed just reading lol

[teal wadi]

That's fair (this is my catchphrase now, isn't it? 🙃 )

[icy moth]

For me it’s “Makes sense”

Lol

[hearty karma]

To quote some cat videos (and an old T-Mobile ad): “Makes sense if you don't think about it”

[teal wadi]

"I see!"

[hearty karma]

Couldn't resist...

[teal wadi]

It's tiny!

[hearty karma]

I've always wanted a little SC501 so when one showed up in an eBay auction with some other modules, I snapped it up. It's going to need a little work to get going, of course.

[gloomy mango]

Oooohhhmmmm!

That's how one resists, Sir!

[hearty karma]

Resistance is futile!

[teal wadi]

https://tenor.com/view/punchline-badumtss-the-pirates-bandof-misfits-gif-5556409

[teal wadi]

any ideas on what's busted?

[hearty karma]

The pilot lamp is burned out, and two of the trimmer potentiometers have their knobs torn off.

[teal wadi]

pilot lamp sounds like an easy fix. Too bad about the trimpots

Hopefully you have replacement parts?

(or can easily find some?)

[hearty karma]

The original pots haven't been made in decades, but it looks like the Bourns 3386 -R, -U, -M, and -T pin configurations might fit, so I've ordered some. The pilot lamp is a #7220, soldered in place. Fortunately that is still available.

[half hollow]

Yeah I have reshipping service to ship it to me.
https://milkv.io/duo/

[teal wadi]

Now you gotta get their overpriced(?) risc-v desktop mobo :D

[half hollow]

Also a opensource FPGA company having some interesting FPGA: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/05/03/cologne-gatemate-a1-fpga-chip-with-20480-le-is-programmable-with-an-open-source-toolchain/

That you can actually buy and use

[teal wadi]

We were actually discussing this a few weeks ago in #fpga !

#fpga message

[half hollow]

Actually I saw this duo board when I was searching that risc-v desktop mobo 😆

The price is just insane, I'm fine with my mac studio

[hearty karma]

If I'm going to buy an overpriced mobo, it would be a Talos Raptor 2

[half hollow]

Isn't PowerPC also have one mobo for devs?

[teal wadi]

Yeah, I feel I'll agree with @hearty karma here

[teal wadi]

This FPGA has an interesting LUT structure

...but no hardware multipliers

[half hollow]

I use ice40 for some of my projects but non of them were able to use DSP block so ....

Ah also another FPGA stuff, apparently Ryzen AI in the new AMD CPU is just an FPGA block

[teal wadi]

I think you need to use synth_ice40 -dsp

Please link me to said CPU

[half hollow]

So it will be interesting to see if anyone can access it

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-details-4-nm-Zen-4-Ryzen-7040-Phoenix-HS-APUs-with-integrated-Xilinx-AI-smarts-alongside-refreshed-Zen-3-and-Zen3-offerings.679093.0.html

[teal wadi]

I think that's AI engine blocks, not FPGA fabric

[half hollow]

The problem is that I rarely do multiply 😆

[teal wadi]

https://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/ai-engine.html
EDIT: Wrong link

At least that'd be my educated guess

[half hollow]

Ah, yeah that makes sense

Like why would you need/want a FPGA to run AI tasks

But I think there is a adaptable layer(FPGA) on top of the AI engines to reorder some stuff

[teal wadi]

The versal adaptive SoC goes for ~10K$ as a devboard

I doubt they're going to integrate that :P

Or it's going to be a "simple" systolic array block ala Google TPU

[half hollow]

AMD is pretty light on the description for their Ryzen AI block and go "yey we got AI, stonks go up" on their presentation so will probably take some hot chips section to see what's going on in the block.....

[teal wadi]

Yup! The only reason I'm guessing they're using the AI engines is because they talk about the Xilinx acquisition

[half hollow]

I think you are 99% right they are reusing the Xilinx AI block here

it just that I wonder if there is a FPGA layer to reconfig the blocks on the fly to run tasks

[teal wadi]

I doubt it. It's a laptop CPU and it'd drive prices too high

[half hollow]

might be not necessary

[teal wadi]

Besides, the AI engines are organized in a NoC

(see link I posted)

[half hollow]

I see it now, that makes sense

[hearty karma]

I'm kind of curious about the "Neural Engine" Apple is including on its CPUs.

[teal wadi]

It's not user-accessible :(

[hearty karma]

But ... I'm the user! Why is it there if I can't do anything with it???

[teal wadi]

(Unless you export your model in a proprietary format, in which case Apple's software will decide whether it's a good fit)

[hearty karma]

Oh, I had hoped to use it to build/train models, not run them.

I guess I'll continue training models on GCP and the AC922

[teal wadi]

Yeah, it's kind of weird. Perhaps the asahi linux folks will figure something out

[hearty karma]

I have had some fights with proprietary formats with Caffe, Detectron, and TensorFlow Lite models and (of course) protobufs

[half hollow]

Isn't that you can recompile model for apple silicon?

Also pytorch supports it right?

[hearty karma]

I don't know

[half hollow]

imx585 vs imx283

[teal wadi]

AFAIK, pytorch/tensorflow etc support the M1 Mac's GPU for training

You can use the neural engine for inference if you export your model to the coreml format

Core ML is designed to seamlessly take advantage of powerful hardware technology including CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, in the most efficient way in order to maximize performance while minimizing memory and power consumption.
https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/core-ml/

These are instructions for setting up accelerated training for tensorflow on m1 macs:
https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/

Sadly, I'm not familiar enough with pytorch to know how to set that one up

[hearty karma]

PyTorch is a little complicated. It may be one of those packages where "install Anaconda" is the quickest approach.

[brittle wind]

I wasn't expecting much when I bought a 70$ logic analyzer off amazon, but it immediately paid for itself when I investigated why my mouse sensor driver isn't validating. Turns out it was just me omitting some brackets in the code (thus the firmware being sent as 0s), but it's interesting that it doesn't even need the firmware to function as a mouse. Still, it was fun reading the signals and also confirming that it wasn't a timing issue.

[strange night]

Logic analyzers are awesome, I love my saleae. Worth every penny imo

[verbal aspen]

Heh heh, Saleae is worth it when your employer is paying those pennies for you...

[karmic obsidian]

WE ARE LIVE! Desk of Ladyada - quad rotary reader and a touch of testers https://youtu.be/RaKpcQTvQrI

[strange night]

They didn’t, unfortunately

It was an out-of-pocket purchase but I have no regrets. I got that sweet individual discount too, and $250ish for a well built LA that gets me away from Pulseview is definitely worth that price discrepancy. They did a killer job with the saleae software

[hearty karma]

I ended up with an Analog Discovery 2, which includes a simple logic analyzer that seems sufficient for my needs. Similar price.

