IIRC, at least 15 years ago, that's exactly what they did. They published a tool suite that your driver should pass before submission because otherwise it would fail when they got to it. I think the submissions were fully automated by that time.
Mine up until a few months ago. Didn't really care because you'd have to stop literally in front of my house to access it. And living on a street with only about 4 properties, that would merit a visit from me asking why you're parked in front of my house.
Yes.
I live in a rural area. The two closest businesses (within 5 miles) are bars. IIRC, both have tie rails so you can ride your horse there. The horse will know the way home, so you just have to stay onboard.
Wife used to be a bartender (somewhere else) and one of the regulars usually showed up on a tractor because he had lost his license. She once fit 3 people plus herself in my 2-seater car as their sober cab.
Sadly, here in the midwest, people driving drunk in small towns is not particularly noteworthy. You learn to be extra careful driving past the bars late at night.
I think you might be surprised to find out how many "real businesses" can't "just reinvest capital" and have to keep struggling on with what they have.
I'm going to forget some details, but he was not using hobby level CNC products. I still have a Kollmorgen AKD motion controller that he sent me as a test bench. Most of the old tools were using 0-10V sawtooth analog outputs for motor position and, IIRC, their preferred controllers didn't support that. The initial version of the box I made took that 0-10V and pretended to be a resolver so the AKD could control the motor.
Like I said, I don't remember all his design decisions, but they wanted to retain the original position sensors.
Have you ever written online about your projects? This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. And your suggestion about a webcam makes me think about a problem a client and I had a couple of years ago that was never solved. It would be a completely controlled visual environment, so an ESP-cam just be the ticket if he's still interested.
Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I've been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies.
Around 2019 or so I was approached by an engineer who had a small business retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls. Think very large lathes and planers. The problem they had was that in order to get these systems working with newer controls, they had to make time-consuming modifications to the old machines, in some cases modifying the axis motors and that cost added up quickly. The engineer realized that it was theoretically possible to take the old analog position signals and convert them into something a modern motion controller could read. That converter box would make the retrofit pretty much plug & play, but he didn't have the programming expertise to make it happen.
We probably built the first iteration of the converter for under $50 in parts and less than 50 hours of development time. That had me searching for other similar opportunities. I have found a few, but they tend to be one-offs that aren't worth the time unless you're already building something similar. Either that or my ability to see opportunity sucks!
If you're interested in the day to day of where the hobby goes, I recommend a browse around /r/projectcar. It's a mix of first time builders, people thinking of getting started, and the old hands doing some absolutely amazing builds.
That sounds odd. The way it was done in every place I worked, is that a set of changes were approved for a release before they were planned and implemented. We organized the work as expected: each bug/feature on its own branch, with its own set of unit tests, etc., and automated testing applied on each commit. These branches are then merged to the integration branch once they are known good. Before the release process starts, QA would get a copy of the integration branch and test that.
The dependency problem doesn't exist, because all the features were already approved to be in the release. The only way there would be a problem is if someone decided late in the game to pull a feature and that feature was a dependency to something else.
Not all buyers are using loans. First house I sold was to someone who refused title insurance because in his words, "that house has been sold 3 times in 10 years, the title's fine."
As an aside, I'm told that Title companies make absolute bank. Most buyers get title insurance, but the insurer very rarely ever has to make a payment.
The problem is that everyone is having that idea at the same time! Posts on /r/embedded asking a related question keep being shut down because there are so many web developers now asking daily how they can get into embedded systems because of a perceived lack of LLM penetration.
No such thing! Companies that aren't already actively using AI for embedded development are looking closely at it and experimenting with procedures to incorporate into their workflow. Why anyone would think that a company would ignore a potential improvement to their bottom line is beyond me.
Yeah, it might take a while, but it will happen faster than you think.
Available for smaller projects (sub-80 hours), consulting, or to just shoot the breeze.
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