We’re back! Not with rework. This time we’re talking about impedance and review. Apparently I can get into a heated argument about a board before it even gets here. In part one, I wrote about using Codex to design my own hardware because I’m sick of Control4, Savant, and the rest of that shit. The useful part wasn’t one-shotting a PCB. It was having the agent work through datasheets, compare parts, and check the design. Then I had to notice that the connectors were facing the wrong fucking way. There was more to review. Which board are we arguing about? I was talking through the Sensor Hub’s…
Fuck1 it, we’re doing consumer hardware for ourselves now and getting fucked by economies of scale, I guess. This all started with me buying some Olimex Bluetooth proxies for Home Assistant. Then I started looking at the components and wondering if I could get better range. Now I’m designing boards, displays, and enclosures, and emailing manufacturers because their bezels are enormous. I’ve ordered the first two boards: a Bluetooth sensor hub and a little maintenance display. I’ve been working on this in Codex, and this post is going to go through what it was good at, where it got stuck or…
DUM-E (“dummy”) and U (“you”) are the names of the robot arms in the Iron Man movies. After watching this movie for the n-teenth time, I have a strong urge to also have robotic arms in a workshop like Tony Stark. You can see the value of the robots clearly throughout the movie. The robots allow Tony to produce suits more quickly, help test the suits, and provide periodic comedic relief. At one point, DUM-E even saves Tony’s life. As a bit of a thought experiment, I considered what it would take to get the same functionality in reality. What this ends up leading to is a configuration…
Tesla had its first Battery Day on September 22nd, 20201. What a fantastic world we live in that we can witness the first Apple-like keynote for batteries. Batteries are a part of our everyday life; without them, the world would be a much different place. Your cellphone, flashlight, tablet, laptops, drones, cars, and other devices would not be portable and operational without batteries. At the heart of it, batteries store chemical energy and convert it into electrical energy. The chemical reaction in a battery involves the flow of electrons from one electrode to another. When a battery is…
I previously wrote a bit about our internal infrastructure in my post on The Art of Automation. This post is going to go into details about our automated Chief infrastructure Officer (CIO). I joke so much that I automated our CIO that I even named the repo holding the code… cio. I took the time this weekend to finally clean up some of this code. Previously, our infrastructure was held together with bash, popsicle sticks, glue, and some rust. Now, it is mostly rust and a much more sane architecture to grok. We also get the freedom of caching all our data in a database that we own so we can…
I have wanted a 3D printer for a very long time. I hope you can tell from my ACM Queue column that I like to do a lot of research and I tend to want the best thing. I had been keeping my eyes on the 3D printer product space for quite some time. This article is going to go over the technical details behind 3D printing as well as my experience with two different products. When I finally decided to buy a 3D printer, I wanted to try ones that used different additive manufacturing processes: material extrusion via fused deposition modeling (FDM) and vat polymerization via stereolithography (SLA)1.…
My mom has a tendency to buy these really terribly spec’d Windows machines. She’s been doing it for as long as I’ve been alive. I was surprised when on one of our latest Zoom calls she said “You know what, I’m beginning to think that size matters.” I’ve only been telling her this for years! Here’s the problem. There are a bunch of shitty Windows machines you can buy that cost around $400 dollars and have something like 4GB RAM. For consumers, this is really compelling; the price seems right. The problem is when they start trying to use the machine to do anything, it runs at a snails pace and…
Being cooped up at home got me looking into the new Xbox and PlayStation 5. I was curious about the innovations in the consoles since their successors. Both claim to have ray tracing and support for 8K graphics. This then got me thinking about how prevalent 8K televisions are today. 8K televisions seem to be in the same state as 4K televisions a few years ago. One thing I know through my life is that pixel density will continue to get bigger and bigger. I almost wonder if there is a Moore’s Law equivalent for pixel density… let’s take a look at televisions through the years. Pixel density…
I am unsure if my love of automation comes from a dislike of doing the same thing twice or an overall desire to be more productive and make everything more efficient. Like a lot of programmers, I often ask myself “can this be scripted” when I find myself doing a manual task. I was inspired recently by reading Wolfram’s writing on his personal infrastructure for productivity1. I, too, have written about my personal infrastructure2, but not at the level of depth or with the same focus on productivity as Wolfram. There is no time like the present to take another swing at it! Not only do I want…
A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways as newer, better, and faster mediums of storage are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing logical state. In the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a specific place. If we go even further back in time to Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a bit was stored as the position of a mechanical gear or lever. For magnetic storage devices, such as tapes and disks,…
