wirehead

You can always mock some stuff up and try it out in PrusaSlicer to see how long it thinks it'll take?

Wall thickness potentially depends on the size of the object? I guess 2mm would the the starting point, fill one with soil, see how sturdy it feels. Complexity for 3D printing is "free", kinda. A lot of the best container designs incorporate ribs to strengthen them without using up too much material. Given that the joins are the weak part, you'd potentially want that a lot thicker.

You also want to look at "vase mode". Some of the fastest printing objects you can get on a 3D printer are where you design around the constraints of vase mode and then you can use a fat nozzle with thick layers to print really fast.

You can always print plumbing instead of using PVC pipes? I've definitely seen self-watering pots such that they just have a pipe incorporated into the design such that it just sticks up along the corner. So, worse case, each module has a watering port. If you want to get fancy, you could make a manifold such that a single pipe sticks up in the middle and fills 4 reservoirs, although the fancier the plumbing the more likely you are to have one of them get dried out faster unless your filling routine tops them off.

Yeah, see if you know Python, then OpenSCAD is not a hard jump? One of the reasons why I really like OpenSCAD is that libraries like BOSL2 have parametric joiners and snaps and stuff. And you could totally write modifiers for FreeCAD or Blender to do it, sure, but it's a lot less trouble to get it done with OpenSCAD. This way your end-result would let you input the size of the bed and it would figure out how many sections it needs, etc.

Lesee... 120x40x40cm is a lot of plastic to print, even with a single printer running all day all night.

What I'd suggest is that you make the wooden outside for the 120x40x40cm shelf and make 20cm x 20cm x 40cm units. At which point you can make bigger multi-part modules. It might actually make sense to keep the cups separate because you could adjust the holes and stuff based on the plant's needs. Whereas the reservoir section is going to be happiest as a single tub. But the important part is that if you are a few modules short, just add a spacer for this season. And it gives you more time to experiment on the tub and allows you to swap that out mid-season.

This is pretty darn ambitious for a starter project. I say this as someone who is trying to get some fancy new 3D printable tomato cages going before the plants get tall and dangerous and I've been doing this for a while.

So you really probably want to de-complicate this, either by only making planters that are sized for the printer or finding a existing planter that's the right size but not self-watering and designing just the self-watering part. You'll probably learn a lot about the right way to do one this year and then next year you can attack the next generation of the planters.

The problem with printing in pieces is that you are going to have to make sure that the joints are strong enough for the weight of the soil. This is why using a ready-made outer container might help. In the same way, what you really want is something finger-ish or jigsaw-ish so that the pieces align themselves more easily and interlock.

You will probably want a fatter nozzle, otherwise this is going to take forever to print.

PETG seems to have worked fairly well for me for outdoor stuff? Coating or paint or whatnot is handy. You might want to look at the epoxy family? If you can print on the balcony, you might consider ASA which is totally fine for outdoor use with no paint.

FreeCAD is a bit of a learning curve? The thing that FreeCAD would make easier is a parametric model, where you say that you want a 400 x 400 x 300 planter. Except that if you are really serious about making large self-watering planters that are parametric, you are going to end up wanting to write code to make it all happen, which either means the Python in FreeCAD, the Python in Blender, or maybe just use OpenSCAD.

One avenue, which is also too big of an ask for this season, is making a multi-part model to cast the large pieces in concrete.

Another avenue would be to just design around the outside being wood and the 3D printed parts being brackets and jigs and connectors and the self-watering bits.

My theory is that they are shooting with the spoons and then some team of poor schmucks gets the lucky assignment of burning 12+ hour days 7 days a week to make the spoons look less spoon.

"lucky" assignment.

It kinda makes sense? Spiderman and Deadpool both they spent a lot of time fixing the mask to make the body language work.

There really aren't any simple counterfactual historical arguments to be made.

I have a fairly strong feeling that, of the various shuttle variants studied, the majority of them would have at least been vulnerable to a Columbia level disaster.

Plus, the shuttle was very much overweight and there were a lot of nasty compromises there, so I kinda wonder that if they'd gone for broke with the two stage reusable designs that they'd have ended up just getting cancelled because the more reusable things are, the colder the equations. So you can't even really treat the earlier proposals as something that might have worked out better. There are things that no amount of money can make work. Like faster-than-light travel without a fundamental reassessment of physics.

