Hacker News: robhawkes

New comment by robhawkes in "My grandad built the original R2-D2 for the first Star Wars film"

robhawkes — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:01:57 +0000

The link shows a photo of my grandad with the original R2-D2 he built for the first Star Wars film…

Jack was a master sheet metal worker, and was roped into using his skills on an obscure project to turn the sketches for the droid into something that could be constructed out of aluminium sheets.

I always knew he'd helped make part of R2-D2. However I only found this photo in recent years and have since learned that he was actually instrumental to the construction of the entire droid, particularly with working out how to machine the complex shapes like the dome and legs out of single sheets of aluminium.

He didn't just build one either, he ended up constructing a handful of the droids for various uses in the film. I still have no idea how he did it, especially without modern software and computer-controlled machining.

Unfortunately I never got to know him as he died when I was a baby, though I have a feeling we share a lot in common.

I also have his old Dragon 32 computer that he was using to learn programming in the 1980s, with reams of hand-written code that still works on the computer.

My grandad built the original R2-D2 for the first Star Wars film

robhawkes — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:00:50 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/robhawkes/status/2051228871064756592

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007079

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:15:09 +0000

Those are NESO (system operator) grid boundaries. The colours represent the forecast flow of energy over each boundary in relation to the capacity of each boundary. Green means lots of extra capacity, red means over capacity. When a boundary exceed capacity it's likely that this constraint will result in wind farms being turned off to reduce output "behind" the constraint.

The black dots are wind farms and other power assets that don't have any generation data. This is usually because they aren't connected to the transmission system, not that they aren't actually outputting. Or to put it another way, I only have data on power assets connected directly to the main transmission grid.

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:05:54 +0000

Thanks! The ultimate fix is to finish upgrading the aging grid. There are other things that can improve the situation however, such as building wind farms away from these constraints, storage (but these can sometimes exacerbate constraints), demand flexibility (eg. place demand above constraints), zonal/regional pricing, and probably more I can't remember off the top of my head.

The demand flexibility aspect is already being explored: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:03:32 +0000

Yup! Looks like it'll be some form of regional demand flexibility, similar to what suppliers like Octopus Energy (disclaimer: my employer) and others have experimented with over the past few years.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:25:12 +0000

Not at all, my stuff is very niche and the other websites and dashboards do a much better job at filling in the higher-level context.

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:20:58 +0000

Indeed! That's including available wind generation that was curtailed (not used) due to transmission constraints. So it's the actual output plus the amount of output that was "lost" because we had to switch off some wind farms, even though the wind was there to generate more.

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:19:39 +0000

I shed a little more light on the context via my map which you can also find linked on the page: https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:18:45 +0000

Thanks! Always a surprise and a pleasure seeing my stuff on here

New comment by robhawkes in "UK total wind generation record beaten today"

robhawkes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:13:27 +0000

Oh cool, that's my website! Let me know if you have any questions about it and I'll do my best to answer them.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:56:59 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:56:28 +0000

That's correct, it's using data from Open Infrastructure Map which is itself based on OpenStreetMap data. That's a good idea to zoom in further to show them off a bit more.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:55:48 +0000

Oh wow that's a blast from the past, feels like a lifetime ago! And thank you.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:10:15 +0000

Ah yeah the FAQ is very out of date and in need of a full rewrite. I'll get to that eventually. And you're right, I'll make sure to add some sort of glossary and perhaps also explain things better in-situ.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:09:09 +0000

Thanks! I would love to make this something that works beyond GB though right now that would require a fundamental change to the way things are set up. It's on my list though, so one day.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:45:22 +0000

I actually have plans to include Ireland and Northern Ireland once I get the GB side nailed down. The data seems to be mostly available though I'd have to really think about how to make it work well on the app as it'd be a pretty fundamental change to how things currently work (assumes a single market).

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:23:13 +0000

I'll make sure to get the about page updated soon, it's been a bit neglected with being so focussed on the recent upgrades. Definitely a lot I can explain better, and also ways that I can solve that with better UX in general.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:06:47 +0000

Yup, that's exactly it! When you zoom in you get to see the wind farms and wind turbines using data from the amazing Open Infrastructure Map [0]. I also show the cables for the offshore wind farms.

[0] https://openinframap.org/

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:00:43 +0000

Tech stack is a mix of things, but the big-ticket items:

- Dagster for data pipeline

- Parquet files for data format

- Cloudflare R2 for data storage

- DuckDB for data processing

- NodeJS for API

- NextJS + React for the app

- MapLibre for the base map functionality

- Deck.gl for the complex map layer (eg. wind particles)

- WeatherLayers (+ GFS) for the wind particles

- Cloudflare as a caching layer

The main difficulty was learning about the underlying data and industry nuances. I've been working on this map the past few years and I'm still learning new things that force me to change my approach. It's an incredibly complex domain and it's part of the reason I made this, to try and make this complex data a bit more digestible.

New comment by robhawkes in "GB Renewables Map"

robhawkes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:57:13 +0000

The lines are sort of arbitrary in a geographic sense as in reality they are defined based on the intersection with the schematic version of the transmission network [0]. Though yeah, that specific example is an odd one and I'd be interested to understand more about why it was placed in one boundary and not the other.

[0] https://www.neso.energy/data-portal/day-ahead-constraint-flo...