Posts by jakimfett@hackers.town
(DIR) Post #AJckPZsqqDkR8eP6MS by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-01T06:33:47Z
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somebody, probably with a name, said something to the effect of "start with why".So, the why of this is so I can set up watering of the plants, and then use that same code for some hydroponics veggies and maybe a tomato-fruit or several.Starting small, tho. The soil moisture reading is pretty basic sensors, but it's been 5 years and a heck of a lot of head damage since messing about with sensors and arduino. The reflexes are there, but the neurons aren't always making the connection, so progress is often disjointed and full of months-long pauses in processing while my brain waits for the next piece to fall into place.In this case, the missing piece was worry that I'd either under or over water our Yule tree, Norman, who has joined us indoors for two years running now. Last summer was hard on them, I left them behind when partner was hospitalized for surgery, and the new growth got all puckered and stunted.For now, I'm aiming to simply: - wake up and read the sensor every quarter day or so - read the sensor when manually triggered - read the sensor when instructed to do so via remote interruptRegardless of *how* the sensor is read, save it to the queue for sending on next wake cycle, possibly with a 'send now' jumper for testing purposes? Or just one switch / command for read, one for send, and enough distance / texture distance that it's obvious which is which?The chip I'm using has been pushed below ~5ma current draw (ref https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_SleepyDog et al) for sensor-interrupt deep sleep (that wakes on packet receive) and that's the functionality we need.While this will be solar, it's probably going to be seriously over-provisioned (looking at minimum of 20 watts for the prototype, although assuming idk 10% efficiency because of wind and growth and sun position, that's still far more than the (10ma * 3.3v = 33mw) low power draw. However, that 10% utilization is assumed to be is approximately 12% of the daytime (3 hours), so that gives us somewhere in the 2w/ hr for three hours, so about six watt-hours. High power draw is in the 125ma range, so doubling that gives us (250ma * 3.3v = 825w) about a half hour to 45 minutes of operation in high power mode, max transmission range? If we are assuming the battery efficiency & capacity are sufficient for this, if memory serves it's a 6,600mah pack, although there are surely much larger ones.This isn't minimalist, yet. It's a prototype on hardware that I know will be useful for other stuff, so while I am debating about a lot of bells and whistles, this thing really just needs to tell the humans, somehow, how wet the dirt is.This year's splurge was an e-ink display (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4777) so the lora stuffs is honestly overkill right now...because making a bar graph on an e-ink display over SPI seems doable, right?...hmm, now that I think about it, the e-ink displays could be used to display QR codes to register the nodes with the pi bridge (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4074, from last year's splurge) since that base station already has some image processing stuffs and a pair of cameras...Given 33mw low power (99%+ of operating time) and around 3-5 minutes total per day of transmission time, this looks like it'll be significantly overpowered, and all that remains to do is build, program, test, rebuild, reprogram, repeat......mmmmmmmmmmm have missed this process. Have missed talking about this process.High
(DIR) Post #AJckPaADnddu0WWyR6 by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-01T02:20:18Z
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The vents begin to blow noticeably cooler.Granted, it always takes me an hour or so to realize, note the face as sensory input, queue the task for abstraction, abstract the steps into a process, and then pursue the steps for bringing the system down.The path is over an exposed gearframe, down first one step then another pair, culminating at a USB-powered remote control that spits IR at the receiver and security camera(s).The hiss-chug of the air and 60hz hum of the alternating current in the thermal exchanger dims, but doesn't fall completely. An oil heater, augmented by a smaller fan, keeps the tone alive.As the body of the vehicle cools, my paths turn inward, towards the glowing terminals rather than the shimmering peripherals. The slight edge of cold, combined with a need to decompress in word-form, makes it easy to take the main compartment lights offline and light the candles that contribute a surprising amount of heat to the small, blanket-enclosed bubble of space to think.Outside, the ground is stabbed by fragments of light escaping through the edges of the greenhouse, where the lamps are disgorging the day's solar bounty towards the plants they protect from the snow outside.Not quite a fortress of solitude, but the sunset is just as beautiful from here, and the sky just as full of stars.Good night, fediverse.Good night, hacker town,thank you for inviting me in.