[inner linden]

I keep thinking about getting the Analog Discovery 2 or the ADALM2000 because they do look really cool and won't take up giant amounts of space, but I've never quite felt like pulling the trigger there.

[half hollow]

Personally I think Analog Discovery 2's software is pretty good

I have one for like 5 years now and still got new features from them

[cursive pewter]

Does anybody know if adafruit is going to release a 4G/LTE FONA module? Since most major US carriers have retired their 2G and 3G networks.

[pine igloo]

Dunno about adafruit but sim7000 modules are quite cheap on ali they rage between 10/20 and similar to the previous sim800

Not as much as ali sim800l though. Weird things 3 dollars for a pcb, while the module itself does cost 8/9 dollars...

[half hollow]

There are quite some modules that is pin-2-pin compatible with SIM7000 and sim800 that supports LTE though

I got SIM A7680C less then 5 USD that surprisingly works with T-mobile n41 LTE band

showing off the board here

[teal wadi]

This board looks menacing, what with all those gas sensors! :P What do you use it for?

[pine igloo]

An easy inexpensive way to get adesive vinyl stencils that does not require me to remove pieces from the stencil by hand?

[delicate quarry]

Are you asking how?

[pine igloo]

Either how or some kind of cheap service

[delicate quarry]

What kind of pieces are you removing?

Oh do you mean as opposed to cutting by hand?

[pine igloo]

Vinyl. I mean if I get vinyl and pass it through a plotter like thing to get the stencil out of vinyl, I still need to remove the pieces by hand, solution not avaible because of small details

[delicate quarry]

Oh, so you have a plotter and want an easy way to poke the pieces out.

That’s kinda tough for vinyl, as the pieces have to have tiny bridges to prevent them from moving during the cutting process.

[pine igloo]

It doesn't need to be vinyl, anything that's can be submerged without coming off
Basically I want to mask a piece, and use electrolysis to "burn" the unmasked part

[delicate quarry]

I think you have to manually remove those pieces for any flexible material for anything with such fine detail. If the cuts are done right, you should just be able to suspend the sheet and poke each piece out with a toothpick or exactoknife.

Any shortcuts you could take past that risks deforming the detail or dimensions of your stencil.

Another means of masking would be to use a 3d printed stencil, then spray painting it with a non-conductive spray?

[pine igloo]

I want it to be like laser burned (too expensive, so electrolysis may do the job) But the negative way may work too, with like those spray paint things that can be peeled off after being applied?

[delicate quarry]

Possibly? I wonder if plastidip peels off easily…

It’s hard to say if the fine details are going to be easy enough to remove, I think no matter what you choose to go with there’s some manual handicraft involved.

[regal horizon]

depends on the amount of layers of plastidip you use.

to coat tool handles requires dipping them many many times

[pine igloo]

Services that do offer stencils for such purpose don't exist right?

Thanks btw

[regal horizon]

if you're talking about the spray that's much thinner and does peel up like a rubberized sticker

plastidip as a conformal coating sounds like an interesting idea except it breaks down over time and becomes more malleable

[delicate quarry]

They do, though I personally couldn’t recommend any one in particular.

You can find them all over Etsy haha

[regal horizon]

There's always acid etching where you coat the piece you want to keep and then let chemicals do the work for you.

for vinyl stickers and plotters there's no easy way. have to use an xacto knife to remove the details.

could use a tiny vacuum actuated picker kind of like a pick and place except there's no guarantee every cut completes perfectly. it does require a human touch. :/

because if a cut didn't complete and a robot vacuum picks it up they'll just rip up the entire vinyl with it.

[half hollow]

It's actually just an environmental pollution sensors

[hearty karma]

Like the photoresist used for etching PCBs, maybe?

[pine igloo]

I don't get it, what are for ip masks? What do I need them for?
Also for example in 192.168.15.15/24
What's /24? It should be 255.255.255.0, but what do I care about it? What's for?

[verbal aspen]

/24 is the subnet specification. In this case it means a value of 24 one-bits followed by 8 zeros, which is the same as 0xFFFFFF00, or 255.255.255.0.

[pine igloo]

Ok, but what are they usefull to me to know?

[verbal aspen]

They're how a device knows whether it can talk to another address directly (if it's on the same subnet) or whether it should send packets to the local router to be passed on to some larger network, like the internet, instead.

[pine igloo]

Hm I don't yet get it 😕
In other words or like a source that you can share?

In the book that they gave me, it just says that I can calculate it by getting the ip adress as a binary number and using a bool AND to get the mask

In the job, they told me that's usefull to know the range of ips that I can assign, so /24 = 255.255.255.0 , the last block 0, I could assign another 255 range, like .001 or .240 or .xxx (under 255)
In the wiki, I'm even more confused

[verbal aspen]

I don't have a good reference offhand... would just be doing the same Google searches, heh heh.

[pine igloo]

I usually do, but this time I'm really confused gotten keep googling then thanks anyway

[brittle wind]

I'm not an expert on it but I get the concept. It breaks up an IP address into chunks that can be used for whatever reason one can think of, mostly to organize them between network and host addresses. Essentially, this is easier to visualize in binary because the mask really is just a thing you AND over the IP.

For example, if your local network address usually looks like 192.168.1.3 and the subnet mask is /24 (255.255.255.0). If you AND those two, you'll end up with two halves: 192.168.1 and 3. The former is the network address, the latter is host address, and that distinction is really just up to the specification. All the mask does is break up the IP.

@pine igloo ^ Tagging just in case.

You can calculate the mask by doing a boolean AND because the network address stays the same regardless of your host address if they're part of the same network, usually. Say if it's 192.168.1.3 and 192.168.1.115. AND-ing them gives you 255.255.255.0.

[onyx marten]

it's also useful for network segment isolation - for example, where i used to work DB's were on a specific subnet and only specific IPs from other subnets were allowed to access them

[midnight totem]

The /24 is just shorthand for a netmask of 255.255.255.0 As other's have said, it is for routing on the local network. Since IP is destination routed, your computer will go through the routing tables applying the netmask to the destination IP address looking for a matching interface to route the packet through. If no match is found it will send the packet on to the default route (gateway address), if one is defined.

[hearty karma]

One way to think of it is there are 32 bits of address, and you can split them between "network" bits and "host" bits. For example, a /24 network has 24 networks bits and 8 host bits. This allows for 254 different hosts on that network. However, you could have a /22 network, which would allow for 1022 hosts.

