tonyarkles

- The first board, which I had already done manual schematic capture, floor planning, and some routing on (but then I lost steam and it’s been sitting at 90% for 6 months) was finished quite readily by Opus + KiCadRoutingTools.

- A second significantly more complex board that has been sitting at the “I’ve done a bunch of planning in Obsidian but haven’t started schematic capture yet” stage… Fable took my Markdown notes, asked questions to fill in the blanks, and put together a plan. Opus first put together a very ugly schematic (essentially all of the parts but no wires between them, just net connections) which then got refined into a nicer-ish schematic. Floor planning went smoothly, the first cut was decent and with a little bit of manual refinement it got somewhere pretty good. Currently routing and still debating a bit between 4-layer and 6-layer. The BGA escapes seem to be causing the majority of the problems right now; originally Opus decided that 4-layer wasn’t feasible due to not being able to even route all the nets, switched to 6-layer, did better but still ended up with like 70 unroutable nets. A bit of back and forth led to revising the BGA fan-out and now we’re back at looking at whether a 4-layer board might be feasible.

For the second one, I’m not 100% sure whether wall-clock-time this is a faster process than it would’ve been to do manually, but… the initial 4-layer attempts were all done while I was out for a date with my wife, the remaining 4-layer attempts ran overnight, the first 6-layer routing attempt was done while I was having my coffee this morning, and now the 4-layer/6-layer fanout changes are being done while I run errands. Something I find especially interesting is that by leaning on KiCadRoutingTools, it looks like there’s actually very little token usage at the routing stage; the plan gets put together as Python + KiCadRoutingTools instructions and then the hard work is done by that tooling. LLM picks up the results, looks at it, tweaks, kicks off a new job. That’s a pretty interesting result; this has all been running on my laptop pretty much continuously for 15 hours and I’m nowhere near any of my usage limits.

I'm actually pretty curious about this. You can't easily sneak on/off a commercial international airplane, but that's because they've got the gates set up in the airport to funnel you through a specific path that leads to customs. Showing up on an international charter or GA flight seems squishier. http://www.canada.eaachapter.org/FLYING%20TO%20and%20FROM%20... The process seems to be that you schedule an ETA, taxi to a CBP station and wait there until a CBP officer arrives.

On the other side of it, it looks like CANPASS would let you land in Canada even if the CBSA station is closed...

Edit: actually, one interesting thing to consider about routing vs. schematic design: my general experience with LLMs is that things work best when there's a feedback loop. On the schematic side, there isn't really much of a feedback loop; nothing will tell you that you've e.g. flipped the + and - terminals of your Opamp.

On the layout side, you've got the ratsnest and DRC to tell you whether you're winning or not. That might be the key to making LLM-based routing work. Opus refused to hand-route my whole board yesterday but is currently using the KCRT tools to do the routing and things seem to be progressing well.

Claude (web) saved me a ton of money with a new hobby. I was curious about astrophotography and had a budget to fill in any missing pieces from my existing photography kit. The conclusion was basically: "get a $20 intervalometer and a wall-wart battery[1]. The lenses you've got are fine, the tripod you've got is fine, and hey good news, Jupyter and Venus are near conjunction so if you can find somewhere dark where you can shoot to the west, you can get a pretty cool timelapse this weekend"

Later on also provided some rough guidelines for the partial lunar eclipse that resulted in some pretty amazing photos.

Since then I have been doing a bit of research on getting a real mount, so that initial budget will probably get used, but it'll be a) for kit that I genuinely don't have yet and b) spent after I've already confirmed that I thoroughly enjoy going out and photographing the stars for hours and then stitching all those photos into timelapses or other neat stacks.

[1] I'm not sure what the right name is for this. One end is battery-shaped but has a wire that plugs into a wall-wart instead of having to switch batteries. I had an existing 500-Wh 120V battery bank thing and it was more than enough to run the camera for 6 hours.

My first attempt on a low-speed not-dense board came out OK. There were a few odd choices, but I don't expect perfection from auto-routers. If nothing else, auto-routers are a good way to double-check that your floor planning is OK, even if you then rip up the auto-routed traces and hand route them instead.

Heh, tongue firmly in cheek: there's a good reason to change from I2C to SPI. I2C's pretty shit in comparison :D

More seriously, I've had interesting mixed results. I had a hobby-maybe-commercialize-next-year Christmas lighting project that I started in March (if I start in March, this will definitely be ready for Christmas!) and got 90% of the way there... and then life got busy and it's sat there untouched with the holiday season coming up again quicker than I'd like. I threw Fable at it first to assess what's done, not done, look for schematic mistakes/improvements (it rightfully pointed out that the cheap LDO I was using was near its limits and suggested a better part).

Opus did a reasonable job of swapping out the LDO, putting reasonable values on all of the pull-ups/pull-downs, etc. Some of the labels did end up in slightly weird places and needed some manual correction. It also did a decent job of floor planning on the PCB side, but pretty much refused to do any routing other than power traces.

I've installed https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools this morning after seeing this article last night... we'll see how this goes. My first manual attempt at running the router did decent but it failed a bunch of DRC spacing rules and insisted on via-in-pad to make it all work. That's, I think, a side effect of Opus's floor planning. It's interesting to play around with to see what's good and not.

