After crashing my RC Plane I decided to experiment with the flight controller using the cheapest possible RC planes I could build. I bought foam board from Dollar Tree. Having the free designs from Flite Test (I’m using their Simple Cub), it quickly became apparent that printing out the designs, cutting, lining them up, gluing, cutting takes hours and hours to cut out a design. I want a CNC machine to do either laser cutting or sawing to save this time. … »
A big thanks to those who helped from the Ardupilot Forum Last week, I took a few extra days off from work to give myself a nice long break over Thanksgiving week. I spent a lot of time finishing an RC plane we had some replacement parts for. This one was going to be autonomous. I spent a few days soldering the flight controller and electronics, gluing the plane together, measuring and trimming everything perfectly. … »
At Meta, we have a few internal workflow orchestration engines. The idea is to allow long-running jobs, or things that can be split into tasks and need to have safe “checkpoints” behind them be defined in a system that can safely execute them and make sure they’re executed in a durable, reliable and scalable way. As I stumble upon things that fit paradigms within Facebook externally, this page is to document them. … »
Last time I did hydroponic growing and germinated seeds in the rockwool, I found it annoying that the roots would grow out the bottom of the rockwool, then get squished by the ground, making it harder to have dangling roots to easily transfer to an NFT system. I used an Openscad model to solve this :) … »
Why learn Rust? In Network Engineering at Facebook Meta, we’ve been going through an interesting transformation in which we’re starting to be discouraged to write new services in Python, and, instead start writing more in Rust (and sorry Golang, of which we’ve already got a bit written in. I’ve always said that I’m not overly a smart person (though am stubborn enough to solve most problems), and don’t expect to be able to pick it up quickly, I decided to start learning by challenge tasks, do as much as I can in it, and document some here. … »
Ordering is a little off here, but I wanted to writeup about a bug I’m seeing in the ESPChess project (post to come) and how I intend to fix it. The chessboard uses AWS IoT Shadow Service (MQTT accessed key-value store) to keep track of your and your opponents chess board state. It has a sequence number that’s incremeneted to flag when we should update our current state to match our opponents. … »
As my hydroponic experiemnt has shown success, I wanted to scale this up. My plan is to build an NFT hydroponic system for the yard, and dutch bucket for tomatoes. From my light study I found the fence and some areas that may make some good light. I found https://university.upstartfarmers.com/blog/sizing-a-pump-hydroponics-aquaponics that describes NFT Hydroponics is 4-6 GPH required for my pump. I’m going to start with one trough, but plan on scaling this up to 3 if it works, so will require 18GPH of total flow. … »
This year i’ve decided to start playing with Hydroponics as a hobby. I’ve been interested in starting with the Kratky Method of gardening. The idea is to grow lettuce in mason jars and see how growing without soil does. I’ve previously enjoyed growing my own alfalfa micro-greens, so this is the next obvious step. Attempt #1 These didn’t go so good. I had planted some seedlings in Rockwool, and left them in a container out in the sun to act as a mini-greenhouse. … »
My partner and I recently started renting an old place in Palo Alto. With COVID, we’ve been working from home for almost two years now, and sharing a desk at times things felt a little cramped (especially with the occsional electronics project). I’m no expert in woodwork, so decided to 3D model it before building the desk. This also helped as my father, who’s a carpenter, could then give me tips when I shared my computer screen with him (being on other sides of the planet). … »
When deciding what to attempt to grow where in the unit we’re renting, I decided to perform a light study of the backyard. To perform this, first I had used the 3D Scanner App to perform a LiDAR scan of the house. Areas of interest are the fences and the walls of the house. Once a scan is performed, I exported this to obj format, and loaded it into my favourite Blender 3D … »