What’s your plan for pricing?

In my opinion: you should bundle this as an offline electron app that can save to the filesystem and get integrated into existing PLM. and/or sell a team plan that offers cloud design & library sync

… and partner with that YC company doing wire harness machines for a “buy now” button

If you haven’t heard it, listen to Sweden or Aria Math.

One example on unmanned boats: a human could radio to the boat over VHF and say “move 100 meters south”… that speech-to-text would feed to an LLM which extracts the meaning and calls the MCP.

I’ll have to install this and play around.

This lets you collect metrics directly from a Mavlink stream, for example from an ArduPilot drone flight controller.

The end result is that you can now use standard telemetry pipeline tools - Telegraf, InfluxDB/VictoriaMetrics/TimescaleDB, and Grafana - to visualize livestreaming and historical data from drones.

I've been using this for the past few months professionally and it's been awesome to be able to use Grafana's graphing capabilities to plot things like vehicle speed, energy consumption, etc.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44009060

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

The path following code is also interesting because I bet you'll run into some corner cases where the A* path thinks a path is feasible, but the vehicle overshoots and hits something. Although in a game I guess that adds to the fun & chaos.

Charts are hand-authored by government hydrography offices and encoded into a format called "S-57". These files contain spatial data for a small area, and different charts cover different zoom levels. This presents a few problems for web apps: Charts of different intended zoom levels cover other data, the full chart dataset is too large to stream, and charts aren't divided into xyz tiles cleanly.

To solve this, I run a bespoke pipeline which processes all nautical chart data into an internal format using PostGIS. From there, I merge all chart data together, overlaying higher accuracy charts over the lower accuracy charts. The pipeline performs a lot of data validation & reconciliation to remove bad data, then simplifies & renders to vector tiles.

PostGIS is critical to this - I started by using a bunch of python geometry manipulation libraries, and slowly shifted more and more of the processing into SQL queries as I realized how fast and intuitive it is.

Hi HN! I'm making Vector Charts, an API product which allows nautical charts to easily be added to web apps. Vector Charts provides a Vector Tile API that you can use to embed nautical charts into any web-based map. We're putting a lot of work into styling and modernizing the map experience so anyone building maritime-related web apps can use charts.

"Nautical Charts" are maritime-specific maps that show the structure of the ocean environment, above and below water. Among other info, they show bathymetry contours, which help avoid boats running aground. They're relied on by both professional and recreational mariners to navigate safely and are a mature technology that's been around for many years.

I've been working in the marine software space for years, and adding nautical charts to web applications is a frequent requirement. But there are a few problems with existing SDKs: First, they're generally too expensive for small web apps, due to the fact that they're designed for safety-critical user interfaces used for navigation on commercial vessels. Second, existing options generally render as raster images, which leads to a blurry or pixelated and cluttered view when used inside a web-based map.

Vector Charts focuses on non-safety-critical web experiences that might benefit from nautical charts, which is a growing segment of the market. We want to be the "Mapbox for Nautical Charts" - The easiest & highest quality option to add nautical charts to a map.

A few examples of where this is useful: A live tracking map for a sailboat race, a watersports logging app, or an unmanned surface vessel C2 software. Anywhere that you're building a web app for a marine setting, nautical charts are likely a better background layer than satellite.

Right now I'm in testing this with customers, improving styling & data quality - So there might be data inconsistencies or missing layers. But the API is live and you can play with it now using the example app!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953490

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

With the exception of low-cost consumer drones, most larger drones have at least a "Flight Controller" (embedded MCU handling guidance, navigation, and control) and a "Flight Computer" (Higher level *nix based computer running autonomy software), and the flight computer is IMO a more appropriate place to put this.

You could encrypt any Mavlink or proprietary protocol at the application layer if you're using an IP link, or you could also just rely on the telemetry radio to perform encryption between the drone and your ground station.

I wonder if the proprietary packet they decoded here is actually just a MAV_CMD_DO_SET_MODE setting the drone into a takeoff flight mode.

Java Edition is the original game and it's fairly easy to either host your own server (The dedicated server is just a .jar you run) or pay for a server ($10-40/mo) using a game server host.

Unsure about bedrock, there's some instructions here (https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/wiki/bds/#wiki_bedrock_de...).

Although many places start with Ubuntu or Debian in my experience it’s common to invest a lot of time and energy in getting out of that unmanaged setup once the company scales.