karmicthreat

I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions.

The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.

If you want something more industrial Chinese arms that ape UR are 10-20k.

I'm tired. I've been at it since '89' when I was 15. Everything being on fire all the time (in the world and in my current robot project) is just burning me out.

Most of my curiosity is tempered by how it can make me money.

I do appreciate that 50-70% of the boring work can be done with AI agents now. As long as you know enough to have opinions and guide the process along, it can be helpful.

Expertise and learning don't seem to be AS important with the upcoming gen of developers. However, there is also so much out there now that it would be much harder to start from zero as opposed to being there from the beginning.

But I think gen X and Millenials were probably peak interest and curiosity, now it's just a job for the later generations.

Is there a way to translate these into friendlier names? It would be nice if something like lidar-front.robot1.yada-fleet.bar could be made.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with ros2 lately at work. Been seeing some moves with VLA models driving robots with text prompts. I think I’m going to focus more of my “free” time on mastering that technology.

This seems kind of like teleport without the logging and remote infrastructure.

https://www.youtube.com/bpsspace Does some pretty informative work with amateur rockets.

I've been "Vibe Coding" this weekend with the vibe of a micromanaging tech lead or PM. Actually, it's not terrible if you just accept that you need to treat the AI like a year 0 engineer who is really good at googling.

I've run the project through cline and roo. Also tried Claude 3.7 and the 1M context Gemni 2.5 pro model. I'd say Gemini is less creative. But it's still good.

I can see how it is a productivity booster. Or at least it gives you the illusion of one. Really I think best part of it is just building out detailed documentation. That's really the killer app for me.

It's fairly nice just to build a simple embedded UI. There is also a useful editor now, though I haven't used it. It was implemented as a stand-alone program, I would have preferred a VSCode plugin.

It can be a bit difficult to get going on a specific platform, but once you have it going, it's smooth sailing.

What computer is Harper talking about here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW7ZHpKuqZg&t=375s

I think it’s just nudging the wheel that is going away. Attention detection via camera is still in effect for FSD. And it won’t start FSD without being able to see you.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I use an M5Stack tough for one of my products. It works ok, but I really wish M5 had some more OEM friendly options.

I need to make a little MQTT communications system for some field devices. I should probably just give up with AWS and Azure for IoT and just roll my own. Though they did have some nice security around their offerings.

My guess would be barring some metallurgical mistakes the stainless surface is getting contaminated during production. We do a decent chunk of stainless steel production where I work and we keep any tools that might be contaminated away from the stainless production. We also bead blast the surface and passivate it to keep it contamination-free. Just any little bits of non-stainless metal will corrode and permanently stain the surface.

I'm sure the technology will work fine when everything is perfect. But much like autonomous cars, when things are imperfect they will probably start to fall apart.

There were other boat launches in Frankfort and Empire they could have used, maybe 20 minutes away. That river is not very traversable as it has a weir on it.

Seems like the same sort of whinging people do about traction control. “Trust me bro I need total control and traction control makes me unsafe” etc.

Same sort of thing with people that complain about iterm being too laggy.

Same, now I want one.

The one thing I would really like for ethernet is a smaller connector. But one that is still able to handle self-made cables. So something like just throwing a Type-C connector at it probably isn't going to work.

People have waaaay too much faith that motorized devices won't injure or kill them. Even motorized lie flat seats in an aircraft can probably break something. Many of these devices rely on simple current limiting. While this can help, its definately not a guarantee that it won't kill you.

I had a manager that loved these things. He would shoe horn eBay one’s into any gambling backend he did. It was terrible, impossible to support and made accomplishing anything a chore. Rust in peace.

They kind of came to be when the Bush financial meltdown happend. Unemployment was getting high in the late 00's. People were trying to develop new skills or build cottage industries. It feels like there is less of a hustle with all that now.

Plus makerspaces were just difficult to make viable and really you are probably better off spending that time on any other endeavor.

A group of us out here tried starting one in West Michigan and it sputtered along for a while. Financials and interest were never able to balance out. The Geek Group out here did a little "better" but the owners and volunteers there basically burned themselves out constantly. Then the founder got nailed for bitcoin crimes and that was the end.

China won't be able to unless they develop the tech domestically.

Has there ever been an example of a consumer RF emitter being remotely hacked and turned into a jammer?

You don't really describe your background at all so all you are going to get is generic advice. But the best thing you could do this year is get a job in the field. Even if its not a very glamorous one you will learn more than you could in a bunch of tutorials or online classes.

It can be something more than TSMC being seized. It could be that he sees TSMCs share of the market going down over the long term. Which it probably will. Many governments are pretty unhappy with dominance of TSMC. The US in particular is dumping some money out there to onshore chip manufacturing. It reasons that this will probably eventually result in some shifting in the market.

This is the laptop 90's me would have wanted.

Yea, but it would probably put many people underwater on loans.

I did a similar thing for a lowish volume embedded product. The update files are just bash scripts with a tar file cat'd on them. The unit just looks for a particular file on an external flash drive to run and the bash script runs, copies off a tar and checks that it has the right hash. Super simple and flexible when customers need me to do something special. Like extract some specific log onto a flash drive.