Burned myself many, many times, not realizing that a bug in my code had resulted in way too much power going through something or the other, and then going to touch that something. Got myself an RF burn that way once, too.
Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
251–260 of 432 posts
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite robotics, but some of our servers kept powercycling , had to plug in the physical terminal. It was close to lunch, so I kept eating. The finale was a jar of mayo spilled into the guts of a 50k server. Best mayo I ever had.
What kind of server room allows you to bring food?
The kind in you would find in a scene from hacker news.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#253I feel like Industrial Automation is cheating, especially if you're working with a lot of tradesmen/clients who refuse to follow safety procedures.
We were commissioning a rather large food processing facility and had already verified that our PLC->Motor Starter wiring was all valid, but at some point the client decided they're ready to run a production line without testing the Motor Starter -> Motor wiring (bump testing the motors).
Normally you'd have people away from the equipment, proper lockout, people with radios verifying operation, all that jazz, but the client decided to go around us and just start turning things on.
Well when they went to turn on motor in section A, a drag in section B started due to some mistakes by the electricians. Section B's motor just happened to be straddled by a welder who was standing over it to do some work on an upper walkway when the thing fired up beneath him. Understandably he was pissed.
I've never had an injury on the job (thank god) in the 9 years I've been doing this, but there's been a handful of close calls. 100% of the time its because people skip safety procedures and think it'll be fine.
The client never did learn their lesson I'm guessing. We went home for the weekend, "Days since last work stopping injury" was reset when we returned Monday. Not sure what happened there.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some small metal pressing machines for example have two buttons, one on each side of the machine. You have to push them both for the machine to operate. This means your hands can't be squished. Or a dental x-ray machine has the final "run" button in the hallway so the nurse taking x-rays must go there to do it, so they don't get repeated exposure.
There's lots of safety mechanisms like this in manufacturing. I've also seen "light curtains" which are essentially 2 bars on either side of a hazard. If anything crosses that plane, the machine stops automatically. There are also pressure pads. For one type, you have to be standing on for the machine to operate so that you are in a safe location when it starts. For the other, the pad covers the danger area and the m…
Another one is machinery where you have to "enter" the machine to do maintenance. Think industrial ovens.
You're supposed to turn off the circuit breaker and lock it with your own personal lock that only you have the key to. That way no one can turn it on even if they wanted to.
I've heard no one, under any circumstances is allowed to take the lock off. If the person leaves after their shift and forgets to take it off for example, they have to come back in the middle of the night so to speak and take it off.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite robotics, but some of our servers kept powercycling , had to plug in the physical terminal. It was close to lunch, so I kept eating. The finale was a jar of mayo spilled into the guts of a 50k server. Best mayo I ever had.
Best mayo it ever had, too.
[deleted]
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#256Not my code, but somewhat related: I almost hurt myself when my friend used a sonic weapon on me in StarCraft. Back in the ancient days, my friends and I would meet every Saturday and go to an Internet cafe for a few hours of playing multiplayer games over LAN. Mostly StarCraft: Brood War, with a mix of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. During the week, we'd all play these games alone, in single player, figuring o…
Love this, thanks for sharing. I'm sure I'm not alone in the HN crowd of having fond memories of BW playing days. The sonic weapon, while accidental, feels similar to tactics used to disrupt concentration and logical thinking. E.g. taunting, trolling, cheese strategies, or your opponent getting tilted from something you didn't intend to annoy them with. Often think of how keeping a cool head is incredibly important i…
> feels similar to tactics used to disrupt concentration and logical thinking (...) trolling, cheese strategies
Yes, we did plenty of that.
Between Internet cafe days and high-school SCBW matches, I think I've got a dozen people to fall for the simple trick of writing "[a bunch of spaces to manually center the message] nuclear launch detected" on chat[0]. Most of the times it only caused a laugh from everyone, but once I actually won a game this way.
It was the late phase of a match, myself and my opponent were in a sort of stalemate - his army held a strategic position; we both knew it, so he just held position, and there was no way I could get through[1]. Not sure how to solve this tactical riddle, I just pressed ENTER and sent the " nuclear launch detected" message. It caught him off-guard, and in a moment of frantic confusion, he decided to move his army elsewhere. Of course, there was no nuke, but I suddenly had an opening I could exploit and win the match.
EDIT: I miss the tactical depth of SC:BW. I haven't seen any other game that came close. Not even StarCraft 2. In particular, all the cheese strategies we tried against each other. Most of cheesing happened early-game, but I was particularly fond of creative abuse of Terran Science Vessels in mid-to-late game...
--
[0] - For non-SC players: Terrans have tactical nukes in their arsenal. Launching one causes a warning message (and audio) to appear for every player, which gives the opponent a few seconds to try and figure out where the nuke will land, and either kill the unit that's laser-guiding it in, or evacuate from the area. People who played SC a lot develop a habitual reaction to this message, overriding whatever they were doing and thinking for a moment.
[1] - I unfortunately don't remember the details about the tactical situation and composition of armies. All I remember is that I was playing Terran, like I almost always did.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#257I’ve not been physically hurt but lessons were learnt : A friend of mine once gave me an old computer (I don’t remember exactly but it was some random Compaq running Windows 98 and this happened in ~2010). I installed some distro in it but tbh, it was barely usable. I decided it was a great opportunity to see with my own eyes what would happen when you intentionally « sudo rm -rf /* ». Well, no surprise, it erases ev…
In college I knew the GNU Coreutils rm had the --no-preserve root option and that my friends didn't know about this. So for fun I ran `sudo rm -rf /` just to show off or something.
Unfortunately I had busybox rm earlier in my $PATH and it started chugging through my files.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#258Every time I git blame on code that needs to change and realize it's my code. So much for write once, run forever!
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#259Was trying to control a 2 ton weighting diesel generator from my code and a few relays. Didn't go right.
This sounds very interesting. What happened?
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and t…
An impact driver (rattle gun) is much better for speeding up disassembly than a drill. They also don't apply anything like the same feeling of torque to the operator's wrist. A lower power (e.g. 300Nm max) battery driver is great for when you have to undo lots of lower sized bolts, while it would be a little bit underpowered for wheel nuts or motorcycle fork retaining bolts.
This is true. I didn't have a hammer drill at the time that would accept a socket adapter so we made do with the drill.