(DIR) Post #AJckPaAvl0D42irXXc by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-04-12T19:50:49Z
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...system processor stable at 96.5C, turbo & auxiliary cooling engaged.Let. There. Be.*COMPILE*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM
(DIR) Post #AJckPb5INRIQrXEYOe by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-01T23:03:06Z
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https://forum.arduino.cc/t/how-to-find-out-output-pin-state/42066/4Always love finding stuff like this...sure beats having a state to watch your state...::quietly prunes out the now-unused 'toggle' boolean::
(DIR) Post #AJckPbY0egGUIafU9Y by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-01T20:54:07Z
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There's a laptop that stays online overnight (if working from inside the shopartment is in my plans), though the goal is to only have a system online when actually using it.Historically, my full 'homelab' usage was about 2-3kw (...*24*365) just for the full height rack with a handful of blades and an air removal unit, and weighed enough that moving it required three people or a *lot* of elbow grease, which wasn't great once homelessness happened. At the time, was trying to pretend that 'going back to normal' was an option, so it's just been sitting in storage while i/we contemplates what to repurpose it for.Everything that remains of the tech stack from then has been reworked or replaced to be quickly brought down and put back into luggable-safe storage, because setting up a workstation has been a temporary "yeah you can use this closet for a week or three but then we need you to be out looking for work" sort of bs since idk 2017 at least?(we moved 8 times in 2020, for reference)This iteration of the lab is a barely-post-homelessness build, where having the funds to just...buy another whatever...is an option, but feels wrong until the backlogue of salvage has been processed. New functionality that will assist in reaching objectives is considered and critiqued extensively, and has to look good from a lot of different angles before the purchase happens.The tradeoff of having these smaller systems is the significantly increased portability and reliability of individual low cost modular bits, which is what a lot of current consumer tech really lacks.This messy conglomeration of three or four laptops, main / backup repositories, printer & scanner, router, an overlarge CPU box, monitors and cables, has rather a lot of idiosyncrasies, and on top of that i/we are kinda paranoid and working on excavating the militarized mindset, so like with any war rig, it can be a tool of freedom or an agonizing death, you just gotta know the correct sequence to bring it online.Occasionally, there's condensation on things, and that rendered the main CPU a bit persnickety about humidity, and each time we shut it down we wonder if it'll come back online.That said, it only eats 10% (about 200-300 watts max) of what my old way of doing things used, constantly.===This system begins to warm enough for the primary CPU to come online safely.May the electric fire scream once again through your veins, my silicon familiar...energizing in three...two...one...
(DIR) Post #AJckPbZ4aj7ELtAKoK by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-02T00:44:56Z
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testing to see if this will actually do a post at sundown, if my device is offline.
(DIR) Post #AJckPcHNvyYqZJtisa by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-04-12T19:58:34Z
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What are you willing to do for love?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRaMatWRK50What amount of outrage will move you to action?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjIwXKPGf80Why did we say "never again" if we were unwilling to do anything?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2z34nkfA9QThese are not new problems.This is not new resolve.This is simply accepting my part.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBspxpQLfl4I choose to build.What do you choose?
(DIR) Post #AJckPcwVT5SEcr8YyW by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-02T02:20:40Z
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hey, the auto-post thing worked!...unsure if that was a true offline test tho, might have been texting someone about then.(Here's a panorama of the office, which looks even less euclidean than usual due to excessive operator movement during the shot.)
(DIR) Post #AJckPeOY4JTn87GTK4 by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-01-02T07:29:49Z
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"Bury Me Low" was the new music fave for today.( https://m.soundcloud.com/8graves/bury-me-low/ )---If I die today, it won’t be so badI can't escape all the nightmares I’ve hadAll of my angry and all of my sadGone in the blink of an eyeI’ve seen the devil, I’ve shaken his handI’ve seen the evil that dwells in a manFor all of my wisdom, I can’t understandOh mercy me, mercy my===Better get to digging while my body’s getting coldI keep tryna fight it so just promise when I goYou’ll bury me lowBury me lowBury me lowJust promise me that when I goYou’ll bury me low
(DIR) Post #AJckPf8HKI3jPwezbM by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-04-26T00:08:24Z
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Have you done your backups?I certainly hadn't.Making some tweaks to my workflow to include a USB drive has given me redundancy now, and will allow me to migrate all but my newest storage pod without needing to bring the workstation online.Which is good, because the workstation has been down for a month while I've been rebuilding the floor, part of a wall, and the ceiling.Currently fighting the fibreglass insulation miniboss, which necessitates a lot of relocating, taping / shielding, and coverings.The outer skin of the lab seems intact, but enough moisture had seeped in that the thin plyboard had warped and de-laminated, so the insulation bits were becoming a hazard.Still fighting the back pain from last fall. Everything is taking ten or twenty times as long.One more step.Backups are the next step.Have you done your backups?
