The example most people use are farms. The problem often isn’t range, it’s power consumption. The soil moisture sensor or the cow health tracker a mile away needs to run on batteries for a long time.
Unless you need high data rates, LoRa would be a better option instead of wifi. Especially if you need a new chipset anyway.
Also, on range alone, people are pushing LoRa to insane distances: https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/new-lora-distance-record-830-miles/
Thanks! Looks like lots of options out there.
Our power panel is old and we’ve been advised it may need replacing. I briefly looked at Span panels, with built-in energy monitoring, but they’re not cheap. These monitors look like you at least get the data at a much more reasonable price.
How did you get the breakdown? We have a really old panel and may be looking at getting a new one in the next year. Would love to be able to see the breakdowns and figure out where it’s going. FWIW, in PG&E territory.
Good read. Sad ending that all that work ended up nowhere.
Country is doomed. I was the best. January 6th rioters were victims. Inflation is their fault. Criminal immigrants, eating your cats and dogs.
When it came to Roe v Wade, he turned it into state rights (sadly, nobody pointed out that was the same, pro-slavery Civil War argument).
Then she said people in his rallies were bored and were walking out. That’s when he spun out of control…
It was amazing, watching how easy it was for her to get under his thin skin.
Switched over to Fox to see how they were going to spin it.
Hannity was like: “The moderators are lefties. It was 3-1 .”
Then he brought on Rubio, and I clicked away.
NEW feature: As you drive down the road, Ford cars will automatically take over and drive you to the nearest sponsor location. Hungry? It will take over and swerve into the nearest KFC drive-thru. Next stop, CVS pharmacy, then Office Depot.
Disclaimer: Disabling AutoAd feature requires monthly subscription.
When this whole ‘training’ trend started a few years ago, there were companies offering image and video labelling services.
It turned out they were mostly sweatshops in low-income countries, where people sat in front of monitors and just dragged boumding boxes around sections of images and picked from an icon menu. Here’s a car, here’s a person, here’s an apple. That sort of thing. You didn’t even need to know how to read or write.
Of course, the quality was questionable, so they needed a second layer of supervisors verifying the choices. But even with that, the cost was way lower than having an engineer or QA person do it. IIRC, there was a bit of hue and cry when stories came out of big tech companies supporting sweatshop conditions.
Sounds like it’s still ongoing.
Depends on how cheap they get the tags. On AliExpress, you can get current ones for around $5 USD (https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-ibeacon.htm). Wiliot makes battery-free ones with a 10 meter range, but you have to use their service (https://www.wiliot.com/product/iot-pixels). By comparison, UWB runs $20-50 per tag and ~$0.50 for NFC.
If the new tags get down to the $5 range, you can attach them to individual items, crates, or palettes. The amount of time saved in locating and getting the items to a shipping or manufacturing line can be easily measured to see if worth the expense.
Bluetooth tags are usually a lot cheaper than UWB for accurate tracking. But they do require special ‘routers’ for AoA and AoD support. This will supposedly make it cheaper to deploy indoor location applications.
The main use-case isn’t Airtags. It’s warehouse and large retail applications, where a roving scanner can store precise item locations and count inventory. That way, if you need a specific part, it would be easy and faster to find. And if running low on items, the inventory system could instantly order more, instead of catching it at the next weekly/monthly/quarterly inventory count. If the tags cost $ instead of $$$ for UWB, you slap one on every item that comes in the door.
NFC tags are also cheap, but you need to get within cm to pick up signal, or have a powerful, expensive scanner at a portal. Even then, it doesn’t help telling you which shelf in the warehouse the item ended on. The BT ones will.
Gotta hand it to the Bluetooth SIG. They’re rapidly pushing out useful features with each revision.
NEW, automated children’s bicycle. Guaranteed to teach the little tyke how to ride! *
I’ve been using ChatGPT, specialized ones on Huggingface, and a bunch of local ones using ollama. A colleague who is into this deep says Claude is giving him best results.
Thing is, depends on the task. For coding, I’ve found all suck. ChatGPT gets you up to a point, then puts out completely wrong stuff. Gemini, Microsoft, and CodeWhisperer put out half-baked rubbish. If you don’t already know the domain, it will be frustrating finding the bugs.
For images, I’ve tried DALL-E for placeholder graphics. Problem is, if you change a single prompt element to refine the output, it will generate completely different images with no way to go back. Same with Adobe generators. Folks have recommended Stability for related images. Will be trying that next.
Most LLMs are just barely acceptable. Good for casual messing around, but I wouldn’t bet the business on any of them. Once the novelty wears off, and the CFOs tally up the costs, my prediction is a lot of these are going away.
A few jobs ago, everyone hated the tech stack. The people who had come up with it had long left. I talked to everyone, then came up with a plan to transition to a modern stack. Got buy-in from management.
Half the people (and all who had said they hated the status quo) threatened to quit if we made the change.
Fortunately, it was just in time to collect the 1-year retention bonus. Life’s too short. Walked away.
How great-grandpa caught syphilis? Towards the end, doctors said a lot of his ailments were because of that one, little issue. You can speculate, but…
An old, dear friend and his family are in town to drop off his daughter at graduate school. Reconnected with him back in April when I visited his side of the country. Looking forward to having them over and introducing them to my own family.
My kid swears by train-crossing channels on YT.
The otherwise sensible people I know who are still on Twitter all say it’s because of a specific interest or group, and the community of people around it who are all on there as well. They all hate what it’s become but put up with it because nobody is sure where else to go.
There’s also a sense of FOMO when it comes to realtime news updates. Until government, news media, and personalities go somewhere and take all their followers with them, it will be hard to break away.
Last time, it didn’t go so well for the robot:
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security-robot-k5-falls-into-water