[midnight totem]

The 192.168.15.15/24 is a subset of the private network 192.168.0.0/16... The private networks are 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16, but a lot of routers define the 192.168 network as 192.168.x.0/24 (max of 254 usable hosts)

[hearty karma]

In the old days, the bits didn't have to be contiguous, so you could have bizarre subnet masks like 255.255.255.1, which would put the even numbered hosts on one net and the odd numbered hosts on another. However, that was silly and not often used, so now the bits are contiguous and you can easily refer to them by count.

Note that the old concepts of "class A", "class B", and "class C" networks have been largely abandoned as we ran out of IPv4 addresses, but the aforementioned private/unroutable networks (one for each) are still around.

[midnight totem]

NATs and PATs are brought up daily at work... Networking between private networks with overlapping used ranges is a challenge.....

[gloomy mango]

Just for a giggle, I'll ask this here.. I once asked a "certified Cisco engineer"....

Why is the numerical range of an octet 0-255?

[hearty karma]

Hee! 🔢

I once was a certified Cisco engineer, but those certifications have since lapsed.

[gloomy mango]

😏

I'm not a network engineer of any grade... Lol

[hearty karma]

The fun follow-up question is "how many hosts can you have in that 0-255 space? And why?"

[icy moth]

I did network engineering in a contractor capacity

[midnight totem]

254 and one for the gateway

[gloomy mango]

254. 0 and 255 are excluded.. broadcast and gateway, if I recall.

[icy moth]

0 gateway, 255 broadcast

Yeep

I once did network engineering stuff

[gloomy mango]

So, yeah... Why is it limited to 0-255?

[icy moth]

Not as a certified person

[pine igloo]

So wait, the private ip classes are also old and dead stuff?

Also thanks to all for the answers

[icy moth]

8 bits

[gloomy mango]

Maximum sum of an 8-bit value

[pine igloo]

I mean
"Address ranges to be use by private networks are:

Class A: 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
Class B: 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
Class C: 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255"

[gloomy mango]

Class A: Pro
Class B: Amateur
Class C: Home user.

🤪

[hearty karma]

Amusingly, after paying for all those Cisco certifications, my job mostly entailed crawling around in the dust under raised floors pulling cables. My cow-orkers would ask me "you're the senior person on this project, why are you crawling around on the floor pulling cables – and smiling?" I'd keep smiling and point out "I get my senior person salary whether I'm slinging code or slinging cable, so I'm happy either way, as long as they don't require me to wear a 3-piece suit while crawling around in the dust!"

[gloomy mango]

Oohhhh.. I love doing cable monkey work. 😁

[hearty karma]

Yeah, I didn't tell them I even actually enjoyed it.

[teal wadi]

Just make sure to wear ear protection

[hearty karma]

Although I'll admit I don't really miss the days of thicknet and vampire taps.

[gloomy mango]

I like any hardware work, really.

No braining, just do.

[teal wadi]

Servers sound like a hairdryer from heck

[onyx marten]

raised floors is easy - try running 10-base-t through existing office walls

[teal wadi]

(I had to edit this :P)

[icy moth]

I prefer the way that Apple data centers cool servers

[hearty karma]

Try pulling 10-base-T through 100 year old plaster and lath walls...

[teal wadi]

?

[icy moth]

Cold room cooling. A dedicated massive HVAC unit pushes air into a small room and out through the servers

And there’s tons of these pods in a single hall

[onyx marten]

and that, too, yeah

[gloomy mango]

Cold corridor cooling is quite common..
We did that at Paragon.

[icy moth]

Each pod holds like.. 50 racks

Apple does hot aisle vs cold aisle because it tends to be more efficient. Most modern data centers do some variation of it these days

[teal wadi]

I don't know how well that'd scale with passive accelerator cards that assume massive airflow for cooling

[icy moth]

But for a long time, cold aisle design was very common. Or that’s what I have been told by various data center architects I’ve spoken too over the years.

Not sure how wildly data center design varies by country

I do know that a data center Facebook was building in Singapore had to be like 9 stories tall because of how scarce land is in the island

Learned that from a guy named Kermit who was a data center planner for Facebook at the time in 2019

[teal wadi]

Hmm... perhaps disclosing their name might not be a good idea?

[pine igloo]

Googling the name he's a killer... Pretty generic

[icy moth]

He’s a very neat guy

Thankfully not a killer 🙂

They have since moved on to greater things based on a quick search of my LinkedIn connections

I had the size wrong, it is an 11 story data center https://engineering.fb.com/2019/01/14/data-center-engineering/singapore-data-center/

[teal wadi]

vertical farming: data center edition

[icy moth]

Sits on just 12 acres

But provides 175,000 m^2 of datacentee

[teal wadi]

All they need to do is start a side business selling hot water :P

[drifting ice]

COOL FIND: To all of y'all looking for FPV goggles to hack that can simultaneously function as displays...

This is what I'm stripping down to bare components to fit the size constraints of a...personal project. [CONFIDENTIAL] (no spoilers)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265889140085

also can be found on amazon

Rant: As for where I got the "hack these" statement from, someone on Amazon shared pictures of them adding audio and a few other things to it, with instructions! company seemed open and helpful in that regard too, sending replacement parts when they messed up.

Rant: Why I'm flipping out about this and why I thought this deserved a share comes down to this; ALL THIS TECH, CRAMMED INTO THAT PRICETAG. HOW???

[hearty karma]

Wow, that sure looks like a Virtual Boy

[drifting ice]

no way we share the same braincell

how in the_

[drifting ice]

how did we both have that thought???

[hearty karma]

Because it really does look like a Virtual Boy (I have one that even works)

[drifting ice]

Siiiiiiiick!!

I remember someone named ShankMods turned one into a handheld at some point.

...and yeah it does

XD

[teal wadi]

Even the color scheme is the same!

All it's missing is the Stand

[drifting ice]

I now have a good justification to build a ridiculously powerful battery.

This thing can take up to 25 flipping volts.

[teal wadi]

Just make sure not to start a house fire

[drifting ice]

I won't, don't worry.

even if I do, we have an extinguisher and this house is both grounded and protected by breakers.

...and I have everything hooked up to an emergency kill switch. -w-'

[drifting ice]

Also, OSHA certified. :P

[teal wadi]

Well, I mean, I'm right

Lithium is no fun

[drifting ice]

oh yeah, no doubt

already seen too many batteries exploding online.

18650 gang.

[teal wadi]

Yeeeeah, just buy a premade one

It's not worth it

The energy density is enough to make you regret all your life choices that led you up to that moment if it starts a fire

[drifting ice]

If we didn't take risks, would we have made as much progress as we do now?

I will be careful, but I also do not want to let some of the modules I purchased go to waste.

[teal wadi]

Well, we take calculated risks when it makes sense to do so

And we take reasonable safeguards so that said risks don't include "electrical house fire"

[drifting ice]

I'm an engineer with Robotics training. I'll be fine.

but thank you for your concern

I will take note of that as I tinker away.