And then a lot of the things in the late-70s-early-80s vision wouldn't have worked out. There was a giant Microwave Radiometer Satellite project that they were cooking on with a giant antenna with a radius of 1150m. Eventually that survey was completed with a much smaller synthetic aperture radio that sat in the shuttle's cargo bay and today there are lots of tiny SAR survey satellites.

There was another giant geosynchronous dish antenna that was supposed to be a single cell phone satellite for all of the continental US. That was overall a bad idea, Iridium did a better version with less lag in lower orbits, and now we've got Starlink and some new competitors coming online and, overall, cell coverage is actually pretty great with conventional towers.

Then again, here's this paper from 1973. See, the shuttle ended up with a reusable second stage the conventional wisdom was that the second stage is always the expensive one so therefore make that reusable and the first stage can basically be a steel pipe with propellant poured into it and everything's fine and the bulk doesn't matter. Thus, only a madman would reuse the first stage. Which is why they were proposing putting parachutes on the Redstone rockets that Mercury used for reuse but never bothered. But, see, they were going to build this two-stage reusable rocket but wanted to preserve the option of launching large bulky cargo... yeah.

The more I think about it, it'd ruin the magic of the story if "Max" got outed. If "Max" goes public and takes credit and maybe talks through how it worked (especially understanding that you could not pull off the same trick today) that would be cool but ... even ignoring any sort of potential harm it just ruins the spirit of the thing.

I don't know what you are talking about. I can't find it on IMDB.

Yah, I think that using LLM's while ignoring all of the externalities involved is ... everything Solarpunk is in opposition to? There's a rejection of the idea that this thing that looks bad now might pay off down the road because mumble mumble mumble progress.

Take a bicycle. A bicycle allows a person to transport themselves using overall less energy than walking. You can even work through the externalities and maybe make bamboo bikes and stuff and maybe try to carefully optimize the externalities better. But it looks pretty darn good at the start, gets better.

That's not LLMs.

Yah, out here, there's one set of frequencies on the government bands for the officials to use and then ARES/RACES has a set of frequencies in the ham band that we'd plan on using. And, yah, the whole thing about all of community resilience is that it lets them focus more closely on fighting the problem where presumably the more interesting things we'd do is windshield surveys from a car or communications between the ARK's (caches) and POD's (points of distribution).

All of this depends on your geography? There's one the need to have a communicator in a neighborhood, and there's a separate need, maybe, for within the neighborhood.

So, for anything of medium density up, if you have a person or two in a park or other public space with a radio and a clipboard and a yellow vest, people will assume that's the communicator? The case where either FRS/GPRS radios or T-Decks (or both) come in handy is when you can't assume people are going to hit up the public space. And, again, having a trained communicator helps prevent the official and community services from getting overwhelmed. The local ARES/RACES has a defined standard way of using the Modified Mercali scale to collect information quickly in the aftermath of an earthquake, if everybody's telling their stories there's not necessarily actionable information.

Depending on geography, height does play a role. The higher-level better-trained communicators have extendable fiberglass tower thingies to get the antenna 25 feet up in the air. So you might be able to have a solar-battery meshtastic relay on a boom? Couple that with potentially some number of regular meshtastic nodes with fixed installs on buildings...?

And, on the lines of the formwork being something Meshtastic is good at, things like making it easy to collect M-M earthquake values is another potential thing?

Where I live, we've got a set of different community resilience groups, where one of them is CERT (which I'm not part of) and the other one is ARES/RACES (which I joined lately). And I already got a lecture from one of the ARES/RACES guys who is also in CERT that I ought to also join CERT. And, at least for us, both CERT and ARES/RACES come with a badge and background check.

ARES/RACES is, honestly, the biggest slam-dunk? Because part of the problem, at least looking at the experience of things here is that at least some of this needs to be organized ahead of time with identified people who have been background checked. And part of this is that you can generally go all-city with a reasonably priced VHF/UHF handheld, maybe with an antenna tower, worst case with a 50W base station radio.

Except that you need a ham license and you can't just have a set of radios at the caches for people to use. There's some arguments I guess about if the FCC ruling is meant to say that amateurs can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency or randos can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency but presumably the FCC has better things to do. But either way, you kinda need to know a bunch of stuff to use them effectively.

