In my opinion: you should bundle this as an offline electron app that can save to the filesystem and get integrated into existing PLM. and/or sell a team plan that offers cloud design & library sync
… and partner with that YC company doing wire harness machines for a “buy now” button
I intend to keep the current functionality (50 harness/assembly designs per account) free. A collaboration feature is coming soon that will allow creating teams and sharing harnesses with specific accounts - we may charge here at some tier but this is TBD.
It really is great, haunting, nostalgic music that I associate with a formative time in my childhood. Beyond the game it’s also fantastic deep focus & coding soundtrack.
If you haven’t heard it, listen to Sweden or Aria Math.
> NixOS is the only one that we didn't hate. Technically, it's a marvel, but the learning curve is too high. Because who has time to learn a new system when you can just stick with what you know and complain about it?
You joke, but there was a ferry accident (I think an NJ to Manhattan ferry) where control was lost because the control station… ran out of SD card space for logs and crashed
Cool! As a moonshot fun idea I’ve been interested in MCP as a way to use informal conversations to task robots. I’ll have to play around with this!
One example on unmanned boats: a human could radio to the boat over VHF and say “move 100 meters south”… that speech-to-text would feed to an LLM which extracts the meaning and calls the MCP.
Ya, sounds like a good idea to let the LLM do all the calculations and send simple instructions to boat. MCP tells it what data is available from the device.
This seems like a residential address. Irrespective of whether the creator deliberately exposed it, I would be a little bit cautious about sharing it further.
I recently contributed this new plugin for Telegraf, Influx's open source telemetry agent.
This lets you collect metrics directly from a Mavlink stream, for example from an ArduPilot drone flight controller.
The end result is that you can now use standard telemetry pipeline tools - Telegraf, InfluxDB/VictoriaMetrics/TimescaleDB, and Grafana - to visualize livestreaming and historical data from drones.
I've been using this for the past few months professionally and it's been awesome to be able to use Grafana's graphing capabilities to plot things like vehicle speed, energy consumption, etc.
Writing path planning code is one of the most enjoyable programming tasks. Love the visualizations.
The path following code is also interesting because I bet you'll run into some corner cases where the A* path thinks a path is feasible, but the vehicle overshoots and hits something. Although in a game I guess that adds to the fun & chaos.
Indeed. There is something satisfying about building these and watching them in full flow.
A couple of years ago, I completed a pathfinding assignment designed by David Churchill (https://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/) for his Algorithmic Techniques for AI course. I'm not a student, and only his students have access to the actual assignment files, so I made a faithful recreation of it by looking at slides he had on a video at the time. The assignment is about pathfinding on a 2D grid. That's fun enough, but I've wanted to put my own spin on it.
Over the past few weeks, I revisited this and applied it to real-world mapping data from OpenStreetMap instead. It uses OverPass API (https://dev.overpass-api.de/) to fetch the data, which is free to use. The data loading times can be a little unpredictable, especially for larger search areas, but I'm happy with it how it turned out. You can find it here if you're interested: https://johnh.co/projects/openstreetmap-pathfinding/
You might be able to add velocity information when doing the A* search, as well as use minkowski sum to make sure that it never tries to squeeze through too tiny a gap.
Re: visualizations, yeah, it’s really easy to caught up in playing with the algorithm just to watch it run rather than using it in your project. Been there, did that. For two distinct projects.
This definitely happens! Mostly it's from the NPC taking a corner a little too quickly when there's obstacles around. I've added data to the resulting path so that the NPC can know how far each path step is from an obstacle so that it can slow itself down first.
Like you said, it adds a lot to the fun so I'm only trying to smooth out those cases that look stupid.
On a technical level, this is a perfect use-case for PostGIS, which I'm a huge fan of.
Charts are hand-authored by government hydrography offices and encoded into a format called "S-57". These files contain spatial data for a small area, and different charts cover different zoom levels. This presents a few problems for web apps: Charts of different intended zoom levels cover other data, the full chart dataset is too large to stream, and charts aren't divided into xyz tiles cleanly.
To solve this, I run a bespoke pipeline which processes all nautical chart data into an internal format using PostGIS. From there, I merge all chart data together, overlaying higher accuracy charts over the lower accuracy charts. The pipeline performs a lot of data validation & reconciliation to remove bad data, then simplifies & renders to vector tiles.
PostGIS is critical to this - I started by using a bunch of python geometry manipulation libraries, and slowly shifted more and more of the processing into SQL queries as I realized how fast and intuitive it is.
If you just want to play around with the nautical chart rendering, check out https://app.vectorcharts.com/ - A free nautical chart viewer that demonstrates the vector charts API.