[teal wadi]

Sorry! I tend not to make any assumptions about anyone's background

[river hatch]

In case it helps anyone who's still wondering about subnet masks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing

[river hatch]

Fun fact: all the lithium that exists was created in the Big Bang. My understanding is that unlike all the other elements, there is no known nuclear reaction which can create lithium.

[river hatch]

Thicknet was before my time. I did do a bit with thinnet in college, though. My university was in the middle of transitioning from thinnet to 10BaseT, so we had some of both.

[teal wadi]

According to wikipedia, it seems to still be made in stellar nucleosynthesis. However, I do not think this could be replicated on earth

(I'm no physicist. It shows)

[river hatch]

OK, guess I was wrong. I think I read it in a book somewhere, but I can't remember where anymore.

[teal wadi]

I mean, as far as we humans are concerned, it seems to essentially be true.

...which makes single-use lithium batteries (typically in novel cigarette products) seem even more wasteful

[river hatch]

Our scientific knowledge is always changing. Wikipedia says "On 27 May 2020, astronomers reported that classical nova explosions are galactic producers of lithium-7." Assuming I did read in a book that lithium cannot be created, it would have been before 2020.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, that makes sense. I did not notice the date

[gloomy mango]

Science is great.
Constantly adjusting to account for new information. 👍

[lost lily]

Is it normal for a sync buck controller to get really really warm? (It's not hot, but it's idling - no load at all)
It's regulating 24v to 5v and it's using 340 mA

[verbal aspen]

There is some quiescent current to run a regulator, but that 340mA sounds much higher than it ought to be.

[lost lily]

It's the LM5116, which I've read that has a pretty high quiescent current compared to other bucks

Funnily enough, it just dropped to 180mA

[verbal aspen]

(As a pedantic note, 180mAh is an amount of energy, like how much is in a battery, whereas 180mA is a current.)

[lost lily]

oops mb

[nimble apex]

Does anybody here know the draw in mAh/hr for a single strand of noods? Im trying to figure out how many hours of life I should expect from a CR2032 directly powering a nood

[icy moth]

They recommend not drawing more than 50mA of current with it.

[hearty karma]

Not very long. Also mAh/h, the h terms cancel and it's just mA

[icy moth]

You’ll want to limit it to 15mA because coin cell can’t be drawn heavily from

[nimble apex]

I thought the coin cell was self-limiting for draw?

[icy moth]

They usually have ~150mAh of charge

Well, like all things it’s better to be safe than sorry

It tends to be better to be below the threshold anyway

[nimble apex]

So I would only get like 3 hours of life>

?*

[hearty karma]

I'd be surprised if you got that much

Then again, it depends somewhat on how much brightness you consider "life". LEDs are amazingly efficient at low current, so you may get a feeble glow for a few hours, after rapidly decreasing brightness to begin with.

[nimble apex]

But if I included a 15mA current limiting resistor, I would get 10 hours, of dimmer light?

Do they sell them by current or only by ohm?

[hearty karma]

You'd probably get a couple of hours of dimmer, then fading to even dimmer. Worse, the resistor will be eating power, reducing your efficiency and voltage, causing the LEDs to fade faster (the blue LEDs in noods have a high-ish forward voltage, so there's not much headroom between that and your cell voltage).

Cell capacity is notoriously non-linear: you get considerably less capacity at heavy draw (and 15mA qualifies as heavy draw for a coin cell)

[nimble apex]

So is trying to power noods from a coin cell just a bad idea? I dont want to go to aaa batteries, cause they make a noticeable lump

[verbal aspen]

Maybe a thin flat lithium-polymer cell?

[nimble apex]

So this is going on a collar, for a cyberpunk costume, the lipo batteries are pretty long

[hearty karma]

This one has more capacity, is rechargeable, and only 36x19.6x5.2mm https://www.adafruit.com/product/2750

And there are smaller ones available

[nimble apex]

Hmm, that would work, I assume I would need a resistor?

[hearty karma]

A small resistor is probably a good idea, given the higher cell voltage and lower ESR.

[nimble apex]

ESR? Sorry im fairly new to leds

[hearty karma]

Equivalent series resistance: batteries have their own resistance, which limits the current they can put out. Coin cells have a lot of resistance, lithium poly cells have much less.

[nimble apex]

Ah, thank you.

Last question then before I get to designing, can somebody point me to where I can calc what resistor I need to limit the current of a lipo battery

[icy moth]

Oh yeah, I have some 150mAh LiPo packs that are about the size of my thumb

[nimble apex]

And what current I should be aiming for?

Sorry, supposed to be a single question

[hearty karma]

Ohm's law lets you work it out. You subtract the LED voltage (3V) from the cell voltage (4.2V) to get the voltage drop across the resistor (1.2V). Then divide that by the current you want (say, 15mA, which is 0.015A: always calculate in basic units). So 1.2V divided by 0.015A yields 80 ohms. I'd probably just use a 100Ω resistor to get slightly lower current and better cell life.

Or try a range of resistors to see what brightness works for you.

I did this for a cosplay prop a while back and found I needed to dial up the brightness for outdoor use, but down for indoor use. I ended up using a 100Ω fixed resistor in series with a 10kΩ variable one (considerably more resistance than I expected to need, as I ran into the aforementioned effect where LEDs are wildly efficient at low current).

Note, I just picked 15mA as an example, I really don't know how much noods draw or what brightness is suitable for your use case.

[nimble apex]

Fair enough, I suppose resistors are pretty cheap, so its probably just easiest to buy a series of them from like 1k to 10k and test run the circuit, see what the max resistance I can use and still get decent brightness.

[hearty karma]

My prop used 24 individual LEDs, and put out a decent amount of brightness even with microamps of current.

[fossil glen]

I've noticed that as well, in a completely different context. In theory, a neopixel at full brightness draws 60ma, 20ma each for the three leds. I'm working on a display that runs "white" as 6.7/6.7/6.7 i.e. all three leds at a third brightness. Keeps the maximum power draw down to 20 ma / pixel, which dramatically reduces power requirements. It's still plenty bright enough, you can hardly see the difference

[hearty karma]

For resistor assortments, I'm fond of the "E3" series, which has 3 values per decade. So I might get 100Ω, 220Ω, 470Ω for the first decade, then similarly 1k, 2.2k, and 4.7k for the next, and 10k, 22k, 47k for the next, and maybe 100k to top it out. That's ten different values and gives solid coverage across most of the ranges you'll need.

Basically each resistor is about 2.2 times the resistance of the previous one.

