European Space Agency ETV-5 approaches the ISS va7unx.space

Hugh Brown, VA7UNX

What Happened in December 2022 calendar Jan 2, 2023

First thing to mention, which doesn’t really have a category: I walked from my home in New Westminster to UBC in one day; it was about 32km, which is the longest walk I’ve done in one day. I am mulling the possibility of walking across the US when I’m 60, and this is the kind of daily distance I’d want to maintain. I got some good blisters and was sore the next day, but not crippled; I think I could have done that again. It’s a good sign.

Webby

Hardware hacking

  • More work on the weather vane; got it mounted on a peanut butter jar lid. If that sounds silly, then in my defense it turns out to be very handy to have a standalone mount for a project.

  • Made an HTML page to display readings from the weather vane, using javascript to rotate an arrow graphic to reflect the direction it was measuring. Surprisingly handy.

  • Bought an Ikea Vindriktning, aiming to read its measurements directly with an ESP32. Took a while to figure out how to get it working – turns out that a common ground between the ESP32 and the sensor board was necessary to get the UART working – but I think it’s coming along.

  • Took apart a coffee maker that died on us to figure out what was wrong, and it turns out to be a thermal fuse that blew – apparently this is quite common. Will be picking up a replacement and seeing if I can get it going again.

ML/AI/Earth Observation

Space

  • After nearly 5 years of searching, I have finally got a job in the space industry: beginning January 9th 2023, I’ll be working for Wyvern Space. They are building satellites to do high-resolution hyperspectral imaging; my position is senior devops software developer, helping to build and operate their image processing pipeline. I couldn’t be more thrilled. 😁
What Happened in November 2022 calendar Dec 18, 2022

Webby

  • More work on refactoring The Floating Head of Ayn Rand so it’s in modern, standards-compliant HTML. Coming along nicely!

  • More work on the UMich/Coursera Web Design for Everybody course. Continues to be excellent.

  • Tried getting habit working under mod_wsgi in Apache on my home server. Man, this was surprisingly hard: the documentation isn’t great, I couldn’t figure out to adjust URLs properly (serve under /habit rather than just /), and also I suspect I’m doing things sub-optimally. Called it quits after a while, and continued running the Flask development server on my local network (no, not exposed to the Internet); this is good enough for now.

Hardware hacking

  • Tried out using an inexpensive flow meter as an alternative design to measure precipitation. It turns out this sort of works. Precision is good – about four pulses per mL of water – but it takes a fair amount of water column height to get the meter to turn. I was able to accomplish that by using a funnel, and maybe 18" of 1/4" vinyl tubing…but if I didn’t hold it just right, the water would just flow through the meter without actually turning the internal vane.

    On top of that, the original tipping bucket meter seems to be behaving a lot better now that I have tightened up the screws holding the wires that connect the meter and the rest of the equipment.

    I may try this design at home, but for now I’m setting it aside.

What Happened in October 2022 calendar Nov 3, 2022

Trying to get back to doing these things on a regular basis.

Hardware hacking

  • More work on an electronic weather vane, following these instructions. Lots of figuring out what size of bearings I should order.

  • Some soldering to make a battery holder for some ESP32 camera modules I’ve got.

  • Weather station:

    • Try to get the tipping bucket rain meter working; there’s a loose connection somewhere, and periodically I see that Burnaby had 5 metres of rain in the last 24 hours. I never realized just how much you have to pay attention to loose wires.

    • Sketch out a new rain meter based on inexpensive flow meters, then order some. We’ll see how this works.

Webby

  • Going through a number of online courses/resources:

    • Coursera UMich Web Design for Everybody course: excellent, though aimed at people quite new to development of any sort. One thing: I’m lucky enough to have my employer pay for this, but the lecturer, Colleen van Lent, writes:

      My motivation for creating this course content was to spread the mission of free education to everyone. Unfortunately, many of the platform changes has put the material behind paywells. I highly encourage students to take the courses individually (rather than as a specialization) to access them for free. Even then, some of the assignments may be hidden. I am hoping to launch a new more open version in Fall 2018.

    • Shay Howe’s HTML & CSS course; also excellent

    • Javascript.info: awesome walkthrough of JavaScript

  • Trying to get the basics down, then look into React or some other front-end framework.

  • Gotta say, I’m really fascinated by the tie-in between JavaScript and DOM manipulation, which I had not really grokked before.

  • Project-in-progress is a refactoring (not a redesign, as I want the look to remain about the same) of The Floating Head of Ayn Rand, which has been more or less untouched for HOLY CRAP twenty-one years. (State of the art at the time was table-based layout, which I adopted enthusiastically 😬).

