dgriffith

joined 2 years ago
[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I was talking more about unwrap causing a panic rather than calling the actual panic macro directly. Rust forces the programmer to deal with bad or ambiguous results, and what that is exactly is entirely decided by the function you are calling. If a function decides to return None when (system timer mod 2 == 0), then you'd better check for None in your code. Edit: otherwise your code is ending now with a panic, as opposed to your code merrily trotting down the path of undefined behaviour and a segfault or similar later on.

Once you get to a point where we are doing the actual panic, well, that is starting to just be semantics.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

causing the program to crash if it actually was an error, restoring the more unsafe behavior of other languages.

Wellllll it's more of an abrupt exit rather than a crash, which is still better than eg. silently accessing beyond the end of an array, or ending up with a pointer to nowhere when you thought you had a sane memory reference.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Engine start, hold down clamps released, cleared the launch tower (juuust), I give this rocket launch 3.5/10, definite room for improvement.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 2 points 4 days ago

An old Falcon Ute is overkill.

A Renault tinyVan is acceptable and much more suitable to the task than your average tradie BlingMobile.

Falcon utes are getting harder to find these days as well.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Their algorithms are not safe for children. Self-reinforcing rabbit holes that easily drift to topics that can cause developing personalities to believe that the torrent of AI slop, drama-for-clicks, general propaganda (see: the ads mentioned), and blatant manipulation of our monkey-brain base instincts is what the world is actually about.

Hell, there's a good case to be made that they're not safe for adults too.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 4 points 1 week ago

Having said that , there is about a thousand watts per square metre of insolation coming in from the Sun on the exterior of the craft, just like there is here on the ground on Earth.

I guess the Apollo designers figured it was easier to insulate and heat the cabin than absorb heat and then try and cool it.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Dunno why...

It's lifted directly from a statement from one of the injured parties.

Welllll actually they used the word "traumatising", but that's the reason quotes are used in headlines like this, they are quoting someone involved.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's ok, that 1500 watt output is only for a microsecond before all the 3 cent "power" MOSFETs inside act as fuses.

More likely, there is enough internal capacitance for the inverter to sustain one (1) half of a full-wave AC cycle at 1500W, after which the overload/low voltage cutout triggers.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 23 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

A guy I used to work with went by the nickname of "Womble", his name was actually Raymond.

One day I was poking through work orders in our system and discovered that it also officially knew him as "Womble <last name>" and there was no sign of Raymond in there.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Conjuring up a frequency graph from 2004-present doesn't help your argument, as the VCR format wars were pretty much over a good 15 years beforehand.

"VCR" could have meant either VHS or Betamax to a consumer in the early '80s.

At least VHS specifies a particular standard, and "player" in that context has a loose connection with record player, or tape player , being the thing you play your purchased records / tapes / videos on.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

"How did this happen?"

Well let's see, they were found at a 100 percent FIFO coal mine that ships ridiculous quantities of equipment, materials, and food from all across Australia and the world on a daily basis, and 600 people are shuffled to and from Brisbane every week via the local airport.

I wonder how those ants ended up there, it's a complete mystery.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

They also iterate very quickly.

First car design - "functional" is being polite about it.

Fifteen years later when they are on their tenth revision - pretty damn good.

Meanwhile US car manufacturers can squeeze in a revision/refresh every 5 years if they're lucky.

 
 

I know, upvotes/downvotes mean less compared to That Other Place. But it would be nice if I could set Boost to not show all the spammy spam spam in my communities that have a score below a configurable threshold.

 

I subscribe to a bunch of communities and often there is a cross post with the same title and the same URL link across four or five of them at once. This usually results in a screen or two of the same post repeating for me, and I usually just find the one with the most commentary to check out.

It would be nice just to do that automatically, and shrink to a single line or otherwise "fold in" the other cross posts to the highest commentary post so they don't clog my feed. Maybe a few "related" lines under the body of the post when you go into it, similar to the indication that it's been cross posted.

Thoughts?

 

Hi all,

In an effort to liven up this community, I'll post this project I'm working on.

I'm building a solar hot water controller for my house. The collector is on the roof of a three-storey building, it is linked to a storage tank on the ground floor. A circulating pump passes water from the tank to the collectors and back again when a temperature sensor on the outlet of the collector registers a warm enough temperature.

The current controller does not understand that there is 15 metres of copper piping to pump water through and cycles the circulating pump in short bursts, resulting in the hot water at the collector cooling considerably by the time it reaches the tank (even though the pipes are insulated). The goal of my project is to read the sensor and drive the pump in a way to minimise these heat losses. Basically instead of trying to maintain a consistent collector output temp with slow constant pulsed operation of the pump, I'll first try pumping the entire volume of moderately hot water from the top half of the collector in one go back to the tank and then waiting until the temperature rises again.

I am using an Adafruit PyPortal Titano as the controller, running circuitpython. For I/O I am using a generic ebay PCF8591 board, which provides 4 analog input and a single analog output over an I2C bus. This is inserted into a motherboard that provides pullup resistors for the analog inputs and an optocoupled zero crossing SCR driver + SCR to drive the (thankfully low power) circulating pump. Board design is my own, design is rather critical as mains supply in my country is 240V.

The original sensors are simple NTC thermistors, one at the bottom of the tank, and one at the top of the collector. I have also added 4 other Dallas 1-wire sensors to measure temperatures at the top of tank, ambient, tank inlet and collector pump inlet which is 1/3rd of the way up the tank. I have a duplicate of the onewire sensors already on the hot water tank using a different adafruit board and circuitpython. Their readings are currently uploaded to my own IOT server and I can plot the current system's performance, and I intend to do the same thing with this board.

The current performance is fairly dismal, a very small bump of perhaps 0.5 - 1 deg C in the normally 55 degree C tank temperature around 12pm to 1pm, and this is in Australia in hot spring weather of 28-32 degrees C.(There's some inaccuracy of the tank temperatures, the sensors aren't really bonded to the tank in any meaningful way, so tank temp is probably a little warmer than this. But I'm looking for relative temperature increases anyway)

Right now , the hardware is all together and functional, and is driving a 13W LED downlight as a test, and I can read the onewire temp sensors, read an analog voltage on the PCF8591 board (which will go to the NTC sensors), and I'm pulsing the pump output proportionally from 0-100 percent drive on a 30 second duty cycle, so that a pump drive function can simply say "run the pump at 70 percent" and you'll get 21 seconds on, 9 seconds off. Duty cycle time is adjustable, so I might lower it a bit to 15 or 10 seconds.

The next step is to try it on the circulating pump (which is quite an inductive load, even if it is only 20 watts), and start working on an algorithm that reads the sensors and maximises water temperature back to the tank. There are a few safety features that I'll put in there, such as a "fault mode" to drive the pump at a fixed rate if there is a sensor failure, and a "night cool" mode if the hot water tank is severely over temperature to circulate hot water to the collector at night to cool it. There are the usual overtemp/overpressure relief valves in the system already.

All this is going in a case with a clear hinged cover on the front so I can open it and poke the Titano's touchscreen to do some things.

Right now I am away from home from work, so my replies might be a bit sporadic, but I'll try to get back to any questions soon-ish.

A few photos for your viewing pleasure:

The I/O and mainboard plus a 5V power supply mounted up:

The front of the panel, showing the Pyportal:

Thingsboard display showing readings from the current system:

Mainboard PCB design and construction via EasyEDA:

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