[nimble apex]

And I can get a pack of those for like 10 bucks, and keep the ones I wind up not using. Thank you, I really appreciate the help

[hearty karma]

Right. Here's one option for $7 that has 30 each the E3 values from 10Ω to 1meg for $7 https://www.youdoitelectronics.com/velleman-resistor-assortment-1-4w-480-pieces-k-res-e3

[nimble apex]

Thats perfect, thank you

[regal horizon]

Ive run noods without a resistor without issue. 6 of them actually.

Resistors are advisable for wearables and lipo’s though. Generally that would be a good idea.

[river hatch]

One thing that's puzzled me is that both the 130mm long nood and the 300mm long nood recommend 50mA. Shouldn't the long one use more power than the short one?

[regal horizon]

Yes, i don’t know the exact power draw. The longer ones should take more power.

Here’s 6 green noods in the horns and 1 red nood in the lower jaw . 30,000mah worth of lipo stuffed against my face and wiring around my head. As long as your wiring is safe everything should be fine.

The mask ran for about a week. I’ve scaled the power down to about 1500mah total now.

Noods don’t take that much power and if they’re pulsing you elongate the longevity of battery life x2.

[teal wadi]

Regardless of how well-wired it is, I would not have the courage to strap 30KmAh worth of LiPo batteries right onto my face

[regal horizon]

Whenever I do something stupid I just fallback to the classic scapegoat... well I'm from Florida.

[hearty karma]

Oh dear. I'm from Florida too (grew up on the space coast)!

[regal horizon]

Yup, Treasure Coast here 🙂

[icy moth]

I also spent part of my childhood on the space coast 🙂

Born in Florida but only spent about 9 years of my formative years there

Well, maybe like 10

I am hoping that when the announce the Artemis II launch that I can take my son down there to see the historic launch

[regal horizon]

In related news yesterday a Florida Man was arrested for assaulting a police officer with a sandwich.

[hearty karma]

I was down there when they were trying to launch Artemis, but had to leave before they finally managed it.

That's the fun of English and dangling participles: did the police officer have the sandwich?

[regal horizon]

seems to have bounced off, was a good throw from about 10 feet away though

[onyx marten]

dang - ought to be in the majors with that kind of arm!

[regal horizon]

yes there's video of it

happened in port orange

[teal wadi]

Today I learned about the geography of Florida. There appear to be at least two coasts, namely the Treasure and Space coasts

[regal horizon]

which by the way the official term of a port orange police officer is in fact POPO

[teal wadi]

I guess they launch spaceships from the Space coast?

No idea about Treasure coast though

[hearty karma]

I think of it as the space coast, Miami, the keys, the gulf coast, and the panhandle

[teal wadi]

Has anyone here seen a spacecraft launch in person? I'd love to observe one myself

[regal horizon]

yes the space coast is where they launch rockets. Canaveral and Titusville are space coast.

[hearty karma]

Yes, I saw several of the Apollo launches, and a couple of space shuttles. A space shuttle launch is amazing, a Saturn V is incredible

[regal horizon]

treasure coast is known for hurricanes historically and wrecked pirate ships, so we have a lot of pirate themed stuff

[onyx marten]

serious case of envy

[hearty karma]

One crazy trip to see a shuttle launch, I flew down to Orlando, rented a car, drove across the state to Cocoa Beach, hiked up the Bennett Causeway bridge, watched the launch, walked back down, drove back to Orlando, and flew home, all on the same day.

[teal wadi]

Those sound like awesome things to have seen

[teal wadi]

Thanks for the info!

[hearty karma]

The view from the top of the bridge

What I came for

[regal horizon]

oh wow you timed the bridge perfectly. it's the hardest view but can make for some amazing photos

[hearty karma]

A friend of mine had flown to Florida seven times, bought a hotel room, rented a car, all of that, and the launch was scrubbed every time. He was livid when he found out I did it on a lucky one-day trip

[regal horizon]

view from across the lake is always popular too as the reflection off the water is always beautiful.

[hearty karma]

The police were trying to get the people off the bridge, but of course everyone argued with them, so it was slow going. Whenever they got close to me, I'd just walk over another few meters. I was only up there 20 minutes or so, and after the launch, they stopped bothering because everyone was leaving.

[teal wadi]

I always assumed launches had dedicated observation areas

[icy moth]

I’ve seen multiple shuttle launches, a few titan V launches

You can see them from most homes in breviary county

[regal horizon]

they shut down the bridges for launches these days. if you don't get across in time your not getting across.

[hearty karma]

Oh, they do have a dedicated area. I managed to notch a trip to the VIP area for one launch.

[regal horizon]

morning launches sound beautiful until you're staring directly at the sun 😛

[icy moth]

If you know someone who can get you onto canaveral air station, you can get an amazing view

[hearty karma]

I was in Kissimmee for one dawn launch and couldn't see anything since the sun was in the same direction. After a minute, I gave up and started walking back to my hotel room, then the sound arrived. Even from several dozen miles away, it was quite audible, it just took a while for the sound to get to me.

[regal horizon]

early evening launches close to dusk are the best in my opinion.

[hearty karma]

I never managed the air station, but the VIP area view is pretty nice

[regal horizon]

when the light is low but still bright over the horizon a contrail makes beautiful whisps of colors as the wind carries it.

[icy moth]

The air station requires being in the military, and someone with at least a secret clearance. It might be more restrictive these days too

[regal horizon]

because it'll be dark where you're at but not in the atmosphere yet. so you see a huge fully lit contrail in the night's sky.

[icy moth]

That contrail you see is all the mind control spray they use to make the next Florida man
/joke

[regal horizon]

looks something like this

[teal wadi]

Florida man is a golem? :P

[icy moth]

Florida man physics is always fun

[regal horizon]

because wind is always different every time it happens it's unique, they're beautiful. depending on the fuel used they can be multi-colored like a whispy rainbow too.

[teal wadi]

Yeah, now I definitely want to see a rocket launch one day

[icy moth]

You could probably try and see an ESA launch?

You’re in that region, right?

[hearty karma]

Where I live now, Wallops Island is fairly accessible (I can see the launches from my house, once they clear the trees, but they're hardly close up)

[teal wadi]

IIRC ESA used to launch in Kazakhstan (Baikonur cosmodrome). No idea what's happening now with all the Situations

A bit difficult to get there :P

[icy moth]

They have launch sites in NZ and Portugal

[teal wadi]

Well, Portugal is definitely much more feasible than the literal antipodes ;P

I'll be keeping an eye on that

[icy moth]

Ahh, it’s in the Azores

Santa Maria

Catch a ferry? Lol

[violet torrent]

Wait someone has launch sites in New Zealand?

