Hacker News: Ductapemaster

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Reverse Engineering Apple Wallet"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:24:21 +0000

Nordic has newly-released silicon that supports Aliro using Channel Sounding, meaning a UWB chipset becomes optional. Also, NFC is supported directly.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Technologies/Aliro/Produ...

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:37:35 +0000

This is cool! I have recently been building a "life admin" system that is focused around keeping track of bills and insurance reimbursements, and I am currently extending it to support a recipe database. My data model is markdown + CSV, but it has reached a point where a real database would be helpful. I'll check this out as it may be a good migration. Thanks for sharing.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Artemis II fault tolerance"

Ductapemaster — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:55:16 +0000

In simple terms, this works by doing an XOR on the outputs and if they disagree, performing a fault recovery.

There's also space systems that use 3 processors and a majority vote for the correct output, but that's different.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:49:43 +0000

It's not about the whole microcontroller having less than 64kB of memory - it's that each WASM module has a minimum memory size of 64kB, regardless of how much it actually requires. Also, if you need 65kB of memory, you now have to reserve 2 pages, meaning your app now needs 128kB of memory!

We're working on WASM for embedded over at atym.io if you're interested.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Apple Introduces AppleCare One"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:16:02 +0000

I use this app on all my Macbooks — it's great!

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Show HN: Compass CNC – Open-source handheld CNC router"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:30:10 +0000

I've always wanted a Shaper Origin, but the cost and subscription fee required for accessing some features always turned me off. I don't need it for anything other than fun hobby projects and couldn't justify it. Now I get double the fun: building a tool, and getting to use it! Nice work.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Tiny Code Reader: a $7 QR code sensor"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:52:17 +0000

Sadly, Useful Sensors seems to have pivoted to other edge AI tech and no longer sells this or their person detector.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Lightning Detector Circuits"

Ductapemaster — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:38:48 +0000

I spent a LOT of time on this website as a 90's kid. One of many that inspired me to get an EE degree. Projects like this always felt like some incredible magic, and came with an artistic aesthetic that I find inescapably captivating. We've instead got little bits of black epoxy everywhere these days and it's just not the same!

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Proper decoupling capacitor practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind"

Ductapemaster — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:12:35 +0000

Thank you (and the GP) for the correction! I'll admit this lesson came to me a decade ago and I am speaking to a rule of thumb I developed as a result. Time to update my knowledge banks.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Proper decoupling capacitor practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 17:22:43 +0000

On your note about capacitor sizes — at my first EE job, my boss taught me about capacitance-voltage derating[0] for ceramic capacitors and it was quite the revelation. There is a significant inverse relationship between the two, which no one tells you about in college!

I'm now very careful to pick ceramic capacitors with enough headroom on their rated voltage as you lose a lot if you're close to the rated value. This curve is dependent on the different ceramic types as well (C0G, X7R, etc). Cheaper ceramics have a steeper rolloff.

For personal projects I am very careful to pick higher quality ceramics (X7R if I can) and use caps rated to 2-3x my operating voltage. Likely overkill, but I'm not optimizing for cost at volume.

[0] https://resources.altium.com/p/voltage-derating-ceramic-capa...

New comment by Ductapemaster in "A man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive"

Ductapemaster — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:55:33 +0000

I live in Alameda and this place is such a local gem. The owners are really genuine people too. Great place to spend some time!

They also own a whole warehouse out at Alameda Point filled with machines. I know they have provided some form of access to the public in the past, but I'm not sure what that looks like today.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch"

Ductapemaster — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 23:18:10 +0000

As a former Fit owner, I wish I had thought of this! The AC was really bad. We did a lot of road trips and it really struggled out on the long desert highway stretches.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "The Analog Thing: Analog Computing for the Future"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 19:13:05 +0000

Just op-amps and FETs for the active components. The design from my memory was:

- To get position, 2 integrators were applied to an adjustable voltage representing gravity.

- The FETs were used to set initial states of the integrators.

- A comparator used to detect the table (y=0), flip the velocity and apply a scaling factor for restitution

The math was actually quite simple given its just the standard velocity equations — the challenge was in handling state changes in the electronics.

I looked around a little more and this video is a very close replica of what we built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt6RVrmvh-o

New comment by Ductapemaster in "The Analog Thing: Analog Computing for the Future"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:36:58 +0000

In my upper-division analog electronics class (the hard one), our lab project throughout the quarter was to build an analog computer that simulated the physics of a bouncing ball. Physical variables of the system were adjustable (gravity constant, coefficient of restitution, etc), and the ball was "released" by pressing a button. The output was viewed on an oscilloscope.

One of the hardest 10 weeks of my life, but also one of the most rewarding. Our team was one of the few that actually got it working in the end. I had to custom-make a gigantic breadboard to hold the entire circuit.

Today I still work in hardware, but mostly with digital circuits. While my analog knowledge has decayed over the last decade, that project and it's success gives me great confidence any time I have to deal with the domain.

If you want to take a look, here's a pretty similar project: https://www.analogmuseum.org/english/examples/bouncing_ball_...

New comment by Ductapemaster in "The truffle industry is a big scam. Not just truffle oil, everything"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:37:11 +0000

That's really interesting. For me, I very much do NOT enjoy the taste of truffles in restaurant dishes because it's often so overbearing. I just don't find the flavor interesting, and it's very singular.

Perhaps I would enjoy the "real" experience more...

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Starship's Sixth Flight Test"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 20:40:28 +0000

This is a great resource for why Starship is groundbreaking. So much so, it’s not even really comprehensive to the existing space-industrial complex.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

New comment by Ductapemaster in "NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 17:44:36 +0000

Check out this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_9YcehCZo

The source code isn't hiding in a repo somewhere for security reasons — it's spread around on various pieces of paper and computers over the last 50 years. There isn't a single source of truth. Adds a whole other level of wizardry to keeping the thing running.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Fruits (2020)"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:47:55 +0000

It's not quite that simple: https://carnegiemuseums.org/magazine-archive/1997/mayjun/dep...

However, one misnomer remains true — a Strawberry isn't actually a 'berry'.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Fraudsters steal 22 tonnes of high-value cheddar"

Ductapemaster — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:04:01 +0000

Awesome!

That is a vastly more complex machine and action than I was expecting. Seems like there is more to the process than just flipping it over.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "The science of "Zoom fatigue""

Ductapemaster — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 19:49:55 +0000

Unfortunately since it’s an active feature it requires power, meaning any wired headset will require a battery or other power source.

A wired headset plus my mixer gives me an opportunity to tinker and upgrade my setup as I wish, and is all USB powered to boot.

I have some rough plans to make a simple audio interface with built in sidetone for use as a portable setup, but haven’t had the time to turn it into a real product. Someday!