Looking back, funnily the top comment drew a parallel to negotiating USB-PD in u-boot, aka the bootloader. I suppose this wouldn’t have worked for your case though, since your device couldn’t boot at all on 5V.
Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/
That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
Is it necessary to prevent the water from freezing? If the chamber and water within are subzero while the SoC produces sufficient heat, the ice would simply melt.
* Edit: the article mentioned freezing could crack the seal. Freezing would be a bigger issue than I had thought, then.
I remember being stuck on a ski lift on a day that was too cold and windy for any intelligent person to be skiing. The phone in my breast pocket was cold to the touch and the battery capacity evaporated by 50%. The display's response time was hundreds of ms. I turned it off at that point.
Not a huge deal. Just charge it when it's warmer. I would have been a little surprised if something inside popped and suddenly the phone started thermal throttling or had water damage.
In my city, temperatures are regularly below -20 Celsius and sometimes below -40. iPhone just doesn't work. You need to keep it close to body and you can't use it outside for a prolonged period of time, it'll simply shut off in a few minutes and won't turn on until you heat it.
Old phones and some android phones work just fine in these conditions.
I applaud his efforts to document this what must’ve been a nightmare of a case for him. But it felt like a lot of the wording is speculative or hyperbolic in nature and aggressively tries to paint Volvo in a bad light. For example:
“Analysis of Volvo's Final Response: This response … confirms Volvo's complete abandonment of customer responsibility…This is Volvo's definition of ‘customer care’ in 2025.”
“Center Display Failure - Critical Interface Blackout: Main Controls Inaccessible”
“Climate Control Malfunction - Climate System Override: Controls Unresponsive Despite Interface Status”
“Complete Center Screen Malfunction - Total System Breakdown: Hard Reset Failed to Restore Screen”
I know little about Volvo or this case; I’m choosing to offer them some benefits of doubt. Comms and decision making are prone to break down on the corporate ladder. Volvo had no doubt fumbled his case badly but I’m not convinced it is indicative of the company’s overall customer support policy. Sure, the main touchscreen had failed. But how is this an “override” of HVAC or a “total system breakdown”? And what’s the “system” anyways? On top of all that, these subtitle summaries smell like AI.
I don’t deny that Volvo has a lot to answer for. Though the choice of these instigating descriptions might not be the best one giving the author is actively pursuing litigation.
> But it felt like a lot of the wording is speculative or hyperbolic in nature and aggressively tries to paint Volvo in a bad light. For example:
Part of it is that he clearly used ChatGPT or Claude to write the prose. (I really should not have to explain how, despite not reading the OP at all, your example quote alone establishes that. You see this kind of hyperbolic unordered list/checklist all the time now. This seems like more of a Claude tic, but could also be ChatGPT due to sheer base rates.)
Being sycophantic and ordered to write polemic, a LLM'll go overboard.
I don't think I'd spend 150k for a car, I imagine it would create a certain sense of entitlement, but he does sound pretty annoying.
It's just an order mess-up, but opening with stuff like: "Sent a formal complaint to Volvo Canada on January 16, requesting escalation to Managing Director Matt Girgis. Volvo Canada never confirmed this escalation." is a vibe.
He puts down a deposit, and waits almost a year, then experiences multiple delays. He seems to be experiencing multiple issues before he requests escalation. I don't think he opens with escalation request in a second email. His vibe seems to be of someone being ignored and just told to deal with it, and not willing to just accept something less than the original agreement.
What would be a "better" vibe than requesting an escalation? if you buy something and you don't get something you've bought? Just say "oh well, it is what it is"?
Ordering a custom car build from a factory is an experience. These sorts of delays are not uncommon, and there just isn't much anything the US or Canadian divisions can do about it most of the time.
That's for basically what amounts to supercars. I imagine a normal luxury car for the "mass market" like the EX90 is going to get even less attention.
For someone not used to it, I can see it being quite frustrating if their dealer is not totally up-front about what an allocation and build timeframe actually means.
A deposit is really not anything more than giving the dealer a bit of assurance that you will actually buy the car they burned their allocation slot on when it arrives - vs. them using it for a more standard common build that has a wider market for it. You are under no obligation to buy the hot pink on light blue custom color options you ordered should it arrive and you decide it looks horrible, for example.