[icy moth]

Yup, southern tip of the northern island

It’s owned by Rocket Lab

[violet torrent]

ooh

[icy moth]

They’ve launched Electron Rockets from there

[violet torrent]

that's much closer than basically anywhere else launching it seems

[icy moth]

https://g.co/kgs/KhVub5

That’s the google maps link

[inner linden]

I got to see SpaceShipOne fly just as space started to get Really Interesting.

I guess at this point, with the rate of SpaceX launches, I could just plan on being down in Florida and probably catch something if I stay more than a few days except for the whole part where Florida Man is running the government. And Vandenberg isn't really set up for visitors.

[elfin idol]

I got to watch a SpaceX launch "live" from Orlando - could kinda barely see it but it was definitely the rocket. I really want to get down there for one quite a bit closer some day.

I did get to see this recently from the deck of a cruise ship as we were leaving Port Canaveral though:

[cloud walrus]

ESA launches from Karou, French Guiana https://www.esa.int/Applications/Telecommunications_Integrated_Applications/Hylas/Launch_site

[teal wadi]

Huh. I really thought they launched from Kazakhstan

[onyx marten]

that's Roscosmos

[teal wadi]

I was under the impression they had a partnership with them

[onyx marten]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikonur_Cosmodrome says not - but there's a real interesting update from march...

[teal wadi]

I actually remember that from the news

https://sci.esa.int/web/home/-/29923-baikonur-cosmodrome-is-located-in-the-former-soviet-republic-of-kazakhstan

Baikonur Cosmodrome is home to several launch vehicles. Of these, the European Space Agency (ESA) has used, or is planning to use, the Soyuz-Fregat and Proton launchers.

In the summer of 2000, ESA's four Cluster spacecraft were launched from Baikonur using Soyuz-Fregat launchers. The same type of launchers will also be used in summer 2003 to launch ESA's Mars Express spacecraft.

The Proton, Russia's largest operational launch vehicle will be used to launch INTEGRAL, ESA's gamma-ray detecting spacecraft, in October 2002.

Looks like they've done some launches from there

[onyx marten]

ah - i was trying to figure out how they would lauch Arianne rockets, but yeah, lofting satellites using Ruscosmos boosters makes sens

[pine igloo]

Tbh I don't understand the hype for such things
It's old tech, all gov money and wide sponsorship due to it

[icy moth]

The hype for space launches?

[teal wadi]

https://tenor.com/view/spacecore-space-portal-core-gif-5586787

[pine igloo]

Rockets
They have been around for at least a century, improvements are not either that great given the frame time

[teal wadi]

Well, most people don't really care about the rocket itself, rather for what it launches

[icy moth]

Eh, the fact that they can take humans to space is enough for me to be fascinated

And given that, even though we’ve had rockets since essentially the 15th century (fireworks), the fact remains that it is incredibly hard to make rockets that can carry a vehicle to space.

I take that back. 2nd century BC is the earliest we had propelled fireworks

Anyway, rockets are hard. We’ve had them for thousands of years but still have some pretty catastrophic failures in the technology. Even recently.

[river hatch]

I remember about 20 years ago now, they launched an ICBM from Vandenberg for some sort of missile interception test. The contrail was all over the sky (I'm in the greater Los Angeles area) and it was one of the most beautiful things I've seen. I heard they could even see it all the way in Arizona.

[onyx marten]

i got to see a shuttle re-entry when it passed over texas once - the thing that freaked me out was you could hear it

[regal horizon]

shuttle re-entries you usually hear twice actually. double sonic boom was a classic "hello world" from shuttles re-entry. 😉

[karmic obsidian]

WE ARE LIVE! ASK AN ENGINEER! https://youtu.be/ggyGtICxogw

[onyx marten]

this was before the booms - it was still in "fireball" phase and i will swear up and down you could hear the crackling

[woeful whale]

Does anyone know of something that will automatically select resistors and capacitors from a site like mouser? It's very boring and tiring searching through all the basically the same components to find the cheapest one that's available in a quantity of 1. Maybe I can make a python script or something for this

[verbal aspen]

I previously had a script which kept a list of previously-used part numbers, so that in a subsequent design you used another 0603 10k resistor but didn't specify an exact part, it would auto-populate the BOM with the prior data. Not perfect, but a good starting point.

[woeful whale]

That's still basically what I need. The common ones are the most painful to search for because you keep having to do it

even a simple copy and paste list of common passives would save me time

I should probably build that up

[hearty karma]

LadyAda's part finder is useful for that, but it hasn't been updated in a while.

[woeful whale]

hmmm

that still might work

resistors haven't changed much

[hearty karma]

http://www.ladyada.net/wiki/partfinder

Common parts (1k and 10k resistors, 100nF capacitors, 1N4148 style diodes, etc.) I just buy in bulk.

[woeful whale]

sadly the ladyada page has no SMD parts

well not in the caps section

[pallid orchid]

New business idea

[hollow matrix]

Finally complete

[woeful whale]

It's still a bunch of fuel and oxidizer that flows into a high pressure combustion chamber, pushing the gases out at extremely high speeds, creating a reaction force that is able to lift something that weighs more than a building off the ground and into space. And that's really cool. Also space

SPAAAAAAACE

[hearty karma]

The excellent book "Ignition", about the history of rocket propellants, covers the chemistry behind it. I had previously believed that some clever chemistry could yield bigger/better/faster/more, but the book explains how the basic concepts are well understood and have been for decades, and there is indeed little new under the sun. The only real change has been an incremental one of using lighter hydrocarbons (methane, propane, etc.) instead of kerosene.

The SLS competition also emphasized the same thing, with one group offering an update of the F-1 engines that powered the moon rockets half a century ago, and another re-using a variant of the existing space shuttle solid rocket motors, designed in the 1970s.

[icy moth]

Hydrazine is popular though incredibly volatile.

[hearty karma]

To be sure, physics has not changed. We just do it with computers more now.

[icy moth]

All said, rockets are still really hard.

[hearty karma]

Hydrazine has always been popular as a hypergolic fuel, even though it's volatile and poisonous.

Yes, the basic propulsion is more or less a solved problem, the devil is (as always) in the details, of which there are bewilderingly many.

[icy moth]

I do look forward to a time when rockets are trivial

But that’s still.. probably 20+ years off based on current investments

[hearty karma]

The R-7, F-1, and Merlin engines have made some good strides toward predictability and reliability, but there's still room for improvement (they're nowhere near "trivial")

[icy moth]

What is spaceX using in their falcon9 rockets?

Raptor?

I’m not up on which spec raptor engines follow

[hearty karma]

That sounds right. I think Raptor and Merlin are related, but I'm not at all sure.

