lochieferrier
Joined 12 years ago
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284
Submissions
43
Member since
Sep 23
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
BETA Technologies | Full time | on-site or remote | South Burlington VT
We build the world's highest performance electric aircraft. You can read more about our latest 6,000 lb aircraft we are flying here: https://evtol.com/news/beta-technologies-previews-alia-evtol...
We are looking for folks passionate about flight, particularly: - programmers - aerodynamicists - flight controls engineers
Formal job listings are here, or feel free to reach out to [email protected] with your story. https://beta.isolvedhire.com/jobs/
Comment · 9 years ago
Code is here: https://github.com/hoburg/jho
Comment · 9 years ago
NASA Helios was quite expensive and tricky to build, with not a lot of margin left for useful payload.
There's a weight runaway that occurs with solar powered aircraft, look at Fig 12 in this report: http://hoburg.mit.edu/publications/gassolar.pdf
Disclaimer: I worked on this project, so am super biased.
Comment · 9 years ago
It's online now! Sorry it had the usual HN flop.
Comment · 9 years ago
For sure, but they have a limited range of packages installed, and can be tricky to tune towards a specific need.
Comment · 9 years ago
You can already do this exact thing with a Python library on the user machine, see here for install instructions: https://gpkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html
The intent here is to make it easy for people to get started and quickly write models, without needing to go through installing a set of packages.
Comment · 9 years ago
Yes, there was an issue with someone nuking the compiler box, and we're working on fixing the demo up.
This does more than LPs, it lets you formulate GPs, which are a way of doing non-linear analytical optimization. See here for more: https://gpkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gp101.html#what-is-a-...
Comment · 10 years ago
Wow, that is really beautiful. Topology optimization is cool stuff.
I think it's key for optimization to be fast so that the designer can get a feedback loop going between the computer and the ideas in their head. Would love to talk about whether geometric programs might help Autodesk generate topology faster.
Near future stuff is probably a real-world component input (optimized shopping), and making things more flexible so you can drag and drop something together from components.
Comment · 10 years ago
For sure, there's a lot missing, title is probably misleading. Definitely nothing new in terms of the CAD, browser CAD has been well done, just look at professional products like Onshape. Right now it's primitives only for this, one of the next steps is to look at how full meshes can be optimized. A simple example of this could be wings: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/papers/2013_gp_win...
Comment · 10 years ago
This is correct, much better than what I said.
Comment · 10 years ago
Yes it's considering the weight of the battery, as well as the weight of the motors. It doesn't factor in the props, I didn't get around to that. The props have inaccurate geometry of course, which I'm looking to fix with a mesher.
Have a look at the console for how the geometric program is assembled.
Comment · 10 years ago
I think by react you meant react to, which was fair enough, it was dodgy as. Now running well.
The property of getting a guaranteed optimum is something that arises from setting the design problem up as a geometric program. You won't always get a solution (for example, a certain size quad has a minimum prop diameter). Though if you do, it is guaranteed to be optimum because the problem is convex as outlined here: https://gpkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gp101.html
Also, conflicting objectives are naturally traded off until you find a Pareto optimal solution. Using geometric programs lets you balance conflicts in a design quickly. This is why they are super useful for aerospace applications, where you are always looking at a tradeoff between weight and at least one other variable.
I've been running this for the past few months. It's a search engine / aggregator for used aircraft. It's really hard to search for used aircraft and sort them across all the different websites, even harder to figure out what's a good deal and watch the whole market. I started this service to try and solve those problems for others.