It's a strange weird scene. I followed this on various car forums when I was planning on ordering a custom spec for my "dream car" a while back, but decided to just get something not quite optioned how I'd like it off the lot instead.
> there just isn't much anything the US or Canadian divisions can do about it most of the time
This sort of thinking about the internals of the business isn't necessary. They're paid to be there; they need to manage their suppliers, internal or external.
Having a very expensive car just randomly roll to a stop on a highway is a "vibe", too. More of a vibe than anything we might reasonably claim to be picking up from this guy, I would opine.
Eh the author is coming from a place of emotion (considering the effort put into the website) so I would definitely cut them some slack on the fairness of their reporting. The owner is telling their story, not a journalist.
> But how is this an “override” of HVAC or a “total system breakdown”?
Complete failure of the throttle would fall within total system breakdown to me.
> Comms and decision making are prone to break down on the corporate ladder.
Businesses do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, they aren't human. If their support ladder broke down to this point that it is fair game to name and shame and up to them to do a PR push and fix their support.
Referring to GP, is there any other type of HN comment than one that completely ignores the human emotion, instead wanting to focus purely on technical and specific pedantry?
They have cars these days that put essential climate, infotainment, and other controls being a screen. This could be a lot worse than just a false positive check engine light.
In Tesla's speed and "engine" warning lights are on screen. IMO it's not really critical, given you can reboot the screen while driving. There aren't any "controls" on screen, idk what you are waffling about.
A lot of the language and wording on this site it’s not actually the author’s - most of it is AI-generated. The “analysis of”, which is actually longer than the letter it analyzes, is a glaring example.
Before I came across this tool, one use case I’d conceived for a tool like this is to help in debugging and reverse engineering. One could hook this up to a microcontroller under test/analysis and essentially monitor its “disk I/O” or supply it with arbitrary data.
Files looks great but it has performance issues and occasional crashes when I tried it out a few months ago. When going into subfolders, there is a very noticeable subsecond lag which I don’t get from native Explorer. For all complaints of lack of features that Windows File Explorer gets, it’s still a very respectable native GUI app for being Windows’ most used program!
It's usable most of the time until it isn't. Far to often I wonder what they were thinking making things. Say, where is the recycle bin? If I could switch to the windows 95 explorer I would do it immediately.
yeah honestly files was such a disappointment for me. Modern i5 from 2 years ago desktop system on windows 11 and it would crash every 2-3 days just browsing with at most <15 tabs open.
Was it coded in electron? What's filepilot made in?
I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.” In college, you have a bunch of freshly educated, similarly minded people in one place with a whole bunch of free time to put towards one project, highly motivated because it’s both an extracurricular escape and a career prep achievement. And these teams are often financially supported by their school departments or fundraisers. If you fail, there are little if any consequences on your life. All these motivators improve the likelihood of making something truly impressive.
Sure, we can make an arrangement like this out of college. Call up your ex-rocket club teammates, who have all now graduated and making banks at rocket startups. Spend the Thanksgiving week grinding out the CAD, code and circuit boards then test everything out in a desert. But projects like this are a huge time investment and with work and family in the way, they can often be very difficult to coordinate and pull off.
Even if your rocket does end up shooting off and breaking a record, does it truly “beat them”? I find it a bit hard to compare a team of similarly educated college students to a group of adults, usually with relevant professional backgrounds. Maybe the closest we can get are YouTuber collabs. Sometimes I miss my days spent on my college team; it’s pretty hard for me to get an exciting, rewarding, comradely and occasionally traumatizing experience like that ever again.
> I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.”
The flip-side of this that you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience in anything applicable in this space. The ability of college university teams to make exceptionally bone headed f ups is very well known. I've mentored a couple of university rocket teams for over 5 years now and I can tell you it's often an exercise in 'unknown unknowns'.
USC RPL has been at this for almost 20 years now. Their main competitive advantage (besides in-house cf cased motors) is documentation and knowledge transfer. As I'm sure you can imagine there are probably no founding team members actively involved today. I was at Balls in 2013 (IIRC it was 13) when they launched their first Traveler rocket, which was their first space shot attempt. They didn't actually reach that goal until April 2019.
