msadowski

Nice one! As a ROS user I'm looking forward to learn more about RDBOX as it's the first time I've came across it.

I'll also feature it in Weekly Robotics (https://weeklyrobotics.com/)!

This looks amazing and I truly hope it comes with an API. Back in a day when I was working on drone autopilots we were using X-Plane to develop Hardware In The Loop (basically a drone autopilot piloting a simulated aircraft).

Fun times on the tuning side (especially helicopters were tricky) and having a Blackbird fly in an automatic mode was pretty good too!

It's actually not that dangerous. Where I am the speed is measured about 200-300 meters from the traffic light. The traffic light changes when you are at a point where you can still slowly come to a stop - you won't be anywhere near a situation where the light changes to yellow as you are about to enter the intersection.

Get the first client, then another. That's what have worked for me in Robotics. IMO the most important thing is to find some good first projects in your field.

UpWork had worked very well for me but I know of some people that have issues with it.

Tl;dr: knowing a language of a country is a plus when relocating; weather varies between countries; your expenses depend on your lifestyle and some countries are more expensive than the others.

What's even more sad is that he was horribly tortured while in prison.

I recommend reading his Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki.

In 1948 Pilecki was executed by communists after a show trial.

The Polish entry has a bit more info (https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki). What is horrifying are his words during the last seeing of his wife: "Auschwitz was a plaything". While in arrest he was tortured: the denailed his feet, crushed his genitals, impaled him on a table leg.

Hi HN!

I've recently decided to branch off my robotics newsletter slightly and start recording podcasts when I have some spare time.

In this episode I've interviewed Auke Ijspeert, a professor at EPFL, who focuses on bioinspired robots. I've learned a ton making this episode and hope you will too!

What worked for me was quitting and starting working as a freelancer. I'm not sure there is a burnout scale but I'd say I was around 7/10 I felt quite miserable at work. I don't think I was fully depressed but I knew that if I didn't change anything then I'd have issues.

Before I quit I did one solid project on UpWork and had about 6 months of runway funds saved and I was very lucky that my girlfriend would support me if things went south. My plan was to quit, try to find more projects and worst case start job hunting after 6 months.

Things worked out really well, I'm approaching year 2 as a solo consultant and I'm loving my job. When I think of my burnout times I realized much later on how risky my approach was and in normal circumstances I wouldn't do it.

I would advise to only follow my approach if you have a solid plan or circumstances that make it a low risk. Remember that your well being is most important. If you can be happier in a job that pays less money then it might be worth it!

Would you have any advice on choosing a quality pillow?

Thanks for the feedback, will try to make the about page clearer in the future.

My background is Robotics (studied Mechatronics on university). Currently mostly focusing on software part of robotics through Robot Operating System. I work as a robotics consultant/contractor/freelancer.

Hope that clears it a bit :)

This reminds me of a 'rule' in Poland that you shouldn't get married in a month with an 'r' in it.

Recently there was a project on Hackaday where someone created an R/C gyrocar: https://hackaday.com/2019/09/06/who-needs-four-wheels-when-y...

The project is quite neat!

Very good article! The only point that I don't agree with is about not freelancing websites.

When I started consulting/contacting 1.5 years ago I did start with a freelance site and at this time about 90% of my jobs still come from there. I would much rather have clients from outside of the platform but I don't find it easy to close them.

I need to point out that I'm in a very niche field (at least on Upwork); On average month I see about 3-5 quality jobs I can apply to and quite often I see them getting less than 5 proposals. I expect this wouldn't be a case for web development projects.

Lem made quite a good prediction about ebook readers:

"The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it."

In old Polish sci-fi I really appreciated the sociological aspect of some of the books, especially these written by Janusz Zajdel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Zajdel). Unfortunately it seems none of his work was translated to English.

In Zajdel's Limes Inferior we have a society divided into classes. The monetary system was divided into points (green, red and yellow) and being in the lowest class you would only earn green points that should cover necessities. For premium items you would need red or yellow points. There is of course a black market exchanges etc. Another interesting concept from this book were 'keys' - every one had their own andb they were used as an id and a wallet for the points (I think they would perform similar functions to mobile phones of today).

I used to love this game and find it good even now for some lan parties!

Very well written article! I'm in a position where I can work from home if I want to but I found out that it's not for me.

Firstly I'm way more productive in the office and no matter how much I tried I couldn't reach the same level of productivity at home.

