robhawkes

The link shows a photo of my grandad with the original R2-D2 he built for the first Star Wars film…

Jack was a master sheet metal worker, and was roped into using his skills on an obscure project to turn the sketches for the droid into something that could be constructed out of aluminium sheets.

I always knew he'd helped make part of R2-D2. However I only found this photo in recent years and have since learned that he was actually instrumental to the construction of the entire droid, particularly with working out how to machine the complex shapes like the dome and legs out of single sheets of aluminium.

He didn't just build one either, he ended up constructing a handful of the droids for various uses in the film. I still have no idea how he did it, especially without modern software and computer-controlled machining.

Unfortunately I never got to know him as he died when I was a baby, though I have a feeling we share a lot in common.

I also have his old Dragon 32 computer that he was using to learn programming in the 1980s, with reams of hand-written code that still works on the computer.

Those are NESO (system operator) grid boundaries. The colours represent the forecast flow of energy over each boundary in relation to the capacity of each boundary. Green means lots of extra capacity, red means over capacity. When a boundary exceed capacity it's likely that this constraint will result in wind farms being turned off to reduce output "behind" the constraint.

The black dots are wind farms and other power assets that don't have any generation data. This is usually because they aren't connected to the transmission system, not that they aren't actually outputting. Or to put it another way, I only have data on power assets connected directly to the main transmission grid.

Not at all, my stuff is very niche and the other websites and dashboards do a much better job at filling in the higher-level context.

Indeed! That's including available wind generation that was curtailed (not used) due to transmission constraints. So it's the actual output plus the amount of output that was "lost" because we had to switch off some wind farms, even though the wind was there to generate more.

Thanks! Always a surprise and a pleasure seeing my stuff on here

Oh cool, that's my website! Let me know if you have any questions about it and I'll do my best to answer them.

Thanks!

That's correct, it's using data from Open Infrastructure Map which is itself based on OpenStreetMap data. That's a good idea to zoom in further to show them off a bit more.

Oh wow that's a blast from the past, feels like a lifetime ago! And thank you.

Ah yeah the FAQ is very out of date and in need of a full rewrite. I'll get to that eventually. And you're right, I'll make sure to add some sort of glossary and perhaps also explain things better in-situ.

Thanks! I would love to make this something that works beyond GB though right now that would require a fundamental change to the way things are set up. It's on my list though, so one day.