  • Changed the CSS for this site to have the post titles be a bit more prominent:

    .posts-list-item-title {
        font-size: xx-large;
    }
    

Data

  • But also web: begin taking up work on the New West Trees page again.
    • Newest feature: adding links to the Wikipedia page for a tree species!
    • Coming soon: adding common names for species (eg: English Oak instead of Quercus robur)…which turns out to be surprisingly tricky.
      • Tried pytaxize, which was a yakshave to get an NCBI API token, then gave me problems re: rate limiting
      • Tried pygbif; better results, but still not great for trees. Example: Quercus palustris is resolved to just “Oak”, but Wikipedia clearly resolves it to “Pin Oak”.
      • But this gave me the idea of trying wikidata or wikispecies; this is up next.
What Happened in September 2022 calendar Oct 6, 2022

Web development:

  • I’ve become interested in web development recently, and have begun working on a habit-tracking project called, unoriginally, Habit. Currently it’s a good exercise for becoming familiar with Javascript, Jquery, Bootstrap, Flask and SQLAlchemy.

Hardware hacking:

  • I ordered a bunch of AI-Thinker ESP32 camera modules from Universal Solder (Canadian vendor of Arduino, ESP32, electronic components, etc; I’m a happy customer & recommend them thoroughly). Started digging into how to make it into a timelapse camera.

Random:

  • I signed up for a free account with [The SDF Public Access UNIX System][3]. I’ve got a totes-real homepage at [http://saintaardvark.unixcab.org][4], just like the old days.

[2]: The SDF Public Access UNIX System [3]: http://sdf.org [4]: http://saintaardvark.unixcab.org

What Happened in August 2022 calendar Sep 9, 2022

Hardware hacking:

  • I ordered a bunch of AI-Thinker ESP32 camera modules from Universal Solder (Canadian vendor of Arduino, ESP32, electronic components, etc; I’m a happy customer & recommend them thoroughly). Started playing around with them.

  • Some work on the electronic windvane.

  • Add a photocell to the office weather station so I could begin to track light levels.

Climate emergency:

Data science/mapping:

Other:

  • I resigned as a Core Contributor of the Libre Space Foundation and the Polaris project. It’s been wonderful to work with these folks, and I wish everyone the best, but it’s time for me to move on.
What Happened in July 2022 calendar Aug 2, 2022

Road trip to Ontario in an EV with my family to visit my parents. Wonderful time.

What Happened in June 2022 calendar Jul 1, 2022

Hardware hacking:

  • Play with EdgeImpulse, an esp32 and an mpu6050; collect gesture data.

  • Got idea to use the mpu6050 for a seismometer; tried logging with MicroPython, and managed to get surprisingly interesting data.

  • Began working on an Arduino-powered weather vane project; fired up 3D printer for first time in a while.

  • Played with ThunderSense and got Bluetooth packets captured with Python.

What Happened in May 2022 calendar Jun 1, 2022

Hardware hacking:

  • More playing with ESP32. Try making an open-window detector with the built-in Hall effect sensor, and sending a Grafana annotation when it’s open.

Programming:

  • Refactor my .emacs files to use a lisp directory, and switch to use-package rather than Cask. This is easily the longest-running project I’ve been working on:
commit 85b1d148afdc135d725498c0384d58e7baa0866d
Author: Hugh Brown <hugh@chibi-laptop-01.(none)>
Date:   Tue Mar 3 21:13:57 2009 -0800

    New repo.

…and that commit came after declaring bankruptcy in the last one.

Data science:

What Happened in April 2022 calendar May 1, 2022

Machine learning

  • Tried out vgg16 as a feature finder for the birdhouse camera, and xgboost as a classifier; 86% accuracy, which isn’t bad.

  • Set up BirdNET-Pi at home – very interesting project

Hardware hacking

  • Try setting up an MQ135 sensor prototype board and hooking it up to a Pi. Mixed results; seemed to show 403PPM, which is at least in the general neighbourhood. But it seems fussy, and takes a lot of warmup time.

  • Ordered some ESP32 chips to play with – Lolin32 Lite from Universal Solder (I’m a very happy customer of theirs). Took a while to get going, but this was mainly because I didn’t realize the USB cables I was trying it with were charging-only – or even that that was a thing. Got MicroPythong going, and wow – wifi set up right away, and with a decent range on it too. Amazing. Played with MicroDot, a web framework in MicroPython that works on ESP32. 🤯🤯🤯

Natural history

What Happened in March 2022 calendar Apr 3, 2022

No ML/DS work this month. But I am beginning to get interested in microscopy, so…

Hardware hacking