When you upload photos to Instagram, back up your phone to “the cloud”, send an email through GMail, or save a document in a storage application like Dropbox or Google Drive, your data is being saved in a data center. These data centers are airplane hangar-sized warehouses, packed to the brim with racks of servers and cooling mechanisms. Depending on the application you are using you are likely hitting one of Facebook’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, or Microsoft’s data centers. Aside from those major players, which we will call the “hyperscalers”, many other companies run their own data centers or…
I had a lot of fun writing blog posts in the past about my home lab and some of my personal infrastructure so I thought I would do the same as we built out our office. Much like moving into a new place, the first thing I always plan to have setup on move-in day is internet. We did the same with our office as well. Before we even had any real furniture, we made sure that we had a network connection. You may recognize that furniture from the garage. For the office I really wanted our network infrastructure to be off-the-charts good. Everyone knows shitty internet is a productivity killer. Since…
WE STARTED A COMPUTER COMPANY!! You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to say that! I guess some context would help… Steve Tuck, Bryan Cantrill, and I officially started the Oxide Computer Company. Since then, we’ve been working on closing up fundraising, getting an awesome office, and hiring! You are probably thinking “a computer company? that’s outrageous!”.. well it is and it isn’t. Over the last year, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time talking with folks who are currently running workloads on premises. The consensus from all my conversations has been that everyone setting…
Last week I attended the Open Source Firmware Conference. It was amazing! The talks, people, and overall feel of the conference really left me feeling inspired and lucky to attend. Having been pushed to attend vendor conferences and trade shows through my career for various jobs, it was so refreshing to have the chance to hang out with folks from such a genuine community that really just want to help one another. When the talks hit YouTube you should be sure to check them out (I also tweeted about a few of them). What I will focus on in this post was the last two days of the conference that…
At lunch today I learned about Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) which is an implementation of transactional memory. The conversation started as a rant about why transactional memory is bad but then it evolved into how this concept even came to be and how it even got implemented if it’s such a terrible idea. What is transactional memory? First let’s start by going over what transactional memory is. You might be familiar with a deadlock. A deadlock occurs when a process or thread is waiting for a specific resource, which is also waiting on a different resource that is being held…
Hello! I thought it would be fun to write a post aimed towards business leaders making technology decisions for their organizations. There is a lot of hype in our field and little truth behind the hype. Like most things I write about, this started from an idea I had on Twitter: has anyone ever done technical breakdowns of these products in Gartner reports that are actually just trash, is this something you'd read..?— jessie frazelle 👩🏼🚀 (@jessfraz) July 24, 2019 This post will cover some hard truths of Kubernetes and what it means for your organization and business. You might have heard…
Below is the foreward for the new book on Linux Observability with BPF by two of my favorite programmers, David Calavera and Lorenzo Fontana! I was pretty stoked about getting to write the foreward, I asked O’Reilly if I could publish it on my blog as well and they said yes. I hope you all check out this book and share what you’ve built after! As a programmer (and a self confessed dweeb) I like to stay up to date on the latest additions to various kernels and research in computing. When I first played around with Berkeley Packet Filters (BPF) and Express Data Path (XDP) in Linux I was in…
“Can I get an encore, do you want more” - Jay-Z I recently read Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing about Hard Things. It’s really eye opening and creates a level of empathy in the reader for leaders that make hard decisions every day. It covers everything from how to know your company is toxic to how to do layoffs. Ben starts each chapter with a rap quote so as did I above ;) obviously I chose Jay-Z but I also love Tupac, as is shown by my first blog post ever. I have a corollary to this: power dynamics. I, personally, have seen and experienced what it is like being a leader when no one…
I gave a talk recently at GoTo Chicago on Why open source firmware is important and I thought it would be nice to also write a blog post with my findings. This post will focus on why open source firmware is important for security. Privilege Levels In your typical “stack” today you have the various levels of privileges. Ring 3 - Userspace: has the least amount of privileges, short of there being a sandbox in userspace that is restricted further. Ring 0 - Kernel: The operating system kernel, for open source operating systems you get visibility into the code behind this. Ring -1 - Hypervisor:…
Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with the Transposit team in San Francisco. Tech is a super small world and it turns out the two founders and I are separated by one-degree through several different people we know. In meeting them I closed many loops without even realizing it, but I digress… Their product is really cool, it exposes a SQL interface for interacting with numerous APIs at once. For someone like myself who deploys a lot of bots, this is great. Usually when I have a complex bot I end up writing a lot of “glue code” to combine a few different APIs and get the information I…
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