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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Oh and I forgot, a big one, I engage the cats if they show interest in my task.

    When cooking they can smell safe things, if I’m working on tech i have a very large screw and bolt for them to play with/try out instead of my small ones.

    Cats are social and want to be included, if you give them the option to do “parallel play” I think it will improve what people see as problem behaviors that are really just begging to be included.


  • Fetch: grab the toy if they play with it and it ends up close by, use verbal reinforcement

    Names: the cats recognize everyone’s name in the hous thanks to reinforcement learning

    Locations: the cats know where I’m going and can beat me there because I tell them where I’m going, sounds like reinforcement learning again?

    Activities: set phrases like “let’s go”, “come on”, “let’s get some food”, “jump up”, etc, all by reinforcement training.

    Paw-touching: slowly touch more and more often, for longer, until nail clipping is a breeze. Hmm… Might be reinforcement training again.

    To end bad behaviors, hiss, it’s a built-in “no” for cats.


  • If you get the grounding box you can have an antistatic collar for the dog and a strap for the human. Plug both in and you’re both at the same potential.

    Alternatively the human can touch the banana plug side of the strap, as the in-built resistor will “slowly” equalize the charges between you. I say slowly because in human terms as soon as you touch its already done.

    @boogetyboo

    The ugg boots may be electrically isolating as well, so a heel-strap is typically worn in ESD environments to overcome insulated soles. In combination with a grounding floor mat, this works without having to think too much about it.

    Additionally, you can get a humidifier and maintain a relative humidity above 40%. Thankfully you don’t need insulation to do this!

    Source: nasa esd training




  • I am an engineer that has worked in the space industry my entire career, and here are my thoughts:

    GOES and METEOR weather satellites transmit images publicly that are NOT real time, but are downlinked, processed, and uplinked for public broadcast. This is pretty simple and saves a lot of processing power on the spacecraft side. That’s important because the biggest constraints on spacecraft processing are: power budget, radiation hardiness, and thermal.

    I was able to find an image of the actual satellite in assembly. From this we can guess that there is probably not more than a square meter of solar on-board, so we can give it a round 1300W of power. I couldn’t find any orbital parameters(If Gunter doesn’t have it, who does?), but given it’s main task is as an imager, we can assume LEO, and so this 1300W isn’t going to be constant since the spacecraft will most likely be eclipsed part of the time.

    Generous 1000W average solar flux, generous 25% panel efficiency, 250W/h.

    So lets look at rad hard processors. They have to be either shielded or run multiple and do voting, though even that isn’t fully acceptable as some SEU (single event upset) can cause permanent damage and leave you down a voting member. The latest and greatest RAD5545 advertises 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) at 20 watts, so if we assume (artlessly, and likely incorrectly) a linear power usage, the 80 TOPS of the WJ-1A should need some 280kW. So we know they aren’t using a typical rad-hard CPU topology for their AI models. I see that Corel/Google advertise 2 TOPS per watt on their edge TPUs (Tensor Processing Unit).

    So assume a large ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) at the same efficiency of 2TOPS/W, with 4x multiples for voting and we get a far more reasonable 160W. Still a LOT of power on orbit for such a small spacecraft, but actually possible.

    So for thermal limits, do they run the TPU only on the dark side in place of their on-board heater? The have some white panels that might be radiators, but it’s hard to say.

    Hard to say from these fluff articles. I really want to hear:

    • What’s the efficiency on the TPU?
    • How did they make it rad-hard, and how long do they expect it to last?
    • What models do they run on the edge?
    • What is their downlink budget? Can they pull full imagery if they want it or are they limited to ML analysis only?

    I expect to see more ML in space, but to be honest I did not expect it to be in such a small form factor.