Available for smaller projects (sub-80 hours), consulting, or to just shoot the breeze.
littlemachines@cedarlakeinstruments.com
- As long as you're not the owner of said asset.
- No. Just no.
If I have a problem with a USB datastream, the last place I'm going to look is the official USB spec. I'll be buried for weeks. The information may be there, but it will take me so long to find it that it might as well not.
The first place to look is a high quality source that has digested the official spec and regurgitated it into something more comprehensible.
[shudder] the amount of life that I've wasted discussing the meaning of some random phrase in IEC-62304 is time I will never get back!
- Was there more than one? The 5.0 (Ice, Ice, Baby) that I remember in early 90's Mustangs was rated at 225.
- Are we setting a trend here?
I swore to the cop that the tree just jumped out in front of my 280Z.
- I remember in the late 80's/early 90s reading a Car & Driver special publication on "affordable used sports cars" (I ended up with a 1975 280Z for $2,000 in great condition). They made a point that "the sports cars of the 60's are easily beaten, at least in a straight line, by today's average family sedans."
I remember this every time something like a Cadillac Escalade leaves my 21-year-old 350Z in its dust...
- ISTR that Speedhunters made a gear-driven DOHC head for it.
- Most of the software written worldwide is created for internal company usage. Consumers don't even know that it exists.
I've worked (still do!) for engineering services companies. Other businesses pay us to build systems for them to either use in-house or resell downstream. I have to assume that if they're paying for it, they see profit potential.
- And new companies are created every day, and new systems are designed every day, and new applications are needed every day.
The market is nowhere close to being saturated.
- Many devices put the data into the Manufacturer-specific part of the advertising packet. It's a workaround. The problem is that it's non-standard so if you're a provider of data management for group fitness you have to have custom code for each manufacturer (and sometimes different devices from the same manufacturer). And it's especially fun when the manufacturer's published data spec doesn't match what the device actually puts out!
I don't know how difficult it would be to connect, grab a bunch of data and disconnect from 24 BLE devices in a one-second period, which is pretty much what you'd need to be an effective workaround for ANT+. In a competitive environment, data from each device changes very rapidly.
- > while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a freshly-printed news sheet
A PhD student once mentioned to me that when people envisage themselves in history, they always assume they'd be upper class. No one ever thinks that they'll be poor :-)
- That's interesting. As the article says, ANT's main use case is in commercial gym equipment. What the article doesn't say is the reason: it excels at gathering data for "group fitness". ANT is a connectionless protocol so in a situation where you have two dozen transmitters and you need to get data from all of them, your receiver simply has to listen and record whatever devices it sees and let the user software (possibly managing a gym leaderboard for a spin class) decide which ones to track.
Contrast with BLE where you would have to make a connection to each device. The overhead of connecting and disconnecting, in addition to being power-prohibitive, takes too long. Some manufacturers have workarounds to enable use of their BLE products in a group fitness environment, but they are pretty much lacking.
It'll be interesting to see how the problem is solved if indeed ANT+ does go away.
- Ambition should always outpace skill. Otherwise, how would we get anywhere?
- I remember a customer support call where the hardware they bought from us wasn't working. The last question I asked was "are you sure that the outlet it's plugged into is working?"
It wasn't.
- Arduino IDE shines when you're building something small and simple, where the code is at most two pages long. That satisfies a majority of the original use cases for arduino. e.g., my first use of it at work was to toggle a relay on and off once per minute to catch a problem with a new design that only happened at power-on. That was probably under 10 LoC.
However, in the intervening 15-20 years, people have been using arduino for increasingly complex applications and the basic IDE really sucks for that.
- VS Code/PlatformIO actually makes that easier than the Arduino IDE. And, as a bonus, the specific version of a library that you use is tied to a single project and won't affect any others. Which is really important when you use a library that is dependent on a particular version of another library.
- There probably is if you look hard enough. Closest thing I can think of is the MKS-DLC32 motor control boards that are generally used in 3D printers and laser engravers. You can buy just the board and reprogram it. They just run grbl with serial and web interfaces anyway and have an arduino bootloader.
- Eh. I used to work for a large corporation that had multiple development sites worldwide. I remember telling someone at another site that I was considering using an OSS library. His jaw dropped, "You can use Open-Source? At our location using OSS is a fireable offence."
Both of us were in the US, BTW.
- Yeah, but they were 2-seater trucks. Very few people want that these days.
Our truck carries stuff a lot. Bags of feed, bales of hay, etc. But unless you want to stack it unreasonably high, 10 bales is about the limit. For big loads, it has to haul a trailer. If it were only a 2-seater, with a bigger bed, it could carry more, but that would mean that all we wouldn't be able to carry all the stuff that's typically in the back seats for safety or protection from the elements.
Like everything, it's a tradeoff.
- Holy crap. Ken Block died????
They varied in complexity from little 8-bit microcontrollers to 64-bit server-class blade PC's orchestrating dozens of smaller controllers over serial networks. Written a lot of C++ to the point where I'm just about sick of it.
I've also done the odd webapp, desktop or mobile app from time to time (C# is fun!), but it's been mostly embedded stuff paying my bills.