A month ago I decided to challenge myself by making videos. This week I’m working on the 3rd one. It’s pushing me really far outside of my comfort zone, and I both hate and love it at the same time. Here’s my channel, in case anyone’s curious: https://youtube.com/@martinrue
I gave up English for the weekend to speak a made-up language created by a Polish eye doctor in 1887
That was the scariest description of a language that I’d ever heard, for some reason I didn’t realise that language was Esperanto until I heard it!
Your videos are really cool! I don’t follow vlogs, I have an unjustifiable prejudice towards anything that’s not written, but videos like these make me think I should try to fix that.
Thanks, really appreciate it. It’s something new for me, but I’m finding it a lot of fun trying to explain stuff in a completely different and alien medium for me. Really glad you enjoyed them! 🙏
I’m installing the second version of my off grid cabin control system, thanks to several helpful members on here over the years!
The cabin has a solar array, battery bank and a mini split heat pump; this weekend I’ll install two RP2040-based devices and a little RPi with a touchscreen. One device controls the minisplit by emulating the IR remote, thanks to those of you that helped me reverse engineer that! One device talks canbus and a protocol called VE.Direct to the batteries and inverter, and the RPi runs a control loop.
This lets me pre-cool the building when the sun is up and there’s tons of power, and then coast / shut off overnight. If it all works it should mean no need for the genset this summer, and enough space to run my new water pump!
I’ve got a video going through the PV system here, but it’s both a few years old now and doesn’t cover the control part (though you can see V1 in the video! It’s the little black box with tape and a white label on it below the rapid shut-off switch).
I should write some blog posts about it all, it’s come pretty far at this point
Just how to make the devices talk is interesting. I got some good tips on here the other day about networking options - using Zigbee was a nightmare to get working, BLE even worse.. for a while I was using a hand-rolled protocol inspired by the Redis network protocol; now I’m just using a dumb simple thing over plain UDP, but someone here pointed me to a low-energy HTTP/web-inspired protocol that seemed really cool.. but I’m also struggling to get away from the though that for home power control you likely want something wired, for reliability, maybe..
I’m hoping to get the 2023 compensation report out the door. More at https://codeandsupply.co/survey. We collected data for the third iteration of the survey in 2022 but this cycle has taken longer than the previous cycles to actually produce the report because we ended up creating an entire data pipeline and somewhat of a framework for producing the graphs. This included learning pandas and plotly, then ditching pandas for Polars with a 10x speedup in full project runs, and then improving the tooling that enables managing chart sprawl while writing the prose that’s going into the report. It’ll go faster next time, I hope.
Finally got a new blog post idea, the topic being runtime verification. RV is really interesting because it combines formal methods (checking properties) with monitoring of real application runtime. Aka, it’s a combination of devops and formal methods. I think this is a practice that teams could end up picking up in the real world, because it addresses a lot of the resistance that people have to formal methods - namely, it’s tied to real code, and real usage of the application by users.
Finally pulling all the pieces and tools together to refresh the front suspension on the Z4. Parcels of goodies have arrived, only outstanding collection now is picking up a floor standing hydraulic spring compressor so I can safely swap shock absorbers this time round. (“Modern” BMW springs have too few coils for the screw-style spring compressors to be safely used, as I discovered when I attempted to replace a 1 series spring a couple of years ago.)
Getting married 🤗
Congratulations!
Congratulations 🎉, I am almost reaching my first anniversary!
A month ago I decided to challenge myself by making videos. This week I’m working on the 3rd one. It’s pushing me really far outside of my comfort zone, and I both hate and love it at the same time. Here’s my channel, in case anyone’s curious: https://youtube.com/@martinrue
That was the scariest description of a language that I’d ever heard, for some reason I didn’t realise that language was Esperanto until I heard it!
Your videos are really cool! I don’t follow vlogs, I have an unjustifiable prejudice towards anything that’s not written, but videos like these make me think I should try to fix that.
Thanks, really appreciate it. It’s something new for me, but I’m finding it a lot of fun trying to explain stuff in a completely different and alien medium for me. Really glad you enjoyed them! 🙏
Great job man. The concept for your first video hit so hard it resonated with me.
Thanks, really appreciate that! Happy it worked out how I’d hoped.
I’m installing the second version of my off grid cabin control system, thanks to several helpful members on here over the years!
The cabin has a solar array, battery bank and a mini split heat pump; this weekend I’ll install two RP2040-based devices and a little RPi with a touchscreen. One device controls the minisplit by emulating the IR remote, thanks to those of you that helped me reverse engineer that! One device talks canbus and a protocol called VE.Direct to the batteries and inverter, and the RPi runs a control loop.
This lets me pre-cool the building when the sun is up and there’s tons of power, and then coast / shut off overnight. If it all works it should mean no need for the genset this summer, and enough space to run my new water pump!
Oooh, sweet. Do you have a write up, specs or designs anywhere? Doing something like that has been a long time dream of mine.
I’ve got a video going through the PV system here, but it’s both a few years old now and doesn’t cover the control part (though you can see V1 in the video! It’s the little black box with tape and a white label on it below the rapid shut-off switch).
I should write some blog posts about it all, it’s come pretty far at this point
Just how to make the devices talk is interesting. I got some good tips on here the other day about networking options - using Zigbee was a nightmare to get working, BLE even worse.. for a while I was using a hand-rolled protocol inspired by the Redis network protocol; now I’m just using a dumb simple thing over plain UDP, but someone here pointed me to a low-energy HTTP/web-inspired protocol that seemed really cool.. but I’m also struggling to get away from the though that for home power control you likely want something wired, for reliability, maybe..
Interviews for a new job after a layoff. Final interview tomorrow for one, and first interviews for 2 others today and tomorrow 🤞
That shit is stressful. Good luck duder.
Taking a stab at writing a Minetest mod for sci-fi spacecannons.
Devildaggers and work. Hit 446s today.
Best of luck on 500!
I’m hoping to get the 2023 compensation report out the door. More at https://codeandsupply.co/survey. We collected data for the third iteration of the survey in 2022 but this cycle has taken longer than the previous cycles to actually produce the report because we ended up creating an entire data pipeline and somewhat of a framework for producing the graphs. This included learning pandas and plotly, then ditching pandas for Polars with a 10x speedup in full project runs, and then improving the tooling that enables managing chart sprawl while writing the prose that’s going into the report. It’ll go faster next time, I hope.
I’m at GOTO Chicago. HMU if you want to chat / get chocolate
Hmmm, good question. Maybe I can wrassle my brain into being sensible enough to work on Garnet, or at least continue cleaning the house.
Finally got a new blog post idea, the topic being runtime verification. RV is really interesting because it combines formal methods (checking properties) with monitoring of real application runtime. Aka, it’s a combination of devops and formal methods. I think this is a practice that teams could end up picking up in the real world, because it addresses a lot of the resistance that people have to formal methods - namely, it’s tied to real code, and real usage of the application by users.
Finally pulling all the pieces and tools together to refresh the front suspension on the Z4. Parcels of goodies have arrived, only outstanding collection now is picking up a floor standing hydraulic spring compressor so I can safely swap shock absorbers this time round. (“Modern” BMW springs have too few coils for the screw-style spring compressors to be safely used, as I discovered when I attempted to replace a 1 series spring a couple of years ago.)
Update: and the exhaust has now split, making an awful racket/drone now. Properly embarrassed to drive it through town.
I guess a new exhaust is also going on this weekend then, need to sort that arriving in time.
I’m experimenting with some Rust + WASM reactive UI libraries. In particular, making some fun livestreaming integrations