Hacker News: theacodes

New comment by theacodes in "Prusa's New Open Community License (OCL)"

theacodes — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:39:27 +0000

This license is so laughably bad I had a hard time writing a parody of it [1]. It's not open source, it doesn't accomplish any of its goals, it's not novel in any way. It's a joke, a smokescreen for Prusa and it won't do anything to save him from competition. Good luck, Josef. I'd encourage everyone else to avoid this like it's radioactive.

[1]: https://github.com/theacodes/socl

New comment by theacodes in "Kris Nóva has died"

theacodes — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 20:43:49 +0000

I only ever directly interacted with Kris once, and that's all I needed. She was so kind to me when I reached out for advice and support during an extremely difficult time in my life.

She will be missed so much.

New comment by theacodes in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

theacodes — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 21:33:20 +0000

Sure, it's blog.thea.codes. I write about open source, synthesizers, 3d printers, and PCB design.

New comment by theacodes in "How to improve Python packaging"

theacodes — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 03:54:35 +0000

As the person who implemented the -t flag and knows the horrendously sharp edge cases that it fails on, all I can say is bless your heart.

New comment by theacodes in "How to improve Python packaging"

theacodes — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 03:51:42 +0000

that "political spat" was actually targeted harassment towards a former PyPA member the last time someone actively working on packaging.python.org tried to be remotely opinionated. Since this ended with them stepping away and no one else has volunteered, it remains unopinionated.

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 03:26:43 +0000

I think you're working on some outdated assumptions. As mentioned in the article, the LumenPNP project is successful. Myself and many others have been successfully assembling boards with it since earlier this year. Lumen isn't my project, it's just the machine that the board I designed is intended to work with.

https://github.com/opulo-inc/lumenpnp

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 02:41:31 +0000

You're not wrong, but it's also not the focus of the article. There's a lot of complexity in a pick and place system, for example I didn't even touch on the entirely separate board that's controlling the tool head. If I tried to capture all that at once, I'd be writing an entire textbook, not an article.

If you're interested in how the LumenPnP handles vision, you can check out the OpenPNP project which handles all of the computer vision involved.

https://openpnp.org/

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:18:48 +0000

Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad it was useful.

> why not get it from 24V?

There are DC-DC converters in that same family that can do 4.75~36V -> 3.3V, but since I needed the 5V anyway for the LEDs and I/Os, tossing an inexpensive and small LDO for 5V -> 3.3V is an easy call.

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 23:57:37 +0000

That one seems a bit cumbersome. Drawing schematics and drawing layouts have much different hurdles in terms of performance, it would definitely be a fun challenge. :)

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 21:04:52 +0000

Thank you! For the board layers I just used macOS's screenshot utility, though I would like to do something fancier in the future. The schematics are rendered using code I wrote specifically for this article, but I am planning to publish it as an open source library so others can use it. It needs a little bit more polishing before it's ready, though! You can follow me on Twitter if you wanna get updates about it.

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 19:52:22 +0000

Great question! It really depends. If I'm working with a part I haven't ever worked with before, I'll often make a minimal breakout board that I can talk to with a devboard like an Arduino or Feather.

If I'm pretty familiar with everything, I generally dive into a rough PCB layout and debug from there. If I absolutely can't get anything to work, I'll go back to the drawing board and possibly do some little breakouts, for example: https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1457845661370568709

Edit: for this specific project I did make breakouts for testing the MOSFETs and solenoid drivers. I'm glad I did, since I was able to try out a couple of different options for each: https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1550878465876004865

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 19:40:50 +0000

I'll echo sibling's comment about just doing it. Theory only takes you so far, it's important to actually build and experiment, even if it's just in a simulator.

I can recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors as a solid base of projects to experiment with and learn from. If you want to learn how to improve circuits and optimize for specific behaviors, there is a wealth of information in manufacturer application notes. A lot of the protection circuitry used in my article follows advice found in application notes.

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 19:07:46 +0000

Hi! I'm planning on talking about that in an upcoming post. There's options - you can run 3d printer firmware like Marlin (C++/Arduino) or Klipper (Python & C), the tricky bit is getting those to talk to the vacuum sensors. Communication is via gcode commands sent over USB serial. Most folks are running their Lumen with OpenPNP on the host.

I'm actually running completely custom firmware that I wrote specifically for this board that's written in C and uses Raspberry Pi's pico SDK. It's similar to Marlin/Klipper in that the host communicates via gcode over USB serial and that movement commands are more or less done the same, but it gives me the flexibility to simplify the whole host view of the pneumatics. It absolutely wasn't necessary for me to this, I just wanted to.

New comment by theacodes in "Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040"

theacodes — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 18:57:19 +0000

Author here, thank you for the kind words! My goal is always to write the thing I would've wanted to have when I started out.

New comment by theacodes in "The Design of the Roland Juno Syntheziser's Oscillators"

theacodes — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 22:40:41 +0000

You're correct. The pulse-width of the saw wave is very dependent on the amplitude of the saw, so when there's a 1 volt deficit in the saw wave's amplitude you lose about 8% of the pulse width. It's really not that noticeable in practice, though, and if anything it adds to the sonic character of the juno.

New comment by theacodes in "The Design of the Roland Juno Syntheziser's Oscillators"

theacodes — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:55:53 +0000

Yes, all of the waveforms out of the waveshaper have a DC offset. The synthesizer removes that when mixing them and sending them through the filter.

We need to talk about GitHub: the problem with hosting monoculture

theacodes — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 20:37:24 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.thea.codes/we-need-to-talk-about-github/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24759165

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by theacodes in "Building a Stateless API Proxy"

theacodes — Thu, 30 May 2019 19:26:09 +0000

I hand-drew the illustrations using an iPad pro & photoshop. The code highlighting is using Sphinx + witchhazel.thea.codes.

New comment by theacodes in "Building a Stateless API Proxy"

theacodes — Thu, 30 May 2019 16:01:51 +0000

Okay, it's updated to use OAEP and PSS padding. Thank you!

New comment by theacodes in "Building a Stateless API Proxy"

theacodes — Thu, 30 May 2019 14:05:40 +0000

Yeah! My blog is actually on GitHub if you want to follow or whatever. It's theacodes/blog.thea.codes.