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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
Finally decided to give up on building and running Mycroft on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ in Arch Linux ARM, and just loaded up a pre-baked Picroft image instead. Got it working with my speaker and microphone (random older spares I've had laying around collecting dust until now), and have been playing around with creating my own Mycroft skills. First one I'm working on is a skill that simply runs arbitrary shell scripts by name, so I can say "hey Jarvis, run my backup script" and it will execute the shell script called "backup." I'm new to Python, so running into mostly googlable issues and having fun with it so far.
I think either Mycroft's wake word detection isn't too great, or could be my microphone isn't the best for this. Sometimes it takes repeating 3 or 4 times before it wakes up, and other times it wakes up from random noises going on in the room that aren't even close to the wake word. I've tried both wake word listeners but haven't noticed much difference between them as far as accuracy.
My accordionish synthesizer doesn't seem much closer to finished, but it's generating interesting sub-problems.
I fooled around with measuring velocity with an optical sensor and a black-and-white pattern on a wheel. Now I'm getting rid of wheel and measuring velocity of a "bow" that I move back and forth. (It doesn't look much like a bellows, but I think it has promise.)
The bow is too short, so I'm looking into making things bigger than the 3D printer bed by designing snap-together plastic pieces.
Meanwhile, I'm investigating ways to make a brake on the bow, as a form of force-feedback.
An accordion bellows resists movement in complicated ways. For example, loudness varies with the velocity of the bellows. If you push with constant force, you get constant velocity and constant loudness. If you push harder, loudness and velocity go up. It seems like braking that varies with velocity would be useful?
An eddy current brake does this, but it doesn't look too practical for my purposes, though I guess it works well for roller coasters. Here's a science experiment where they drop a device containing magnets along an aluminum ruler and see how much braking they get. Not much, apparently? Maybe it would work better with more magnets?
Probably this will be a regular friction brake that's electronically controlled, but I'm not sure what I could use to control the friction brake. A DC motor that turns a screw that adjusts tension on a spring might be one way, but I think it might be too high latency. Also, DC motors often make noise.
Also, ideally I'd find some method of braking that uses the force from the user pushing and pulling as power. Eventually this instrument will be battery-powered and I'd rather not use a lot of electrical power just on braking.
Maybe I should look into interesting things to do with solenoids?
This isn't all that technical, but I got a new Mastodon account. The server I was using (schelling.pt) stopped updating and images seem to be gone. (I didn't notice for a while because I don't follow many people and figured they were taking a break.)
Casually picking Mastodon servers doesn't seem like a great strategy. The first Mastodon account I lost was hosted by Drew DeVault (I didn't know who he was when I picked it) and disappeared one day. I have no idea who runs schelling.pt, I just liked the name. Hopefully mastodon.social should work for a long time since it's the most famous one, right?
.social (and .online, which is also hosted by the same people) should be reasonably stable, although I recall admins of some other instances being wary of accounts from these two instances (in some cases, blocking the instances), as both instances don't seem to have much moderation compared to the activity. (Or so I read)
In short, yeah, choosing instances are hard.
(Also, don't use /web/ urls to link. They only work for people on the same instance as you)
I tried the link in an Incognito window and it redirects to a shorter link. So it seems it's not the preferred link but it works?
It doesn't seem obvious in the UI how you get the shorter link, unless you just remember how it works.
Oh, that might only happen because I have a deactivated/redirected account there (so it redirected to settings)
Yeah, that is true.
I recall there being some effort on connecting the web and login UIs together, but the implementation I recall required JS even for logged out views, which makes using a JS blocker way harder than it needs to be (considering the amount of instances out there, and considering how federation might not give you the full picture on smaller/single-user instances)
I've been working on tidying up all the cables in my server rack. Today I upgraded the CPU in the server than runs Blue Iris and shortened the cable runs to my security cameras.
The other day I got a cable management arm for my Dell Poweredge R730XD and I've got one coming for my R420. The R420 is a backup target for proxmox that's running on my R730XD and also stores a copy of all the data on the R730XD.
I also ordered some fiber optic gear for my rack for better cable management.