I used to be part of a very successful competitive robotics team. You'll be surprised at how many student teams have this one guy who has been doing his PhD forever/startup founder who spun off from your team and mentors it that exist in the more successful teams.
I've seen PhDs whove mastered the art of being in the same uni team. One of them I knew has followed the path from undergrad (4 years), masters (2 years), RA (2 years), Phd (7 years), Post-doc (2 years).
Another is a startup founder who started the team in undergrad, worked as an RA for 4 years, then spun-off his own company over the next 6 years.
For the most part its beneficial for the uni to retain such talent. Especially, cause they are better grounded than some of the professors who claim to be "experts".
Unless they turn faculty I kinda doubt it. Not to sully your robot team, but I expect many of these students to want to progress to bigger and better things in the commercial space launch sector which they can't do at USC. Also, money.
Founded in 2005. They probably have a very strong Knowledge transfer system and alumni network in place (useful for funding). This is something I can attest to when I go back to my college days.
> you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience
For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.
Somewhat but it's still such a wealthy student body that if everyone in the photo was from a family worth millions that would not even be a very unlikely statistical anomaly.
The biggest issue with college teams is that there is no institutional knowledge retention. Once they are done padding their resumes, they will move on. The next batch of club members will usually reinvent the wheel again. There is little incentive for good management and long term innovation beyond proving out one or two ideas that are immediately relevant to their academic research.
This is so frustrating to me. I was involved in a cyber security club that just started in my university. Both complete incentive misalignment and lack of focus. In the first committee meeting I was excited and pitched a plan to go from "zero to one", setting up training curriculums, building talent pipelines (esp from year 1s) from the student populace to us, institutional knowledge retention to keep and grow knowledge, getting mentors/research links with professors etc. After drawing everything on a white board, I turned around to find a glassy eyed committee. Every single one said "nah, let's just meet every week and uh, talk about a ctf or something". The president looked around and agreed with them. Over the semester I realized the president was far more interested in going to events and introducing himself as president than actually having any impact. As I predicted at the start, the initial hype and momentum gave way to lethargy and indifference. Participation from both non members and members fell off a cliff.
I think we can see that this isn’t true in this case. They are building on successful work from 2019’s record setting attempt, implying plenty of continuity. And these are undergrads so they are not generally doing heavy research. They are likely well advised.
If a 21 century rocketry group takes 20 years to reach the Karman line, college students or not, they are the definition of incompetent. Maybe they should all get internships at the United Launch Alliance; good for lapping out of the gravy train and not much else.
Making it graded tends to F it up bigtime. You waste soooo much time doing overkill process for the sake of proving that you can to get the grade. CAD models will be made. Simulations will be run. Powerpoints will be made to convey the results. When in reality all you needed was one dude to spend two hours prototyping both so that they could be evaluated and the more viable path of development chosen.
Heh, grades served as a good barometer for me to know how much effort I needed to put into the boring classes to pass them. My transcript is a nightmare, high 50s and low 60s in the "easy classes", high 90s in the hard/interesting classes. And then a bunch of really fun/challenging extracurricular stuff that used to get a line or two on my resume when I was a fresh grad.
Thank goodness that the only employer to have ever cared was one where many of my extracurricular friends already worked and vouched for me. The only other time my transcript has actually mattered was when I went back to grad school; my overall average was about 2% too low for the good funding and I had to spend a semester working a lot of hours at the undergrad homework help desk until my first semester MSc. grades came in and qualified me for a significantly better stipend with less hours spent on other people's homework.
With an ESP32 or comparable (RPi Pico W, for example) you get MicroPython or CircuitPython support! That means a Python interpreter, drivers for popular peripherals and usually a network stack. Performance doesn’t beat a native SDK but Python is Python.
The Voyagers’ protocol use no encryption and the specification appears to be public. I’ve linked a PDF of what appears to contain the protocol description below. So anyone with a *large enough* antenna can talk to it. It just happens to be that the “anyone” on earth really is just NASA and its Deep Space Network.
Looking back, funnily the top comment drew a parallel to negotiating USB-PD in u-boot, aka the bootloader. I suppose this wouldn’t have worked for your case though, since your device couldn’t boot at all on 5V.
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