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). TunerStudio can log GPS information if you have a serial GPS dongle (and have remembered to configure it, and then remembered to check that TS hasn’t lost the config becuase the USB to /dev/tty* mapping has changed) and obviously MSDroid does it natively being an Android application.
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. All these repos live as bare repos in an imaginitively named directory called git
I resurrected a game I half wrote for the Amiga 35 years ago, but I’m struggling with reading the joystick in fs-uae.
fs-uae to emulate the joystick with the keyboard it works fine.llamatron on the emulator, it works with my shiny new joystickTo probe this further I took the example code from the VSCode Amiga Assembly plugin and hacked it so that the value of JOY1DAT is written into the blitter so I can see some effect on screen. This works with keyboard emulation, but does not respond to the joystick.
Today at work in a Slack mental health channel someone posted this set of definitions to help discussions :-
Neurodiversity The idea that people’s brains work in different ways, and that these differences are natural and normal.
Neurotypical A term used to describe people whose brains function in the way that society expects.
Neurodivergent A term used to describe people whose brains function differently from what is considered typical.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but to me implies a linearity to ’neuro’. It reminded me of this paper (PDF) about the US Airforce trying to define an ‘average’ pilot to optimise cockpit design. The more dimensions you add, the less likely you are to find someone who is ‘average’ in all categories. Personalities are like that, it’s multi-dimensional and there is no ’normal’; there is no ’typical’ that anyone can actually fit to. We all diverge along the multiple axis’ that represent who we are and I hold that ’neurotypical’ should be considered shockingly rare and not ’normal’
I’m currently on holiday with this Debian laptop, a GL.iNet Puli XE300 and a villa full of random network SSIDs. The Puli establishes a WireGuard VPN connection back home using whatever network connection it can. This laptop also has a WireGuard config back home.
What I didn’t want to happen was for the VPN to run on this laptop if I was connected to the Puli as I’d then be tunneling within a tunnel. However I didn’t want to accidentally go naked if I wasn’t connected to the Puli.
I have a Growatt SPH6000 hybrid inverter connected to 2 strings of solar panels and a Growatt GBLI6532 battery. Originally I used the supplied Growatt Shine-S stick (diverting via grott ) to get the lovely data out of it, but I didn’t like having an external dependency, so I decided to try and replace it with an ESP32 running ESPHome.
This is my setup that works for me. There is no guarantee that if you try this, it won’t burn your house down. It may make you fall in love with a penguin and give you nightmares about circus midgets.
I’ve paused my experiment with FreeBSD. It’s good (some parts really good) but I got caught on a number of barbs such as power management and serial ports. I could have nerded harder, but there are other things I need to do.
It did confirm my dislike of the shitshow that is software application management under Ubuntu and it’s derivatives, and it introduced me to ’naked’ Gnome which I actually quite liked. No desktop clutter and simple app launching by pressing ‘Super’ and then typing the start of the app name that I want. ‘T’ is enough to get me a terminal.
Following on from yesterdays post I have fought and won with my printer (by cheating). It’s a Brother HL-L8260CDW, a network capable dual sided laser printer, and I had it working with Linux and OSX using CUPS. How hard could it be?….
@vermaden gave a very detailed answer to my plea on Mastodon. Ultimately not the solution, but a heap of info to point me in the right direction. I learnt how to mount OSX disk images for starters. The OSX ones were no good as they had proprietry binary executables in them so next I went off to Linux ones.