• 13 Posts
  • 653 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As an electronics engineer:

    Small batch (10 or so) fully integrated and assembled PCBs of the type of Airgradient without testing, without a case, and without any certifications will run you probably around $50 per piece. That is without any development time, no 3D modeling time to build a case, no software, engineering hours, testing, etc… Just raw BOM cost.

    Boards are cheap, assembly service at low quantities is expensive. Making 10 PCBs by hand is also an option, but at a low $50 hourly rate, it would probably take 6-8 hours to hand assemble if you factor in 10% board mistakes with hand assembly. That brings you to $80ish per piece with no software or case.

    The other way you can do this is hiring out very low income countries through fixed-rate contracts via fiverr or Upwork. But you will maybe have to shell out around $1000 to get people to actually take the contract, in which case it is only 30% cheaper than the airgradiant kit for vastlt lower build quality.

    Much easier to work with modules and jumper wires, test it yourself, and solder when needed. Soldering station and supplies is $50 total and with modules you can probably get it done a bit roughly for $50 per piece total, but the benefit ia your free time costs nothing money-wise and you learn a lot.

    Yes you can do things yourself for much cheaper than commercial products. The keyword is yourself. You often times can’t hire someone else to do it for cheaper than a commercial product (with exceptions).


  • They don’t want people to innovate. Innovation is a buzzword that they use to market themselves as something other than parasites.

    Most companies want to safely follow market trends to suck away large profit margin with minimal payout to workers. If they make a product that doesn’t work, they just assert that it does and that the customer is wrong.

    That’s also why they intentionally quiet fire seniors like in the article. They don’t give a fuck about quality or innovation. They want the cheapest labor possible while hiking service/product pricing.

    They don’t want employees to be happy. They want them to be cheap and exploitable.

    That is literally the base form of businesses in the flawed reality of capitalism.






  • It’s funny because everyone arguing for phones and tablets for kids is like “hurt durr but their education”

    You know what the vast vast vast majority of kids use the phones and tablets for? Fucking sure as hell that it isn’t education.

    Addicting microtransaction games, social media, and the lowest trash YouTube channels.

    Pretty much every teacher in existence will tell you that phones for young kids have been hell and the kids can’t focus at all and have much more trouble learning.

    And every single person with any awareness at all will know that social media has been an absolute plague to kids social and mental health.

    Sure give a phone to your kid when they are 14, 15, 16. But when they are in primary school it is not needed and they are at the most risk for every bad aspect of phones.





  • Progression has been my absolute favorite.

    Reddit fitness user made it back in the day, works perfectly, super customizable without any terrible subscription.

    There is a companion body composition app for tracking measurement changes.

    Best app I have tried to date except for a while the rest interval alarm would sometimes make podcasts get stuck at a lower volume, but android auto had that problem too, so maybe an android thing.

    Only thing it is lacking is heart rate tracking from a Polar strap for example.



  • How to accurately estimate signal crosstalk and power delivery performance without FEM/MoM simulators.

    For people and companies that can’t afford 25k-300k per year in licence and compute costs, there is yet to be a good standard way to estimate EM performance. Not to mention dedicated simulation machines needed.

    That’s why these companies can charge so damn much. The systems are so complex that making a ton of assumptions to pump out some things by hand or with bulk circuit simulators often doesn’t even get close to real world performance.

    If someone figured out an accurate method without those simulations, the industry could also save a shit ton of compute power and time.