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e-_pusher

276 karma · joined September 8, 2017

hi@iskender.ee
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e-_pusher··on Stanford Pupper: low-cost quadruped robot
Awesome project Nathan, kudos to the team. I'd love to use the Stanford Pupper at some point for K-12 outreach efforts myself.

I reviewed your power distribution board. I think it needs more safety features before it can safely be entrusted to the hands of K-12 kids. Couple of comments:

- The battery input is unfused. I would HIGHLY recommend adding one.

- I know you guys wrote in Github about how people should not plug in voltages above 8.4V, and not overdischarge batteries, but I would not trust K-12 kids to follow those instructions :)

It would be best to add a overvoltage, overcurrent and reverse polarity protection circuits. Those are pretty simple and should not take much space on the board. Jerri Ellisworth has a great video where she explains these circuits in detail, and how to make them low-cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ0WXQWND-I

- I would add a schmitt trigger circuit to sense the battery voltage and feed that as a digital input to the Raspberry Pi. If the batteries are too low, the Pi then can throw an audible alarm and disable the servos. This would prevent kids from overdischarging their batteries.

As a future addition, I think it would be sweet to add a Teensy somewhere. Then students would be able to easily add extra sensors and have their robot respond to changes in the environment etc. So much potential for fun.

Congrats again!

e-_pusher··on Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans
Not sure why you are claiming that Facebook has stepped away from AR/VR. I know that Facebook is still hiring quite heavily in the Seattle area for AR/VR HW roles.
e-_pusher··on Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
Sorry to hear this Zach. Best of luck and I hope you will pull through this stronger.

I would look into positions at Microsoft. Since the current CEO Satya Nadella took over, there has been a big push to improve the accessibility of Microsoft products, and I know that there are quite a few blind developers working there.

e-_pusher··on Focus has become more valuable than intelligence (2018)
There is an example of a community like this in Turkey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesin_Mathematics_Village

e-_pusher··on RF Field-Probes PBS 1 / DC to 9GHz
You can still get pretty far with an RTL-SDR attached to them, which can be had for $25. I have successfully debugged radiated EMI issues with the combination of these two:

https://www.amazon.com/seeed-Studio-RF-Explorer-Antenna/dp/B...

https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Define...

e-_pusher··on To hire neurodiverse workers, one firm got rid of job interviews
You are probably thinking of this:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-t...

e-_pusher··on On Being an Engineering Manager
I have found The Manager's Path useful about this. She goes into good detail about what it means to be a manager vs a tech lead, for example.

https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Grow...

e-_pusher··on Ask HN: What are some tech companies that do not use an open floor plan?
Microsoft is slowly switching to open floor plans, but for now a lot of folks have their own offices, or are doubling up at most.
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