(DIR) Post #AJckPgcnmI4M2twsoi by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-05-15T16:44:34Z
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Backups completed on the main workstation yesterday, After a brief fight with the #guix installer (kept crashing on "guided disc partitioning" and after about the third try to guess at what partitions the installer needed manually) i gave up and just installed #nixos again. Too frustrating to keep trying the same 20+ interactions and putting in user accounts and such to have it randomly blink away and not even be sure it was something I had done the first two times.The takeaway for me, here, is that basic functionality polish is outside scope for many, if not most, open source projects. Accessibility, is a tacked-on-after-the-fact consideration.Simply having my choices-so-far be written to the free space on my drive, and having the option to resume after each crash, would have kept me persisting towards installing the base system that I dearly want to use.But for now, familiarity has momentum.And I suppose it's not the worst thing to not be running bleeding edge all the time everywhere, eh?
(DIR) Post #AJckPggLZ6uADtbiLI by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-05-10T21:03:12Z
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Major update to the layout & arrangement of our prototyping lab.Been about a month and a half in progress.As of today's grid measurements, when the printer kicks on and all the monitors power up, the workstation comes on and the laptop boots, power level usage will peak below a kilowatt.We've got about 7-20 watts of solar that keep small pieces of it going without routine intervention. About half of it is just sticking the panel out the window until the light fades, every day. A manually switched network of solar power, less a grid than a series of buckets and several fountains.It's not #permaComputing or even really sharable..and...we'll get there eventually. #slOwpenSource maybe?This sub-kilowatt energy usage peak means a 2/3 reduction in overall lab computing energy usage over the last 5 years, and once the network stack is...appropriately hardened for today's network environment...we'll see how remote services compare to before the jump. I expect to break the 1kw boundary again slightly when things like the game world backend are at full load, and, managing that will be the point of the next iteration of optimizations.This also means that my entire professional computing stack runs off less than two hundred watts under moderate load, and when the workstation isn't necessary, that number drops into the double digits. This iteration of the lab is capabilities-driven, so when idle systems shut down we drop from 75ish watts to like 13-17 watts, total computing stack draw. And I'll often just pull the mains breaker on my way out for the night, so it's like 2/3 duty cycle if that.We're aiming for total wattage in the single digits or below (what can you do for a #watt is #actuallyAlot XD) and also ......this is us celebrating, as the old lab (circa 2015) was over 1kw idle and 2kw average.
(DIR) Post #AJckPhvyuT0O6fviLo by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-05-16T05:03:34Z
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Only caught the last quarter of daylight, but still got a +7% boost to the mobile's battery. Enough to post this, and keep ahead of the overnight drain. Already we're down 2%, though some of it is temp.Workstation is booting.(Will try #guix again soon. It remains my goal.)Got things working with the default noveaue driver and plasma...which has been a ride.(...really need to write a guide for a bunch of this stuff...)Lots of new quirks to learn with plasma, and it seems to have difficulties with visual lag...though that may just be the non-vendor graphics driver.Got the next set of hardware backed up and staged for #nixos to be installed. This will be a burst-capacity build server, art / media station, and to free up the laptop that was driving that display previously. Probably going to try pathenon again?Slowly the new shape rises from the tangle of past attempts.
(DIR) Post #AJckPi7gCyMYgxP3aK by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-05-11T17:57:54Z
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That which cannot be repaired is broken already.That which cannot be recycled is broken already.That which cannot be modified is broken already.These things are easy to demonstrate, and easy to remediate. Living them, however, happens one step at a time. It happens in conversations where we choose to use better language, and moments when we choose to use less destructive options.Truly there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, which is why we must give, give, give to one another who have need. Give food. Give shelter. Give kindness and space to be hurting.We cannot make things better through any one focus alone, but by combining our foci and exchanges of perspective, each of us finding balance.There is no perfect victim, and expectations that one will be so is untenable.My home is in someone else's driveway. Existing here invites constant scrutiny and threat of cop-calling from my landperson.Still, I find ways to make progress towards things that benefit us all. My work in the garden, at the forge, and in open source, not to mention the woodworking and cross-discipline tinkering.Most of us are surrounded by reminders of all that we cannot change, so perhaps you will share some of your successes.Today, I am resting.Tomorrow is another big lift.
