I thought I’d have a play with Copilot to see what it could do as I maintain this blog using VSCode as it is significantly better than both emacs & vi1. I thought a nice simple task would be to add OpenGraph tags the the head of each most. It was more painful than I thought. TL;DR It finally got it right, but it didn’t notice it wasn’t reading the output of it’s own test tools and it happily made assumptions without testing them.
My plane currently weighs 235g (minus a few grammes of control surface connections), but it has a weight problem. I used FreeCAD to design and print a simple balance frame. (I should have put a nice chamfer on the joints) I then removed the battery (27g 600mAh 2S LiPo) and put some scales under the tail. They read 25g. In order to get the plane to balance, I’d need to place the battery somewhere about 300mm in front of the centre of gravity.
It’s A Plane When I was a teenager, I used to belong to the Chester Model Flying Club (which now appears to be defunct :( ) and I flew electric powered gliders of about 2M wingspan. Typically a balsa framework, with a 540 motor and a 6 cell NiCad battery. Power (& skill) were marginal, weight was high, but I had fun. I’ve always hankered getting back into it, partly becuase my route to and from work can go via the Nomansland Common where there are facilities to fly planes.
After my last post I drank some more wine, read the comments it generated and got down to some jolly good proper thinking. I realised that I was distracting myself with standard deviation and such like, and a more empirical approach may work. The rough pseudo code is for each log entry that isn't filtered out by temp/RPM etc Find the AFR in the future by doing a bilinear interpolation on a delay table Find the actual VE by doing a bilinear interpolation on this record Find the target AFR by doing a bilinear interpolation on this record Work out how far out of whack the actual AFR is For each of the 4 cells involved in the current reading, add a weighted adjustment record depending on where the bilinear interpolation lands for each cell that has more adjustment records than the minimum number of hits required Calculate a weighted average adjustment to apply to the cell create a new VE table by applying the adjustments to the base table And it seems to work.
I’ve been doing more fiddling with log file and VE analysis, and I’m a little stumped as to where to go with it next. A Bit Of Background VE analysis is basically looking at what the air/fuel ratio the car is running at at a specific load/speed, comparing that to what we think it should be, and then fiddling with the fueling to get it closer to the ideal. The authors of the original Megasquirt firmware published a PDF that went in the basic maths of this.
Two posts in two days? I’m on a roll! The two main applications in the world of Speeduino/Megasquirt ECU logging are TunerStudio to generate log files and MegaLogViewer to examine them. Whilst they are both very useful applications (I have bought full fat licences for both), they lack position information. When I’m driving my car and it does something weird, I tend to remember where I was (e.g. approaching the roundabout on the A1081) rahter than when I was (5m20s into the drive).
I’ve recently been trying to improve the efficiency of The Supid Car. Fundamentally, within the ECU is a 16 by 16 table of values. One axis is engine speed, the other is the amount of air the engine is trying to suck in. Each cell in the table contains a value that relates to how long the fuel injectors should fire for. There are a bunch of correction factors thrown in for air temperature, engine temperature, how long the engine has been running etc but simply it’s just a lookup on that table.
I recently treated myself to a Creality K1C printer with the purpose of being able to print ABS bits for the Fury. It’s a fabulous printer, much more reliable than the Ender 3 Pro I have (and we won’t even mention the Vertex K8800 that has never worked properly) Anyway, the current mount I have is down on the transmission tunnel, and not easy to glance at. The last time I was in the car, it occured to me I could probably put my phone on the dash behind the steering wheel without blocking the view of anything important.
I’ve found a use for LLMs that I’m comfortable with. Several times I’ve found that I need to write a simple script to do something, but it’s always a grind to do. Why not get a computer to do the grind then? At home I have a NAS called luggage (named for the equivalent in Discworld, but so far the NAS has not sprouted feet) and I host git repositories there so I can easily swap between desktop and laptop without a 3rd party service.
I resurrected a game I half wrote for the Amiga 35 years ago, but I’m struggling with reading the joystick in fs-uae. If I tell fs-uae to emulate the joystick with the keyboard it works fine. If I play llamatron on the emulator, it works with my shiny new joystick If I try to use my joystick with my code that works in 1. it behaves as if it is not there.