Hello world. March felt busy.

Polaris

The Libre Space Foundation (and thus Polaris) was accepted for the Google Summer of Code, and we had bunch of awesome students show up in our chat room. A lot of work came out of that: coaching students, evaluating their MRs, giving early feedback on proposals, and helping them find their way through the codebase and the problems. But these are definitely good problems to have!
I prepared an initial analysis of data from the QUBIK satellites; the data was from integration testing, and we’re hoping to compare it with what we receive afterward. You can see the graphs for QUBIK-1 and QUBIK-2. Next up will be adding info to our documentationto show how we did this.
A short blurb about Polaris will be going out in the IAF newsletter, which is cool!

Machine learning

Finished up tracking down a bug in Detecto, a wrapper around PyTorch for object detection.
Dig into more options for image augmentation, including Albumentation
Came up with a rough prototype for the Dishwasher Loading Critic: a (poorly) trained model, sitting behind an API written in Fast, with a copied bootstrap template. I was able to post pictures to it from my phone & get some (poor) bounding boxes around things. Progress!
Still trying to figure out where I want to go with this project: stick with Detecto, or move to PyTorch? I’d like to do the latter, but I have a lot of learning to do there.
Got LSP-mode enabled for Emacs. Interesting, and I suspect this will be a way forward for Emacs.
Tried Paperspace again after their upgrade, and WOW: it’s blazingly fast to start up. I’m going to re-open my account with them again.

Finally got Fedora 33 installed on an Intel NUC. The problem had been that wifi did not work after installation, even though it worked during installation. Turns out there’s a bug where wpa-supplicant is not installed during installation; installing it afterward by hand did the trick.
Learned about nftables…huh.

First prototype of anemometer working – I’m now able to get RPM read and displayed in Grafana. Apparently, the best option open to me for calibrating this thing is to use a car: hold it out the window, go at a set speed, and take measurements.