Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

Post by leeoniya » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #166

leeoniya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JSON BinPack is space-efficient, but what about runtime-efficiency? > When transmitting data over the Internet, time is the bottleneck, making computation essentially free in comparison. i thought this was an odd sales pitch from the jsonbinpack site, given that a central use-case is IoT, which frequently runs on batteries or power-constrained environments where there's no such thing as "essentially free"

For sure, but radio transmitter time is almost always much more expensive than CPU time! It’s 4mA-20mA vs 180mA on an esp32; having the radio on is a 160mA load! As long as every seven milliseconds compressing saves a millisecond of transmission, your compression algorithm comes out ahead.

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 9:17 PM UTC

jviotti wrote: post #169

freeone3000 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, but radio transmitter time is almost always much more expensive than CPU time! It’s 4mA-20mA vs 180mA on an esp32; having the radio on is a 160mA load! As long as every seven milliseconds compressing saves a millisecond of transmission, your compression algorithm comes out ahead.

Sounds like you are pretty familiar with satellite transmission at the hardware level. If so, I would love to chat to get your brains on it. I don't know much of the hardware constraints myself.