Tim Hanewich

I developed a quadcopter with a custom flight controller, programmed in Python (@micropython), that can efficiently run on a $4 @Raspberry_Pi Pico microcontroller! Check it out: github.com/TimHanewich/Ce…

@billcompute Qwen Stefani 27B or 35B? Not that weight matters, just more to love.

I just fired ALL my employees and replaced them with OpenClaws! Bold? Stupid? Genius? As I was laying in bed last night me and my wife had a heart to heart. 5 year plan. 10 year plan. That sort of chat. I broke down. I couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m gonna take my life back. I pay thousands of $$$ per month for people I must babysit.” I said, wiping the tears running down my face. “I’m gonna fire all my employees.” My wife gasped. I could feel the tension building. “But Bill…” she started. “You don’t have employees. You need to get a job. I can’t take it anymore.” This is why I don’t discuss business at home. Some people just aren’t built for entrepreneurship. Oh and my wife’s name? Qwen Stefani.

Good flying today 😊

Blast off

Successful day today! The ferrite beads + capacitors certainly seemed to have helped, but not as much as I had hoped. Much more stable Rx now, but still rocky at certain moments. Just one of the flights from today. Enjoy! github.com/TimHanewich/ce…

Let's fly! 🤞

From 8-bit to 16-bit checksum. This will vastly lower chances of accident caused by random pass. github.com/TimHanewich/ce…

Installing ferrite beads and two capacitors on the HC-12's VCC and GND lines seems to have significantly reduced the noise emitting from the SMA port + antenna caused by EMI from the ESC's. github.com/TimHanewich/ce…

We're back.

Circuits restored

@tt12514 Changes I'm making: 1. 2-byte checksum used now (reduces likelihood of random pass from 0.4% to 0.0015%) 2. Rx buffer dumping logic in case of overflow due to bad data 3. Ferrite beads & capacitors places on VCC + GND to HC-12.

@tt12514 Thanks for thoughts @tt12514 Yes, the range of the "mobile" one was still ~100 meters. But that was w/ spring antenna and holding about head height, within Fresnel zone. I documented my theory on how this happened here: github.com/TimHanewich/ce…

Today's work: repair burnout damage This was caused in a high-load test I ran a couple weeks back. Too much current I guess! 🫣

“What will software engineers do now?” Software engineers have been required to learn new skills every single year of their career. More than literally any other career in existence, software engineering has required adaptability. So even if software engineering as we know it ceases to exist, engineers will just keep doing what they always have done - they’ll learn whatever is required and will add value.

Could this really be?

@RobbiewOnline Thanks Robbie. I tend to agree. At home here I had it strapped to a metal mesh surface. Perhaps that acted as a ground plane and helped it receive data properly. Some research to do. But first to put this thing back together. Thx for the thoughts.

I ran your thread through Grok out of interest, its evidence based conclusion sounds... plausible. It's an interesting read and might help you look at it from a different angle. The part about not being able to reproduce piqued by interest, but there's a probable reason for that based on your environmental surroundings. x.com/i/grok/share/0…

Today was a tough day. Absolutely bewildered after the surprise problem today... Took the drone to the field today to fly for the first time with the new antenna mast. 🧵

That - or the conditions in my test here at home were just better. Maybe the metal mesh crate i strapped it to served as a ground plane and helped it. These are my best guesses right now.

And the drone was not able to process new actual command data for several seconds because it was overwhelmed processing a backlog of random bytes it has to process due to that short.

My best guess as of now: It was a VERY foggy day. Odd for where I live. Perhaps moisture built up in between the HC-12 pins, caused a short. This caused HC-12 to overload with random bytes though they weren't actually coming from antenna! 🧵

If anyone has any thoughts or ideas, I'd be all ears! Thanks for the time in reading this. I hope to get this back in the air eventually but I have no idea if I should ignore this as a freak unexplained incident since all SEEMS fine or get to the bottom of it.

Maybe it was a poorly insulated new uf.l to SMA that was allowing in too much EMI from external wires? Maybe the new uf.l to SMA was broken? Maybe going from a 6 inch to 12 inch u.fl to SMA was too long? (weakens signal) But why was any of this not reproducible in my tests?