Staff/Senior Firmware Engineer working in IoT looking for full time role. I have 12 years of experience. Last 5 years at Staff level. Looking for at least that level of seniority or a lead position. Willing to move out of IoT.
Responsible for the entire product lifecycle for medium ($500,000/yr product) and large ($3m/yr) products at both startups and multinational enterprises.
my office adjoins a factory where we produce what we engineer in the offices.
The factory has two or maybe three different types of robots delivering all sorts of things from packages to packaging to stainless steel bar.
the robots use the same walkways as the humans.
It seems more and more we are designing robots to occupy and utilize the same spaces as humans. And we're designing the robots to make the humans give way: they're slow, large, bulky, and just stop when confronted. I think it's because humans are a much better robot.
humans (generally, of course) are more agile, can route easily, and move our bodies in unexpected ways to accomplish the task (lift a box up from waist height over an obstacle for example)
though I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot in my local stop & shop
>> I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot
I ran into one of these things late one night after checking into a hotel. Dead tired, I got off the elevator and was walking down the hall when this 3-foot high dalek started following me. "Can I get you some towels?" I retreated into my room. The next morning I almost tripped over it. It had spent the night outside my door... stalking me.
How much of this is that the robots are far newer than the buildings? How soon till new buildings are designed with designated robotic paths?
Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.
We do that all the time, we just don't usually consider them to be robots. Car factories have all kinds of vehicles transporting car parts along tracks, ceiling mounted rails, etc. Nobody bats an eye about that. If you squint hard enough elevators are a kind of robot on a designated pathway.
But to be called a robot it has to have some human-like (or at least animal-like) quality. Which usually involves either imitating human arms (e.g. typical industrial robot arms), imitating human movement (e.g. Boston dynamics) or using infrastructure designed for humans. If you put a delivery robot on a purpose-built path it has none of those qualities and reverts back to being a normal machine.
> Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.
For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes.
What's the problem supposed to be with running cables through clips on the wall? That you'll know they're there? That you can easily access them?
> For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes.
Install flexible plastic tubes instead and you can just pull out cables when you need to replace them for whatever reason.
Here in the 3rd world we still often use people instead of robots mainly due to cost, but it's definitely changing. Why struggle with government rules, unions and individuals if a machine can do it?
Jobs are already really hard to come by on all the unskilled levels, it's a bit grim to be honest.
"offline first" AND "privacy first", self hosted or cloud options, AND I need to sign up?
Why do I need to sign up? When I "sync" how do I know my notes are private? Where are they 'synced' and who has access to the keys?
I wish there was a 'how Unforget works' section
I'm not web tech savvy, but I value my privacy (especially with notes) and I need a note taking app with permanence. With this landing page I have no idea how it works, where my notes get saved, how do I access my notes if https://unforget.computing-den.com/ goes down. how do I self host?
maybe I just didnt spend enough time or navigate to the right section of the app shrugs
edit: I was going to delete this comment because I am not sure it adds anything meaningful. It was mostly a rant. But I want to explain that I'm coming from a place where I've also been looking for a note taking tool for a long time and this is very close to what I'm looking for.
ok so to answer more thoroughly, sign up is required for the sync feature to work. I'm not gonna say there's no way around having a server for sync, but none is simple or even possible to implement for all platforms including the web (see the Nat Traversal problem [1]).
You can self host of course in which case you only sign up to your own server. Instructions for self hosting can be found on the github page [2].
As for verifying the privacy of your data, this is a little more complicated. First, since it's a web app, you can open the dev console of your browser and in the network tab you'll see all the data that gets passes around. You will see that the content of your notes and passwords are all "gibberish" because they are encrypted or hashed. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean they are encrypted or encrypted well. To verify that, you really have to take a look at the code at least the client examples [3] which is provided in both typescript and python. They will show you how encryption and decryption work which allows you to verify that the "gibberish" data you see in the network tab of the website really is properly encrypted notes.
I hope that addresses your concerns. Let me know if you have any more questions.
It was constructive critique. Terse, but not only did I point out the things that are unclear to me I suggested a fix.
The edit was to soften the effect of being so blunt. Its a technique of being harsh then giving the reader some reason to attribute their negative emotions to. Its a way of side stepping the ‘defensive reflex’
So my friend I would appreciate you take as much time to read as write
I just started reading, and I am making the faux-pas of commenting before finishing.
But, I'm wondering what the challenges are of automating the ROV to map a body of water's floor in a pattern. like a grid pattern, or whatever is most efficient.
At first I was thinking currents would cause displacement. but can't we sense the current moving us in undesirable ways and correct with thrusters?