[icy moth]

They probably are the most stable. I think Rocket Labs is using a form of Merlin engines for their Electron rockets

Oh okay, so a raptor engine is a 3x improved design based on the 1D Merlin engine

Fascinating

[hearty karma]

Growing up in Cocoa Beach, it was neat hearing the rocket people talk about what promoted reliability. It seemed to me like they basically agreed on two things. One was to make it easy and quick to check on things when needed. One particular rocket (Redstone?) had all its critical circuits routed to a test panel at ground level so a technician could literally walk up to the rocket with a multimeter and measure something. That ability let them check things instead of hoping for the best, which had a direct effect on reliability. The other was the human factor. The people who built these things had a real feel for them. If your pump engineer said something sounded or felt off, it paid to listen to her.

[icy moth]

Yeah it’s funny how for experienced engineers, feeling and sound of things is something that you become in tune with

That transformation of experience to instinct is pure magic

[hearty karma]

Totally with you there.

[half hollow]

Finally got to play around these things
But the bottle got kicked during the shipping I guess

[icy moth]

https://tenor.com/view/delivery-kick-newspaper-gif-9243117

[teal wadi]

You know it's serious when the bottle reads "Warning" in 6 languages

[half hollow]

I know that when I see the bill too 🥲

But seriously though the content looks pretty safe comparing to other chemicals

[modest moon]

Let me guess.....postnord or fedex

[half hollow]

UPS ground - I just checked with Chip Quik support and they said the package should have a additional box for that product. But I think the main issue is still UPS ground sending this package from coast to coast...

TIL, MRAM is susceptible to strong magnetic fields....

[hearty karma]

Weirdly, FRAM pretty much ignores magnetic fields

[modest moon]

Damm i just realized how little i know about floppies. I used them as coasters growing up mainly due to minidisk

[half hollow]

It's MRAM 😜

[delicate quarry]

Yup, those are two separate technologies that both store data by magnetic means.

Surprisingly similar strengths despite their vastly different shortcomings.

[violet torrent]

I wish I were more organised with my PC files

I wanna organise and prune them, but it's a monumental task

[verbal aspen]

Be like me. Just wait until you upgrade computers, then stuff everything into a "Files from old PC" folder and start fresh. My hard drive looks like a Russian doll now, with ten levels of nested history from all my old computers... 😅

[teal wadi]

That's what windows upgrade does too, to some degree. I have no idea whether you can end up with C:\Windows.old\Windows.old\Windows.old though :P

[river hatch]

Last year, I did that for the first time in 20 years. For 20 years, I used Mac laptops, and Migration Assistant would just copy my home directory from one to the next. But last year, I switched back to Linux, and actually started a new, fresh home directory.

[river hatch]

I think you run into directory nesting depth problems, like I did a while back when I tried to move Windows.old into the Recycle Bin.

[hearty karma]

Yeah, the ancient 8.3 filesystem is getting a bit long in the tooth

[rough edge]

Thanks, I have used Python on windows but just as a sideline. I've bookmarked the page to look at it further.

[violet torrent]

Ultimately one day I hope to dualboot some distro of Linux with Windows, which is why I need to organise my files

[river hatch]

It isn't so much an 8.3 limit as it is a 260 character limit.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=registry

[hearty karma]

I was referring to the ancient filesystem and its limitations in general, not that specific limitation

[river hatch]

OK, yeah. Although it's actually a Win32 API limitation, not an NTFS limitation. The NTFS limit is 32,767 characters, and they've gradually been providing ways to access that by working around the 260 character limit in the Win32 API.

[hearty karma]

As they slowly upgrade the guts to Linux

[violet torrent]

Not gonna get used to the new DigiKey logo for a while

[river hatch]

Oh, wow, I hadn't noticed that.

I'm having trouble getting used to the new Digi-Key labels. Even though the label itself is larger, I feel like it makes the relevant information harder to read. (The new Digi-Key labels look more like Mouser labels, and I don't like Mouser labels.)

[teal wadi]

I thought you could change the max path limit, but that risks stability somehow?

Looked it up. That is (or at least seems to, you never know with Windows), indeed, the case from win10 onwards, but this dialog looks like win7

[river hatch]

I know that these days, applications can "opt-in" to having longer paths. Maybe there was always a way to change it with a registry key; I'm not sure.

[teal wadi]

I'm not sure either; It's been a while since I last worked with a windows system

[river hatch]

It probably was Windows 7. That screenshot is from some time between 2012 and 2014.

[teal wadi]

Last good windows version!

[river hatch]

I have Windows 11 in a virtual machine, but I try to avoid using it as much as I can. It ramps up my laptop's fan a lot, plus I'd just prefer to do things natively on Linux if I can.

[onyx marten]

the last time i used windows "full time" was 1999

[karmic silo]

Is font color NOT in the configfile for lxterminal?

[teal wadi]

Yeah, there are too many maintenance and telemetry tasks going on all the time

[onyx marten]

can you not select it in preferences in the window?

[karmic silo]

Yea but trying to save a copy of the config to update new builds and whatnot

So I don't have to remember the color codes or whatever.

[teal wadi]

https://xkcd.com/1205/

xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?

Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.

[onyx marten]

iirc the config files should be under .config or .local - what I usually do is just copy over the entire /home/edg directory - i got some configs going back decades 😃

[teal wadi]

These days, there's also the dconf database thing, which I have no idea where it's stored

[onyx marten]

eh - i just keep installing packages until the icons on my panel all show up 😈

[teal wadi]

I use user as an username; Saves time when redacting examples for docs

(Provided I'm the only user on the machine, that is)

[onyx marten]

i always keep one extra "admin" user in case i screw up my primary account

on the desktop systems - dev boxes are "trashable"

[teal wadi]

Provided they are local :P

Unless you have IPMI

[gloomy mango]

And some of my colleagues still can't get their head around bulk processing tickets on Jira.... 🧐

[lost lily]

How can I calculate how much power a resistor dissipates?

For context I'm trying to see if I can actually push up to 36v and 20A through this suspicious looking Amazon product: https://a.co/d/gvGN7HG

I'll probably only go to 24v through the 0.1 ohm shunt though

And max of 10A

[verbal aspen]

Power is equal to voltage times current, and the voltage across a resistor is equal to resistance times current, so the power would be I^2 * R. You'd want a milliohm-scale shunt resistor for higher currents like that.

(Not to mention fairly beefy traces on the board.)

[lost lily]

Are these traces fine? I'm fine with substituting the shunt resistor.

[lost lily]

So 10A^2 * 0.1 ohm = 10 watts dissipated?

[verbal aspen]

Yup. And the resistor would be dropping a whole volt, so it would be way over-range for the sensor chip, too.