Comes out to about $100/month

$3.2B revenue, 2.6M player accounts, ~$1230/yr ~= $100/month

So can I still drink and gamble in private if I sign a waiver?

The biggest problem I encountered using a similar setup for doing long-term and iterative data analysis is error propagation. My team and I are characterizing and modelling a physical system, there are real-world experiments that need to be run and then fed back into the analysis pipeline and then the next frontier of questions comes up. Any time there has been an erroneous analysis somewhere along the line, that error continues to be treated as a correct fact until it has been decisively eradicated. If one analysis script or document has the error written as a correct fact, that error will continue to pollute future analyses. Oh and these errors can also end up in the agents’ memory files as well. I have gotten very careful about making sure that every reference is corrected everywhere because it seems that the initial error is weighted heavier than the correction.

I use DaVinci Resolve for editing GoPro, Canon DSLR, iPhone, and Drone FPV footage. I import clips, use the razor to cut them and rearrange them, occasionally crop and zoom, and then encode them down to h264 or whatever. There are a bazillion features that I sort of know exist but haven't ever had any need to use. Could I make a tool using an LLM that covers my DaVinci workflow? Almost certainly, and I don't think it would take anywhere near 200 prompts. I've made significantly more complex bespoke data analysis pipelines for drone flight telemetry in like... a dozen prompts. But I have no illusions that what I would make as my "DaVinci Clone" would have anywhere near the functionality of DaVinci, just the tiny piece of that functionality that I use.

Zynq is super cool and strongly agree that it’s worth looking into, although starting with just a naked little FPGA board might be more approachable. On the other hand, if you’re sufficiently capable with both embedded Linux and Verilog to successfully implement a piece of hardware in the PL and build a driver and userspace for it in the PS, you’re definitely miles ahead of most candidates.

TI/Octavo chips with the PRUs are kind of similar; not that they’re asynchronous logic like the Zynq PL is, but they’re similarly powerful as far as doing hard real-time deterministic jobs driven by an attached Linux core.

Having the turbine, electric motor, gearbox, and potentially clutches to isolate the turbine or electric motor from the transmission seems pretty viable though. This would waste a little bit of power keeping the turbine spinning (unless there are clutches) but would also ensure that the turbine’s been spun recently, the oil pumps are primed and the bearings are lubed and ready to go.

Not that I’m saying a turboprop turbine like a PT6A is a simple device, but compared to a high-bypass turbofan like you’d see on a 737 or A320, they are considerably simpler.

Edit: looking quick, the time-before-overhaul (TBO) on modern PT6As can be up to 6000 hours, with a ~2000hr Hot Section Inspection. I’m not sure how “spinning but not burning fuel” counts on TBO, but it should at least mean the HSI is simple.

https://docs.sciml.ai/ModelingToolkit/stable/tutorials/nonli...

If you've used something like SciPy or symbolic Matlab or Maxima or whatever, it always feels like I'm very carefully converting the equations I've scribbled down on paper into code and always a little nervous that I've accidentally split one variable into two names or used the wrong equality operator and am going to end up hating life, or accidentally assigned x = sp.Symbol("y") somewhere.

The Julia version is just plain beautiful. There's no ceremony other than the three @parameters, @variables, @mtkcompile macros. It lives in its own little world where you don't have to constantly watch your back to make sure you haven't duplicated a symbol somewhere.

We’ve also collaborated on some Python tooling that takes a rather slow data format that I often have to process and analyze, indexed the whole corpus, and for analysis I can do (or Claude Code can) a single-pass conversion to Parquet which is then queryable with DuckDB. That tool has dramatically improved my turnaround time on one-off analysis tasks and as a Python CLI tool using Typer, the interface is also nicely discoverable for LLM harnesses to work with.

I’ll rephrase a little bit because “not give a shit” is maybe too flippant and what you’re saying is important context: if you have a family and responsibilities, framing it in terms of the article, that is one version of the NPC life and you’re going to be way better at it if you actually like it. If you feel like your constant responsibilities to your family are a burden and are getting in the way of doing what you want to be doing, that’s going to show up everywhere.

I was definitely raised with a “happy wife, happy life” mentality and a few years ago I smashed that whole notion to pieces for myself, not because it’s wrong but because the implementation I was taught was wrong. I understood it as “she’s going to want you to do a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to do, and the key to a happy life is to do it anyway.” As it turns out, in my experience, genuinely enthusiastic yesses and clear “no, not interested” is a way better approach. She trusts your yes way more if she trusts your ability to say no. Turns out that knowing she’s with someone who knows what he wants and doesn’t want, and has enough of a spine to say and act accordingly, is a key component to both “happy wife” and “happy life”.

If you’ve got family responsibilities and they feel like a heavy burden, it’s probably worth spending some time really reflecting on that and figuring out what needs to change.

If I didn’t enjoy yard care, I wouldn’t have a yard or I’d xeriscape or gravel + trees, or something. Laundry’s kind of a drag, mostly the folding part. Most of the time I enjoy cooking and tidying up afterwards; when I’m not in the mood I’ll do takeout or throw something from the freezer in.

I’m not sure what you’re saying overall? Is it that those things you’ve listed are what stops people from having enjoyable lives where they do what they want?