Marc's Public Blog - Linux Hacking

I gave a couple of talks this year:

I also had fun at the Open Hardware Miniconf 2020: Dingo Car with Tensorflow Video Analysis v2

I met Chris and Jon for dinner before the conference:

Chris had a fancy wheelchair enhanced with Jon's improvements

Then came time for the conference:

I much enjoyed a very cool talk on emulating old game consoles in an FPGA

took a lot to run those video consoles back then, lots of it was RAM

there was no framebuffer, sprites and backgrounds were rendered real time during CRT gun scans

backgrounds were rendered fro a bunch of tiles to same RAM

Random talk slides:

great to have Bunnie back

Nice to see the usual people again:

of course I 'need' an ESP32 watch :)

this one is cute too

Nice dinners as usual:

I brought my new LED outfit

And just like this, it was conference close, where we we told to guess where the next conference would be:

it'll be back in Canberra a 3rd time

Jon Oxer won the Rusty Wrench award this year, and it was well deserved

After an ice cream social, the conference was over.

Jon, presenting the miniconf as per how many

Raspberry Pi running the car

This year's dingo car, controlled by the rPi

All done

Andy presenting the software side of the car

We then trained our cars' neural network by manually driving them arount the track:

and before long, I got my car to drive around on its own

Here is a video of my car driving on its own, including how it learned to drive:

During the miniconf, I also gave a talk on my recent LED panel/ESP32 work and brought my recent RGBPanels:

The talk focussed on failures I've encountered in multiple fields, and what I learned from reading from other people's failures, a common practise in aviation that has saved countless lives in not re-creating failures and accidents out of ignorance.
As they say in aviation "experience is a cruel teacher: she gives you the test first, and if you survive, then you get to learn the lesson".

After looking at examples of failures we experienced at Google, I give a fair amount of examples from aviation, from AF447, QF32, and the Boeing 737 Max disaster which is so many failures in so many ways that it takes a while to describe in details. My hope is that engineers in a similar situation where they know they are getting overruled, can use other escallation steps to avoid disaster for others.

You can get the talk PDF or openoffice source from here. Otherwise, you can read the slides below and watch the video recording: