So I am in the designing of the circuit and PCB stage right now.

The usecase is for Meshtastic/Meshcore nodes because those sit outside in a tree or in a high place outside year-round and are solar charged. I am designing it as a RAKwireless Wisblock power module that will be charged by 2, 5V, 200mA small solar panels in series. The whole project will be released on Codeberg like all of my home projects.

Later I can copy the circuit over to other PCBs for more general formats. One of my future projects is going to be an 8S pack BMS for driving a 12V water pump for off-grid rainwater collection barrels.

I am targeting 2S systems now because then the entire sodium cell can discharge if the system voltage is set to 3V and I don’t need any buck/boost, just a buck which is significantly cheaper and easier on the batteries.

I am using an STM32C011 as a custom BMS + buck charger because my original idea of using a very cheap, small mixed signal FPGA (greenpak SLG47105) wouldn’t work well for sodium because it didn’t have enough comparators to have a soft constant voltage region (gradually increasing CV voltage from 3.8V per cell to 4V along with the natural current decrease to prolong charge cycle life), it will have overvoltage/over current protections, 1A or 2A max current, resistive battery balancing, and some safety features and an I2C readout.

(Sorry, wall of text)

We have heat pumps at my job for our factory.

They are literally useless around of below freezing in the experience here.

They exchange heat so they blow out air colder than outside air, then their entire radiator gets completely covered in ice, then it has to switch off and then the entire factory cools off while they have to turn on the resistive heaters to defrost themselves, then they turn themselves back on and because they are covered in water from defrosting, very quickly freeze again and the whole cycle repeats while the factory is very marginally warmed up during the cycle.

Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn’t fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:

**Commercial things: **

• Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)

• Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people

• Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer

• MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.

• Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.

• FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects

• RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.

Maybe older, but still great:

• open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc… Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.

• epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices

**Community Projects: **

• HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every

• Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price

• Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.

• The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc…

• The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don’t need to explain the impact

• Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself

There is more, but this is already long

Sodium companies closing is incredibly painful because also if you look at the reasons, outside of Northvolt, it is literally all startups where their investors pulled out and screwed them because lithium prices dropped and they wanted to recoup their costs with 30% market share on week 1 of launch (exaggeration of course)

Proving yet again that rich fucks are complete and total idiots who can’t look any further at all than 4-8 quarters.

China sodium is luckily going strong, so we have a fallback when lithium prices inevitably spike yet again.

Yes, it doesn’t work out of the box. Proton games literally won’t launch. You need to run this command (at least on atomic distros):

flatpak permission-set background background com.valvesoftware.Steam yes

https://github.com/AeonDesktop/Project/wiki/Troubleshooting#steam-flatpak-opens-but-cant-start-games

Mangohud also doesn’t work without modifications, as well as a couple games having absolutely abysmal framerates like rocket league.

Gamemode doesn’t work AFAIK

It is a worse experience in general, but works for a lot of people.

I am split on this.

If you allow it, then you get eevblog sort of posts where there are 1000+ comments over 5 years in 50 pages that switch topics so regularly that every 2-5 pages should be entirely seperate posts and reading them because of wanting to find information on the title topic is completely useless.

On the other hand, sometimes an issue will become stale and someone will comment with an update or solution to a problem and get chastised for “necroing” and sometimes their comment with a solution deleted.

There are also tons like Italy, Czech republic, Croatia that have civil unions, but I don’t know if they respect foreign marriage.

There are many many kinds of laws that are fucked in Japan. Court in general is a whole other cultural world from what I hear and however unfair courts are in the west, in Japan they are even less so.

Except not on most phones, just a small subset of old phones.

Time to DIY!

Waveshare touchscreen for pi, 1200x800 is a good price and for home assistant that is fine. $70/75 for 8inch/10.1inch version. (10.1DP-CAPLCD)

Raspberry pi 3/4/5 can mount directly on the back of it. For whatever outrageous price Pis are now. (Around here, a 4B/4GB is 60€.

Wave share PoE hat for $20

Assemble it like Lego, put it in a wooden frame or 3D print, done. Around 160 USD plus shipping for a full build of a POE battery-less touchscreen display that runs full Linux of whatever flavor. (And is quite overkill as far as power).

You could probably do it even cheaper with an orange pi zero 3 with a PoE to USB-C converter or a Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro IoT which has PoE built in.

It is cheaper than a tablet and strips out the useless things like a battery, camera, really high DPI display, LTE radios, etc… For a simple home assistant kiosk.

But yeah, epaper displays are 3x the display cost without touchscreen. Though in my opinion, epaper is better for static non-interactive sensor display which can run on battery with an MCU for almost no power because it only has to update once an hour or so.

Placebo is a hell of a phenomenon though lol

But actual results and bugs have very little to do with corporate firings or open positions, as 30 years of history show us.

If corporations “think” they can fire people, with AI as an excuse, and put that cost in their pockets, they will do it. We are already seeing it in the US tech-bro sphere.

Companies will tank themselves in the medium-long term to make short term profits. Which I think is the “dev market” that OP is talking about. It shouldn’t affect the market, but it will because you have MBAs making technical decisions. I could be wrong, but the tech market is very predictable as far as behavior. They will hire a skeleton crew and work them to burnout to fix the AI slop. (Tech industry needs unions now)

But on this threat model? Why would it not be good?

It has to physically accessed on the PCB itself from what I gather.

There are 2 “threats” from what I see:

• someone at the distribution facility pops it open and has the know how to install malware on it (very very unlikely)

• someone breaks into your home unnoticed and has the time to carefully take apart your vacuum and upload pre-prepared malware instead of just sticking an IP camera somewhere. If this actually happens, the owner has much much bigger problems and the vacuum is the least of their worries.

The homeowner is the other person that can access it and it is a big feature in that case.

I miss the Compose key so much on windows for my work computer

Hell, a 12TB WD red Plus in the EU is 300€. $160 for a 14TB is absolute dirt cheap

Also OLED screens so you could literally make a notification LED from 4-7 pixels in software without even having to add extra hardware at all

They sell tons of stuff that isn’t food.

Clothes and work & running gear(even Aldi merch once a year), budget electronics and appliances (their toaster ovens are very often used for DIY solder reflow ovens), garden tools and supplies like slug pellets and shears, and even lower quality tools that work fine for ocassional light use.

That is the largest overstatement of the year.

It rivals aliexpress/amazon brands in quality, sure, but it still generally isn’t even at the quality of Ryobi, which is a lower-medium tier brand together with Bosch green, much less makita, dewalt, or Bosch blue.

Though for many non-renovating homeowners just needing the occasional drill work, it works just fine!

The Minigame maps in source days were crazy good!

I am still relatively inexperienced and only embedded. (Electronics by trade) I am working on an embedded project with Zephyr now.

If I run into a problem I kind of do this method (e.g. trying to figure out when to use mutexes vs semaphores vs library header file booleans for checking ):

• first look in the zephyr docs at mutexes and see if that clears it up

• second search ecosia/ddg for things like “Zephyr when to use global boolean vs mutex in thread syncing”

• if none of those work, I will ask AI, and then it often gives enough context that I can see if it is logical or not (in this case, it was better to use a semi-global boolean to check if a specific thread had seen the next message in the queue, and protect the boolean with a mutex to know if that thread was currently busy processing the data), but then it also gave options like using a gate check instead of a mutex, which is dumb because it doesn’t exist in zephyr.

For new topics if I can’t find a video or application note that doesn’t assume too much knowledge or use jargon I am not yet familiar with, I will use AI to become familiar with the basic concept in the terms so that I can then go on to other, better resources.

In engineering and programming, jargon is constant and makes topic introduction quite difficult if they don’t explain it in the beginning.

I never use it for code with the exception of codebases that are ingested but with no documentation on all of the keys available, or like in zephyr where macro magic is very difficult to navigate to what it actually does and isn’t often documented at all.