381–390 of 408 posts
> I’m changing the title of this page just to screw with mods on the orange website Loving it! What orange website could they be talking about? I wonder what would be achievable, around the $15 mark WITHOUT needing a minimum order of 1000? (Presuming access to a 3d printer and a reasonably cheap PCB fab company)
ah, someone who shares my disdain for "hacker" "news"
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Whatever you feelings may be, HN brings a breath of fresh air. Compared to other social media, its quite rare for commentary to devolve into nonsense.
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Supercilious posturing over other people is bad for comments here because it's reliably uninteresting. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site more in the intended spirit? We're trying for curious conversation here.
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The problem with comments like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30088471 is that they poison the ecosystem with more of the very thing you're complaining about, plus they lower the signal/noise ratio with tedious meta. Supercilious posturing over other people is bad for comments here because it's reliably uninteresting. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the…
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I'm doing this as a test mostly. I bought some 0.8mm 121 pin lattice iCE40HX FPGAs ($5 a pop) to test with with. Few enough balls that you can do a 4 layer stackup without cheating (no traces in the power plane layers). I hand-placed some 0.4mm QFNs before (LVDS to TMDS converter IC) (admittedly, only a ~90% success rate) so this has to be at least twice as easy.
"Easier than QFN" isn't a glowing recommendation but makes me hopeful. QFNs are the bane of my existence.
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The screen alone is going to triple the price. A 3A boost/buck converter to power the Pi from a battery is not going to be cheap, either. You could probably cobble a few 500mA ones together and hope everything plays nice, but that's a large footprint. If the pi actually is being used it'll definitely draw 2.5-3A, so a 2Ah battery won't last very long. I'm not really up to date on li-poly (the flat pack lithium style…
> A 3A boost/buck converter to power the Pi from a battery is not going to be cheap, either. LM2596 costs <$1 and it powers my rtl-adsb for 4 years so far (yes, this is in step-down mode, but you either want a 2S/3S battery anyway, or you use the similar step-up chip).
I have a bunch of "QC3.0/3A Buck converters" for 6-36VDC to USB-A, maybe i should try to run a pi on a SLA Gel 12V battery.
Like the idea. Reconsider the keyboard. If we presume the target users are other than first-world, the likelihood of only have one hand or missing fingers increases significantly. The keyboard becomes very cumbersome. (source: found out the hard way when brought toys that require two hands or all fingers to play with, in worn-torn countries.)
Do you mean the keyboard being split across the screen would be hard to use for those people?
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So true. I recently helped a friend build a little bit of a backyard carpentry project and I was struck by the fact that I got the same creative satisfaction from building little pieces of software. With one big difference: that 2-day carpentry project cost around $1000 in materials. People wanting to create these kinds of things have to pay a big price. Whereas with code (and lots of free-tier cloud services etc) I…
The other big difference is that you generally can’t make mistakes in woodworking. Made a mistake in your code? No problem, you fix the bug. But not in woodworking. Cut a piece too short? You’re hooped. Drilled a hole in the wrong place? You’re hooped. Misalignment during glue-up? Hooped. Woodworking scratches many of the same itches as programming for me, with one key difference: it’s unforgiving of mistakes, so req…
But working with wood a crippling anxiety hangs over me.
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> And the cost of any mistake is in actual real money That's the same in software engineering. You are losing your own time. If you are just breaking your prototypes and not the machines to build them, your time lost is probably multiple times more valuable than the material. I guess, once you have billed a certain number of hours to clients, the relation between time and money just ingrains itself so deep inside you…
That's when you're working for money . If it's your own project, your mistakes cost you nothing but you learn something from every one of them.
Don't you still work for time? If you have achieved something, you can do it again or something similar you might enjoy. Unless what you are doing is completely directionless and you are basically just randomly soldering stuff together, I would say there is still esentially the same loss function as with money.
I give you that the abstraction often makes you feel less pressure in the moment itself. But in the end it is really just an abstraction. Money is just a virtually constructed number we use to control people's time.
> If it's your own project, your mistakes cost you nothing but you learn something from every one of them.
You also learn form professional mistakes.
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> A 3A boost/buck converter to power the Pi from a battery is not going to be cheap, either. LM2596 costs <$1 and it powers my rtl-adsb for 4 years so far (yes, this is in step-down mode, but you either want a 2S/3S battery anyway, or you use the similar step-up chip).
I am not doubting your claim, but it makes me wary since all the "cheap" wallwarts that claimed "2.5A" and now "3A" ran about $10, whereas the official RPI wallwart is double that (maybe $18), and a really awesome 5V PSU that can run two rpi at full TDP costs between $35-$120. I have a bunch of "QC3.0/3A Buck converters" for 6-36VDC to USB-A, maybe i should try to run a pi on a SLA Gel 12V battery.