When I worked from home many days in a row I realized I was missing a human contact. Even though I was with my girlfriend every evening, was around people in the shop and in the gym I felt quite depressed.

Strangely I had some weeks when I was the only one working in the coworking space and I didn't feel like this.

Here is what I don't understand about this: where is innovation in this patent? It seems like some of the digital photo frames could be used as a prior art.

As an outsider it looks to me that the US patent system is seriously limiting your innovation.

Yes! I like your attitude and I think that many companies could use it. I was inspired into thinking along these lines after reading "Let my People Go Surfing" and if I ever start a proper company then I'd love to hold similar values to yours.

Right now I'm working as a consultant, early on I decided that I'm going to donate 1% of my revenue to 1% For The Planet. One other value that I chose to follow was that health > work and having this attitude I visit the gym 3 times a week, no matter how things are at my consultancy.

I hope that I can keep these values as I move to setting up a proper company out of my activity.

I love tmux and use it extensively in my workflow. One thing that I found very useful was binding "synchronize panes" to ctrl+b+e combination, this allows me to quickly modify the configurations.

tmuxp is also a great tool for creating predefined layouts. Personally I store a config for every client and by typing "tmuxp load client_config" my session is immediatelly available and I can get productive within seconds.

I came across this simulator while doing research for my Weekly Robotics project[1] and found it very satisfying to watch. If you'd like to learn more about the project then here is the link to the publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.03372 and a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPaof0kKdM

[1] https://weeklyrobotics.com/

That looks awesome! I have Realsense d435i and would love to test it out. I'll have an in depth look at it later but I'd love to share it in my mostly open source list: https://github.com/msadowski/awesome-weekly-robotics

I quite appreciated Rodney's paper from 1985 titled "A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot" [1]. I'm sometimes wondering if mobile robotics would look much different without this paper or if we would arrive to something similar anyway.

I even asked Rodney Brooks whether the results of this paper were applied on some robot platform as a follow up research and received a very interesting reply [2]. I agree that I might have worded it poorly but it's still one of my favourite tweets.

[1] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160833.pdf [2] https://twitter.com/WeeklyRobotics/status/105775034299205222...

I know this content doesn't get too much traction on HN but I wanted to highlight two pieces from today's issue:

Acutronic Robotics closing down [1] - I personally think that this is kind of a big deal for the ROS community. Acutronic Robotics was heavily involved in ROS2 development, micro-ROS project [2] and developed H-ROS [3].

BettleCam 10th Birthday Video [4] - this was the first time I learned about BettleCam - a robot for taking photographs of wildlife. I really enjoyed the video and the anecdotes about the robot meeting wild animals (often not surviving these).

[1] https://acutronicrobotics.com/news/acutronic-robotics-closes...

[2] https://micro-ros.github.io/

[3] https://acutronicrobotics.com/technology/H-ROS/

[4] https://youtu.be/EsEQVWyvI80

So much stuff! I was surprised to see so many boots and hammocks.

You can see the work log online that contains all the screenshots and most probably camera shots too (never had to use it so I'm not 100% sure).

I think the way to know that your camera is on is to look at the little LED next to your camera and hoping UpWork didn't find a way around it.

UpWork doesn't do filming using your camera, only takes a picture every ~10 minutes. Also the picture taking is optional and can be disabled by client (Throughout 1 year working on UpWork I never had a project which required of me the camera bit). The screenshot taking is required for payment protection.

I've been using UpWork for over a year now and never had a dispute so far.

The author is right in saying that UpWork only guarantees payment when time tracking using their app. Where he is mistaken though is where he says that the app requires camera to be on at all times. There is such an option but personally I'd never go for a project like this. And yes, the app will take the screenshot of the stuff you are working on.

I don't get why author's customer would launch a dispute over not completing a 10 minute survey. Given that it was an hourly project I bet there were issues with communication and perhaps the author should have double checked with the client before closing the job.

UpWork is far from being flawless but for me it has been working quite ok.

I'm working on Robotics Newsletter : https://weeklyrobotics.com/

That has been going quite ok for the past few months.

Another side thing I'm working on is a set of tutorials for Robot Operating System but that one I started just couple of weeks ago.

If you have a budget you can go for robotics. I'd recommend getting a Lego Mindstorms kit, they usually come with ideas for builds (both hardware and software).

When I was presenting this to 10 year olds couple of years back they loved it! With mindstorms you can make it very interactive, you could easily do a show and tell of programming it with block diagrams.

You will most likely have a lot of fun yourself!