Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 29, 2021

TinyPilot

• Looked into options for scaling production
  • I’m currently limited by cases for the Voyager, as my printing lab can produce only 40 cases per week.
  • The next option up is likely plastic injection molding, which is super fast and inexpensive, but requires an up-front investment that will likely be ~$20-25k to make the molds
  • Met with one plastic injection molding and they’re putting together a quote
  • Reached out to additional 3D printing labs to see if I can parallelize production, but they’re quoting me 10x higher than I currently pay (I get an amazing deal through a state subsidy at my lab)
  • Talked with my 3D printing lab about using alternative materials that may speed up the process
• Reviewed PRs from new TinyPilot freelance developer
  • change dump-logs to just call new script (#435)
  • Update check-trailing-whitespace to work on macOS (#434)
  • Add GET /api/debugLogs endpoint (#436)
  • fix safari bug (#444)
  • Make /api/update asynchronous (#441)
    • This one turned out to be way more complicated than I expected.
    • We want to kick off an “update” process which takes 2-3 minutes to run, so you can’t do it in a single HTTP request or things time out.
    • But it turns out that managing state on the backend and frontend is way more complicated than it seems. We’re still not quite there.
• Added automated style checks to the build
  • Integrate pylint into the Python build (#452)
  • Configure pylint to check quotes for consistency (#459)
  • I’m trying to honor my own rule of “let computers do the boring parts” so that we’re not wasting review cycles on style issues that an automated checker could catch.
• Wrote up a new freelance developer contract
  • Maybe it would mean something in court? Who knows!
• Reviewed a proposal from my EE contractors for a rack-mounted TinyPilot
• Explored options for streaming video over H264.
  • Submitted a couple fixes to a TinyPilot alternative catid/kvm.
• Reviewed a PR from my frontend freelancer to convert assembly instructions on the website
  • The old ones were done as Vue HTML, but the new ones are Markdown, which is much easier to manage.
• Reached out to more YouTubers about reviewing TinyPilot
• Bought a tiny little laptop for testing
  • Look how cute!
  • Only $80 on eBay
  • I didn’t realize it’s i686, which is a little annoying, but there are still plenty of distros that support it
  • I ended up installing Q4OS, which took forever to install but is pretty lean and snappy once it finished
  • It will likely be a dedicated machine for testing power connector circuit boards that arrive from the factory

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on my blog post about my third year as a solo developer

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

• Created one of those annoying big-captioned auto-play videos to promote the course

Beekeeping

• Scheduled a time for a buyer to purchase my beekeeping stuff

Misc

• Bought a managed Mastodon instance at m.mtlynch.io
  • I really want to like Mastodon, but it’s a pretty clunky experience
• Made a “focus mode” script for Fastmail
• Caught up on bookkeeping
  • Fixed this error that had been hanging over me for a month where I had 7 business purchases accidentally on my personal card
  • It’s such a hassle to correct this anytime I do it, so I kept putting it off
  • I finally did it and it took 20 minutes and was pretty easy
• Tried to clean my oil boiler
  • Realized I didn’t know what I was doing, couldn’t find any instructions that matched my boiler, scheduled a professional instead