And then I thought.. do lakes have currents? Do they have tides? can a ROV sense the boundary of a lake?
just further down the rabbit hole, realizing how little I've learned about the natural environment!
Lübecks university has several projects[1] using swarms of robots for automatic cartography, water measurements and such.
Autonomous accurate navigation under water is quite complicated, because after a certain point you need to start relying on local sensors because nothing reaches you anymore. But local sensors tend to be weird, because a straight line underwater is not necessarily a straight line - you are most likely drifting -- and detecting drift isn't easy. From a local observer, the water around you isn't even moving. That was a fun team to talk with.
I wonder if pedantically speaking the definition of lake would include non-tidal in many countries but ....
A) humans use names sloppily and if it's an important detail I wouldn't assume a lake is non-tidal without checking.
B) non-tidal bodies of water might still change height over the year, for example after a heavy rainfall.
Mainly I'd question the need to automate it. It's difficult, and in many cases the cost of a human to drive it is tiny compared to all the other costs you need to pay so just do that (as in the article - those weren't automated). Also, driving them can be fun :-)
Sorry I dont know muchj about the parametric modeling in freecad. Ignore the rest of this comment, it's just a rant :)
I've been using freecad fairly heavily (hobbiest level heavily, so nights/weekends) for the past year and a half.
I can't recommend freecad for any project you'll put more than 10 hours, or 3 iterations into.
References suck in freecad. Sketches/constrains are okay, as long as all your references are in the sketch. If they're in another sketch or body, forget it.
Lets say you want to create two parts where a polar pattern of bolts align between the two. Top has a hole and counterbore, bottom is threaded. The most efficient way of doing that is drawing a copy on a piece of paper and write down the dimensions. then create two sketches on the two bodies and enter those dimensions. Which is dumb. Wouldn't it be nice to reference a constraint/dimension in another sketch? or use a master-sketch like fusion360? not in freecad.
freecad does have a reference system, but they're named references that are a pain in the ass to remember. And, there's no point since sketches lose their faces way too often. Modifying a sketch in the middle of the body history means risking all the other sketches just coming off the body and leaving you with a mess.
That said, i've used freecad to design fairly complicated assemblies that have electronics, gears, motors, bearings, and moving parts. iterating on the design just requires a lot of rework.
You can absolutely refer to constraints from other sketches in expressions, copy geometry directly from other sketches and "export" geometry from other bodies or generated geometry with a shapebinder in Part Design (or a Facebinder from the Draft workbench in a Part workflow). Shapebinders are very useful.
There are master sketch workflows. Youtube videos are out there for those (Mango Jelly Solutions has at least one).
The “losing faces” issue is the Topological Naming Problem. This is very soon to be mitigated and it can be worked around in the meantime (offset your sketches from a base plane rather than attaching them to a face). Though it is I gather still murderous in one of the assembly workbenches. The fix is coming soon.
Many of your other concerns would be addressed by doubling down on the parametric stuff, I think. The Spreadsheet module can help solve a lot of problems that are otherwise solved by the methods above and may be easier to keep track of. You can do calculations in there more or less as you would in a typical spreadsheet, and then give cells of the spreadsheets aliases that you can refer to in expressions anywhere in your design.
FreeCAD is really fundamentally parametric, and once you get into that, you have a bunch of options.
I wonder if there's more information on the logistics of transporting an instrument of that size and complexity from California to a mountaintop in Chile. They say it's the size of a small car, but the support structures certainly look bigger than that!
Packing, cleanliness, dealing with drops/shocks, loading, unloading.... are they flying it down?
Devs/engineers' skills are technical. we can design and build you something. Why are our managers and directors okay with Product Owners or Program Managers farming their jobs onto us?
Prioritization, feature design, product design, writing product specifications, writing acceptance criteria, creating stories... why is a firmware engineer assigned to these things? bruh, what do these people even do anymore?
If you dont know what we want, lets create a plan to figure it out. Writing 2 sentence AC and rejecting iterations until time runs out is NOT A PLAN.
Remote: Willing
Willing to relocate: no
Tech: Embedded Firmware, C, Python, Rust, WiFi, BLE, IoT, linux, UART/SPI/I2C
Email: fusslo85 (at) 639zw.xyz
Staff/Senior Firmware Engineer working in IoT looking for full time role. I have 12 years of experience. Last 5 years at Staff level. Looking for at least that level of seniority or a lead position. Willing to move out of IoT.
Responsible for the entire product lifecycle for medium ($500,000/yr product) and large ($3m/yr) products at both startups and multinational enterprises.
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