Which isn't entirely a bad thing? Because there's a world of difference between someone who can use a radio and someone who can send a message properly and quickly with the hard words turned into phonetics, etc.

Meshtastic has a lot of desirable properties for EmCom. It's not there yet? I'd like to see it get there.

The big thing is that some solar powered Meshtastic nodes and some other random battery powered nodes have a lot of the positive attributes of a VHF/UHF handheld in that you are going all-city without using up nearly the sort of power that would be required to keep cell phones up to go all-city.

A meshtastic "repeater" is a lot simpler than a UHF/VHF repeater.

But there's problems.

For example, there was a guy who got himself a big fine lately because he was getting on the channels that the firefighters were using and trying to convince them to save some of his land as if he was a fire department worker. Running it in amateur mode with amateur power might be nice, but amateur mode means no encryption.

I lost power on Wednesday and I couldn't really get good cell service. Because everybody just grabs their phone for entertainment. The problem is that you want Meshtastic to have fun uses outside of merely EmCom so people use it and it doesn't just sit there as an abstract concept, but you also don't want it to go down because everybody's bored.

In a comms-down situation, you cannot hand someone a LoRa board with meshtastic on it and let them use it to augment their phone because if there's no cell service, there's no way to get the app.

One fairly concrete problem that hits me is that in ARES/RACES we do packet radio. Part of the thing is that if they do activate CERT and ARES/RACES in an emergency, there's a lot of paperwork to attend to, and it's required because afterwards the insurance companies gotta do their stuff and the city needs to declare how much the disaster cost and everything. Obviously paper sucks and is bulky so the emergency center has packet radio in case the internet is down to send messages. To me it feels like there's a very Meshtastic-friendly application for that specific part of the puzzle. And I think part of that is pub-sub and store-and-forward.

tl;dr: dono. VHF/UHF radios with FM-encoded audio still wins on the "will always work" whereas meshes can fail to work because they are too thin or too oversubscribed. But Meshtastic has a bunch of positive attributes that make it a worthy tool for emcom, with a bit of work.

My dad designed jet engines and nobody made him design a jet engine on the whiteboard. So you are starting from the right place.

We are here where we are today because we spent too much time thinking that acting like the right kind of nerd meant you were a good programmer. There's nothing wrong with going to a job, working hard, and then doing something else. I know very productive engineers who don't have a favorite science fiction book who were great to work with.

Given things lately, I think it's healthy that a lot of people have had to take a step back and realize that their employer would totally harvest their organs for profit if they could get away with it. Providing people the right "tech subculture" cues has resulted in a lot of people working themselves to death and never seeing any income windfalls.

I actively hate a bunch of my old science fiction books from when I was a kid because they were written with what is, to my adult mind, a not-very-subtle fascist bent. There's, obviously, some great novels out there that expand your mind ... but at the same time, there's a lot of the science fiction canon where I'd probably hate working with people who took those books seriously.

And, likewise, there's a lot of people who simply don't have time because they are smart people actually trying to get into the lucrative field of computer science and a good scifi novel reading session is a luxury they just don't have.

"Tell me about your favorite science fiction book" is pretty much a textbook case for how to have good intentions but conduct an interview that's, when you step back and think about it some more, biased. It's checking for subculture-fit in ways that have nothing to do with how they are at work.

On the other hand, whiteboard tests are also useless.

If you want to make a better interview, I'd suggest you have an interview guide. Not a manager? Just write your own for your interviews and keep to it. This protects you from unconsciously giving the person who looks the part easy questions.

If you want to check for culture fit, talk about things at work that matter. Are you worried someone is going to talk down to a junior engineer? Make them talk about a time they had to mentor a junior engineer. Did they succeed? What did they do? Ask them about the best project manager or doc writer they worked with. Are you worried that they aren't serious enough about getting shit done at work? Talk about the worst incident they ever were part of, but not the technical parts, just how they made sure it got fixed. Are you worried that they aren't a good team player? Ask about their best collaborations. Or how they organized work on a large project. Or the time that they took one for the team. If you think through how the last crop of yuppies pissed you off for a while and break it down into questions that they'd not have a good answer to, you should be able to make a nice set of behavioral screening questions and a set of attributes that you want the person to display in their answers.

The way I've been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.

If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we're not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.

Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it's not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.

Conversely, there's a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there's a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.

Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I'm at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is ... risky.