davekeck

Surprised that folks were still using RealPlayer in 2011

It took me a minute to realize they're not just videos too. Really outstanding work.

“Muitithreabring”

> Something I still fail to understand is where you can actually spend 20ms

Aren’t these numbers .2 ms, ie 200 microseconds?

Out of curiosity, how is that measured across machines?

(The first thing that comes to my mind would be to use an oscilloscope with two probes, one to each machine, but I’m guessing that’s not it.)

To work towards eliminating PFAS in everyday products, I envisioned a service where people could send in things they own to have them tested, and the results would be published on a website/app and searchable via barcode. Win/win: users get free PFAS testing, and the service gets free products to test to create a database.

I researched how to perform rigorous PFAS testing but it looks like the best method is PIGE which requires a particle accelerator, which aren’t exactly easy to come by.

Anyway just posting this in case anyone has thoughts or would be interested in working on something like this.

I always assumed it was because FM station bandwidths (200kHz) are much wider than AM (10kHz). AM's 10 kHz chops off a lot of human-hearable frequencies.

It’s not soldered, but it does have a Molex Pico-EZmate connector (chosen for its low profile), and I’m not sure you can find batteries premade with that kind of connector. You could reuse the existing connector with a new battery, but that would ideally involve soldering.

- I think the most important skill for making hardware is just having a good fundamental understanding of electricity. Just developing an intuition around Ohm's law gets you remarkably far in terms of developing and debugging circuits. Towards that end, Khan's "Introduction to electrical engineering" and MIT's 6.01SC Unit 3 both look great.

- For this specific project, I needed to program an FPGA so I drew on my college experience (18-240) where we learned about FPGAs and Verilog. Coursera's "Introduction to FPGA Design for Embedded Systems" looks like a good option.

- Don't be discouraged by hardware tools. Coming from a software background, using hardware tools is like traveling to a foreign land where good UX is punishable by death. At its core, designing PCBs is really just drawing 2D shapes, and it's striking how painful drawing is using hardware tools (eg Eagle, Kicad) versus how delightful drawing is using artistic tools (eg Sketch, Figma).

I 1000% agree with the sentiment, I hate that we throw so many electronics away.

I need to make a blog post showing how to replace the battery.

Send me an email ([email protected]) and I can make a custom Stripe invoice / shipping label. Still need to figure out how to automate international shipping!

Definitely, the HN crowd has been kind.

I got so lucky with that, still can't believe I could work around it!

> How does your manufacturing process look like if someone decides to click the "buy" button and do you have any open orders currently?

I assembled ~120 of these devices beforehand so I just need to package them up and ship them out when I get an order.

> Also do you actively use it currently on your bike or do you know some use cases of someone that bought/has it?

I intended to put the device in the garage to catch the thief, rather than attach it to the bike. But with a good mounting solution (which I should invest some time into!) you could certainly use it on a bike for time-lapses. It should work great for a cross-country road trip.

A friend of mine is using it to do a timelapse of a house construction project, and I mailed out the first orders today so they're in the wild now!