The idea here is to have a place to post things we’ve found that aren’t project related & don’t really need a whole thread - just a magnet for any ideas/interesting things people find.
This popped up while searching for something totally unrelated - looks awesome:
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That’s awesome. I wonder if we could create one for town map or something
This is quite interesting link to playable city - https://www.playablecity.com/projects/
A few ideas of tech and real world
I had thought of doing an awareness raising thing for mobile device id’s (as well as making anon use of them for footfall/occupancy estimates) - I stumbled across this awareness/art project today:
(The flock of birds in the background makes it hard to read anything, but it’s interesting work)
http://probekit.brangerbriz.com/
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I like that! (Part of me wonders if we’d have to be really careful not to store anything we captured? Capture, display, and throw away.)
I found some materials about energy, so I’m going to dump them here…
An infographic about the balance of sources for UK’s power generation:
Lots more data and some presumably-not-completely-objective articles at Drax:
I see there’s a Europe-wide initiative to measure traffic flows using Raspberry Pi kit installed in people’s houses. Or possibly in their windows - it seems like a camera based system, distinguishing pedestrians, bikes, cars, lorries. A professor at UWE is part of it.
Here’s the mostly-unpopulated map:
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Seems likely the Town Council might be interested in some of this (Phase 2 of the sensors project?)
Could give us insights into traffic flow within the town and, hopefully, the growth of cycle and foot traffic as the message gets out and habits start to change.
Here’s an open source ebook reader - we were discussing low power displays, and this one uses a 4.2 inch e-paper display. As a nice touch, the PCB is not as small as possible, but acts as part of the case, and is annotated with explanation of what each chip is doing.
There are now many models of Raspberry Pi, and they keep getting faster, but it seems they also get quite picky about the power supply. Just because a power cable fits doesn’t mean it will be reliable - it seems even a good cable might lose a tenth of a volt getting from one end to the other. The latest official supplies actually deliver 5.1V at one end, which a cheapo mobile phone charger won’t do.
And as it turns out the power consumption can be very spiky, causing short-term drops in voltage, which aren’t good. As a consequence, there’s often a lightning bolt flashing on the top right corner of the screen, and corresponding messages from the kernel about ‘undervoltage detected’.
There’s a bit of an investigation here, with graphs:
The “CanaKit” supply I got with miy Pi case is 5.1V 3.5A…
…BUT, I’ve been using a RavPower 60W multi-usb port thing (decent quality with USB-C fast charge). It’s 5V, but it’s been totally solid so far (no voltage warnings etc.).
My Pi2 has been running rock solid for a couple of years from the USB output of a “power tower” extension lead. So the Raspberry Pi 2-series was probably less picky.
One thing we know if certain - the supply from an original Chromecast can’t reliably power the 3B+ !
Interestingly the article you linked Ed, mentions adding a capacitor over the power for smoothing - the “power towers” tend to have those (I replaced a cap in another tower of mine that was DOA)
I’d rather fit a smoothing capacitor to a Pi’s header than fit a fan… not that they are addressing the same problem. It sounds like cable resistance is a major factor, so a shorter higher quality cable will always help.
Just came across Makers Making Change who use 3D printing to help people with disabilities. A helpful design with an open license can be printed by anyone, or improved, or adapted.
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This was something I spotted last year - a tech-and-maker-focused festival called EMF.
First tickets for this Summer go on sale today:
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Just found this:
“Papers We Love is a repository of academic computer science papers and a community who loves reading them.”
as mentioned in this talk (“Lets LISP like it’s 1959”):
Google are giving free time on massive computers fitted with their TPU accelerators: you get 100 TPUs for 30 days but it sounds like you barely need to justify yourself and you can keep getting extensions. There’s a ridiculously upbeat comment with some helpful pointers here:
It’s like having a hundred raspberry pis to play with, except every raspberry pi is actually an ubuntu server with 96 CPUs and 330GB of RAM, and it happens to have 8 TPUs, along with a 100Gbit/s link to every other raspberry pi.
Previously Google positioned this as TensorFlow in the cloud, but now it’s more like high performance compute generally: there’s still TensorFlow, but there’s the lower-level libtpu and the higher level Jax, if I’ve understood correctly.
The idea of using 100 theoretically high-performance nodes of anything, in creative ways, greatly appealed to my gamedev background.
It wasn’t till later that I discovered, to my delight, that these weren’t “nodes of anything.”
These are 96 CPU, 330GB RAM, Ubuntu servers.
and
It shouldn’t be obvious that the bandwidth is high enough to train a GPT-3 sized model in any reasonable time frame. It’s still not obvious to me. But at this point, I’ve been amazed by so many things related to TPUs, JAX, and TFRC, that I feel like I’m dancing around in willy wonka’s factory while the door’s wide open. The oompa loompas are singing about “that’s just what the world will do, oompa-loompa they’ll ignore you” while I keep trying to get everybody to stop what they’re doing and step into the factory.
and
TPU VMs just launched a month ago. No one realizes yet that JAX is the React of ML.
JAX on TPU VMs changes everything. In five years, you’ll all look like you’ve been writing websites in assembly.
From “How do I get started with JAX on TPU VMs?”:
- Step 1: apply for the TPU Research Cloud (TRC): TPU Research Cloud
- Step 2: within a few hours, you’ll likely receive an email saying “Congratulations! You have access to for the next 30 days. Click here to begin your free trial.”
- Step 3: Don’t worry about that 30 day number. Just force yourself to activate it right now, tonight.