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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • The absolute best thing I ever did in regards to figuring out bike maintenance was to buy a really crappy bike and just try to fix it, similar to what you’ve done. I went into it with the attitude of “if I break stuff, that’s fine, it was super cheap and old anyways” and wasn’t imagining I’d actually get a sound bike out of it. I used park tool YouTube videos mostly, and from that bike (and a few others) I learned how to do pretty much everything maintenance-related short of redoing the seals in a mountain bike fork (and that’s likely coming up soon). Wheel truing is tough but absolutely doable - again, but a really cheap bike (marketplace special), take the wheels off and apart, and just try to get them back together - that’ll force you to true them. Park tool again was an awesome resource for that.
















  • Doesn’t provide enough power for the cost of the cells, plus having to clean and upkeep them. And the more material you cover them with (to protect them; solar cells are INCREDIBLY fragile), the less efficient they are. I was on a solar car team in college and the cells are so fragile that to clean them, we had to use new microfiber cloths every time. Any dust would scratch and ruin them (which made it quite tough when I drove across the outback in the thing). We kept our cells completely uncovered because we needed maximum efficiency - but even with a super light carbon fiber solar car that’s got very minimal tire contact patches, specialized tires from Bridgestone, and a very aerodynamic shape (plus no amenities like A/C), I think our car could sustain something like 10-15 km/h on a perfectly sunny day in the middle of the outback. It just doesn’t add enough on a huge, heavy EV


  • I started with C++ too, and then ended up finding a job writing firmware pretty much all in C. There really hasn’t been anything we’ve run into that’s made us consider switching to C++; being able to (and needing to) have complete control over your memory means you can do some pretty fancy stuff with the tiny amounts of memory on our ASICs.

    We’ve been eyeballing switching to rust a little bit, but really only for other applications; the root of our main code base is over 25 years old at this point and a rewrite would take a Herculean effort.