[lost lily]

Ah that would be disastrous lol

[verbal aspen]

I'm not sure. This board is probably designed for much lower currents. Having the sense traces connect to the header pins rather than using a Kelvin connection on the resistor itself might also introduce some errors at higher currents / lower resistance.

[lost lily]

I'm probably going to limit it down to 5A cause I'm also using a suspicious Amazon relay limited to 10A DC

[hearty karma]

Hard to tell with those traces too, if it's a cheap board, it could be 1oz copper or even less

[woeful whale]

It's probably 1oz

[half hollow]

At 20A you also need to calculate those 2.54mm header in...

or 5.04mm

[woeful whale]

I don't think those are headers

The design is weird

[lost lily]

It's Amazon

[woeful whale]

Yeah the Chinese seller boards often have weird designs

But that INA226 is an interesting IC

Not in stock at mouser tho

Ina237 might be equivalent

[regal horizon]

Looks like holes for screw terminals and the 2 outside holes are just mounting holes.

[teal shore]

The chinese sellers will advertise absolute maximum chip rating from the datasheet while doing an absolute minimum circuit implementation with the smallest possible components around the chip. It usually works if you use a fraction of the advertised capacity, but any chinese modules that do any sort of serious power never live up to their specs. complete lack of or inadequate cooling on mosfets for example is not an exception but the absolute norm.

[twilit warren]

Hello, I was looking for a solution to integrate fingerprint scanning in a Django web application and I found this python library (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_Fingerprint). Could someone tell me if it's somehow possible to scan and store fingerprint using a USB/TTL adapter and the adafruit Fingerprint sensor ?

[teal wadi]

If, for some reason, you want to use a fingerprint as an authentication method, it would be best to do it in a secure fashion that would not leave you open to even more GDPR (and related regulation)-related liabilities in the event of a data breach [disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice]. As much as I dislike proposing walled-garden standards, google's passkeys seem to be an option

[cold pebble]

passkeys are industry standard, Microsoft and Apple (and others) are using them too

[teal wadi]

Thank you for the clarification! Can you use passkeys in non-chromium-based browsers?

[cold pebble]

yes

[teal wadi]

I didn't know. Thanks!

[cold pebble]

Safari for example

and apps

[teal wadi]

I wonder whether firefox supports it....

[cold pebble]

looks like not yet https://passkeys.dev/device-support/

[teal wadi]

:(

[violet torrent]

Reminds me, I still need to make my password dongle at some point

[wicked relic]

Hey anyone got any experience with removing a egpu and putting in an actual desktop pc? Got an aorus 2080ti donated to my ewaste place, it's water-cooled, and as a egpu it sucks, but could be good as a desktop gpu if it can be put into an actual pc

[hearty karma]

Should be okay, if the bus, drivers, power, and cooling are compatible. An EGPU enclosure generally just provides a slot, power, and connection via some method back to the host machine.

[hollow tangle]

Is there a adapter pcb available to use Feather HATs with normal ESP8266/32 NodeMCU boards?

[pine igloo]

How can I release this connector? Or whatever this thing is named?
It's a display connector of an old laptop

[silver glacier]

It should just lift up.

[pine igloo]

I may break it if I force it
i see no holdings nor tape

[silver glacier]

They usually just lift up with the pull tab.

[pine igloo]

i see thanks

[pine igloo]

Do you have like a naming of the connector?

[silver glacier]

It's a mezzanine style connector. No idea what brand/family.

[delicate quarry]

Brand is Hirose, family eludes me.

[delicate solar]

Hello synthy people and happy b-day to the late Bob Moog.
In celebration Moog has launched a Flash-era styled website designed by Pentagram. Enjoy!
https://minimoogmodeld.com/

[cold pebble]

I visited the Moog factory a couple years ago, it was cool, and fun to play with all the toys.

dang, now I want one, again

[hearty karma]

One what? I have a couple of old Moog synthesizers.

[cold pebble]

yeah, one of the synthesizers. fun to play on, but I don't really know what I'm doing

[teal wadi]

I know it's not moog, but have you looked into https://vcvrack.com/ ?

It's probably easier to learn if you can play around in a simulator where you are not constrained by available modules

(Though I wouldn't be one to talk. I have no idea about anything synth)

[cold pebble]

I have no idea either (and not really the time for another hobby), but I do like the physicality of IRL equipment, the analog-ness, and the sounds that can be made

[hearty karma]

Yeah, I have a fondness for analog scopes, analog synths, switches and knobs.

[keen lichen]

This is why I want to make switch and knob modules that interface with something like vcvrack

[steady gulch]

did you play with a theremin ? That's what I would have gone for 😁

[cold pebble]

yes, those are fun, but hard to make actual notes

[steady gulch]

yeah, watching videos of people who know how is quite impressive

[unique rain]

Hi there – I'm running into issues with this: https://dcist.com/story/23/03/16/heres-how-to-build-your-own-mini-metro-arrival-screen-for-your-home-or-office/. Wondering if anyone can help/where to ask in this discord?

[solemn field]

Hello and welcome! #help-with-projects is a great place to start. You never need to ask permission to ask, feel free to ask whenever. Please be patient with us though. This server is primarily made up of community members who volunteer their time around other life obligations. Good luck!

[unique rain]

Thanks@

[main hemlock]

If you have trouble with Chrome not displaying text on Ubuntu after recent upgrades to the mesa libraries, stop Chrome, delete ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/GPUCache/, and restart Chrome.

[drifting ice]

Hey, what was that old pair of goggles you said you had again?

[hearty karma]

VictorMaxx StuntMaster

Gee, I wonder what the problem is with this CPU board from a refrigerator...

[drifting ice]

how much did you want for it?

[hearty karma]

We can discuss in DM if you're amenable

[icy moth]

Looks like it decided it wanted to be a stove.

[autumn willow]

Is that a short to the chassis?

[hearty karma]

No, failing bad solder joint

[violet torrent]

Does Adafruit sell a StemmaQT cable that is just bare wire on one side?

[verbal aspen]

This might be the closest. You could snip off the header pins if you truly wanted bare wires. https://www.adafruit.com/product/4209

[hearty karma]

I'll also buy a plain StemmaQT cable and cut it in two, for two wire-end ones

[silver glacier]

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/windows_xp_activation_cracked/

[gloomy mango]

That blasted tellytubbies wallpaper.....

[teal wadi]

Hey! "Bliss" was nice! :P

(BTW, this is the first time I hear somebody refer to it as the "telletubbies wallpaper"; It's..... surprisingly accurate, and I applaud your imagination

[gloomy mango]

😁

I find it somewhat.. uninteresting.

[teal wadi]

I dunno, I don't really look at my system's wallpaper all that often, so I tend to leave the default