(DIR) Post #AJckPiHFdO1FAdshVI by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-05-19T05:07:05Z
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The sunward panels were pulling in a solid 11 watts today. Grid power is currently available, but the more I can run off the sun, the better. Gained two or three amp-hours on the batteries, so we can top up the phone tonight.Sketching out the cuts necessary for next stage of the hardware for kiddo's viewscreen is in progress, and the tactile kinesthetics are really helping me relax. Wooden frame takes the graphite well.Using the high impact (plastic? something else?) from tablet display salvage to protect the face of a mini HDMI display for kiddo's playtesting. Not yet aiming for outdoor use tho, getting this waterproof needs...future catra and adora problems, eh?Doing a pair of off the shelf batteries, about 10 amp-hours apiece, and using a third of the same type as an internal cell to make the other two hotswappable. USB for now, but looking to upgrade to barrel plugs once there's time to poke around for better options for that.Next step is to reinforce the wooden frame so the padding/buffer material can be put in place to cradle the display. Anticipating 1+ meter droups on the regular, and attempting to make this tough enough to keep on working. LCDs are not my fave. >_>
(DIR) Post #AKFwtEaBVWUCt4eF2e by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-06-07T04:41:01Z
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Got a friendly who needs a place to crash for the night, his flat has become...unworkably unfriendly towards his efforts to recover from alcoholism. He's a #veteran and his plan of last resort is trying to hitchike or beg a fare off someone, to Texas (his last living family is there).This is one of the few people I trust around kiddo, if you need to gauge my level of willingness to vouch for them. They've taught me a lot about life, and are trying to find an environment conducive to making positive change in their life.If you are near south west #pdx (Goose Hollow, specifically or adjacent) or could help directly with transport fare to a safe place to sleep for the night, please reach out.If you are not able to do the above, please boost.(I will let y'all know when the need is filled.)I am no longer local, or I would simply have them come to my place instead. #mutualism #mutualAid #trimet
(DIR) Post #AKFwtFVG5K8jk5Lp0C by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-06-07T08:14:50Z
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They found a place to sleep that was warm, if jot safe.Talked through options for getting them long term housing, and prepared to retrieve their things from the former living situation in the meantime.Still coukd use a place for them to stay that is recovering-alcoholic friendly, this bs of people getting pissy that they turn down alcohol is the root of this problem for them, consent matters.Please reach out if you can help with this.Heading offline for the night.Thank you everyone who hoosted and responded to late night messages with an effort to help, i see your generosity and kindness.
(DIR) Post #AKM9QKESoC2ouKnrKS by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-06-10T20:01:57Z
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Have been contemplatng and discussing a recycling collective that has an attached makerspace using only reclaimed materials to teach metalworking.If we try to crowdfund this (with intention of reimbursing all supporters, microloan style, and publishing our shyte so other people can repeat and improve on our work), what's your level of monetary interest in getting a nonprofit educational recycling startup off the ground?
(DIR) Post #AOxkoESmgbA5A67TE0 by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-10-26T15:05:37Z
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@CarlCravens "designing freedom" talks about how to manage homeostasis machines with a desired output (like production of goods or services by business) from secondary mechanisms which benefit the core value / output / outcomes more than managing and measuring specific metrics directly.Also delves how we use computing in ways that amplify the wrong types of information, leading to homeostasis collapse (from cognitive overwhelm becoming the normal operating mode), when instead we should be using computing to attinuate or abstract the proliferation of variety enough that humans are effective instead of overwhelmed by it.Worth a look if you can find a copy. It's a short one, much of Beer's other work is...dense.
(DIR) Post #APtyQI69XN47S2x8Do by jakimfett@hackers.town
2022-11-23T16:56:00Z
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who has recommends for a fediverse (on mobile) client that is specifically compatible with local-only posts (ala hometown) and secondarily tolerates (or caches) for completely offline use?My network is flaky at best (leading to lots of posting woes), and I am tired of not being able to properly scope my toots in #tusky tho it's had a good run.Are these features of subwaytooter? or others that i don't know about?:boost_ok: