JustEnoughDucks

Hello,

I am making an open source privacy-first fitness band for myself and I am writing the firmware now as someone relatively inexperienced at firmware development (I am an electronics engineer by trade). I get it done but sometimes I run into concept issues, especially when I start overthinking, like now that I need help with.

I have a macronix SPI NOR flash on-board that I want to use as offline activity saving, backup at low battery, etc... I am dreaming up the data structure for it. Here is the values I need to save to not lose information and what will be required for my supported features in the Bluetooth Physical Activity Monitor Service:

struct memory_map_nor {
    time_t timestamp;
    uint16_t sub_sess_id;
    uint32_t steps: 24;
    uint8_t bpm;
    float16_t spo2;
    uint16_t pulse_inter_beat_interval;
    uint16_t cadence;
    uint16_t speed;
    uint16_t activity_level;
    uint16_t activity_type;
    uint16_t temp;
};

So from this datastructure, it has a total of 28 bytes of data. This has to fit on a 256 byte page, which means 9 "rows" of data can be written per page, 144 per sector, 2304 per 64 bit block, and 147456 in total for a 32Mbit NOR.

But, I am getting confused while reading about memory structures in "normal" processors that need to read everything in 4/8-byte words via the parallel interfaces. This means that conventionally, everything has to be padded to neat structures that are divisible by 4 (32-bit) for QSPI reading. In that case, I would either have to add another 32 bits of data or pad 32 bits to every "row", making a neat 8 data "rows" per page.

OR, because I am only using single lane SPI, would this not matter and I could shove an extra datapoint in each page. The difference is 147456 data rows vs 131072 data rows. At 3s polling rate, that is 5.12 days vs 4.55 days. For my application, the difference might be useless anyway, but the band goal battery life is 2 weeks or so.

Again, maybe I am overthinking this and can just pad the data to make everything neat and fit well. Anyone have any opinions? Thanks!

I have been getting beaten down between 24/7 job uncertainty with the bad engineering market right now, a full-strip house renovation, and not sleeping well.

Yesterday renovation with my girlfriend's family I hit a breakpoint of just going numb after the 3-4 hours of work I put into building the bath frame has to be shortened by 2cm to get the tiles flat that I wrongly calculated because my brain doesn't work anymore. Like 50% of the work has to be redone and half of the holes through the tiles carefully redrilled.

Today I actually took a day off just working on my personal electronics project. Just a nice, sunny day playing with our dog, doing a bit of gardening and actually enjoying the day instead of just going and going renovating or working or going to social events. I really needed it. Back to the grind tomorrow.

My girlfriend bought a cafe and they had a cast iron waffle iron that had, in some places, 5mm of grime built up over 2 years, never once been cleaned. Even the hinges were full of old crusted on batter and grease.

I spent hours with a grill scraper scraping every individual pin.

I have gotten to or past the seasoning in many places except in between all of the pins is hell to try to scrape the old baked on grease away. I have tried sodium carbonate soaks, a wire brush and a wire brush on a drill, a few different scraping tools, and I have only gotten about half out of those grooves. Miles better than before, but still not perfect enough to season and put back in the cafe.

What a boring and terrible time.

I was sick with influenza for 14 days, longest sickness of my life. I just recovered to go back to work yesterday. Migraines every day and temperature ping-ponging between 35.3 and 38.1. I couldn't focus at work and also couldn't work on any home projects. For some of the worst days I just had to be a vegetable in front of the TV or in bed.

My body still isn't back to 100% yet and I still wake up covered in sweat multiple times per night.

I played rimworld on and off casually for a few years. <100 hours in the game. I could never make it to the spaceship though I did have a pretty good colony or two.

Sorry here is the rant of my recent colony I tried playing for hours and hours:

I bought ideology and came back to rimworld because it sounded fun and wanted a simple tribal start. Everyone said arid shrublands is easy so sure. i picked pheobe on normal difficulty because I was looking for a relaxed time. Everyone says arid shrublands is the easiest.

Holy shit. 4 animals on the entire map + 1 herd of elephants. Almost no trees whatsoever, and researching is so damn slow that I have only had stonecutting and complex furniture done in 2 years. Electricity by itself would take 3-4 years of non-stop research...

Meanwhile, there is no way to heat or cool anything because campfires make a room boil (and there is no wood) and passive coolers don't work (and there is no wood). I have a giant cactus farm, but don't worry, somehow it takes 2 seasons to fully grow when it says 15 days on the card and it is 100% fert. So that doesn't help much. So there is no way to cool except to go into the mountains. Fine, except oh wait, when it is 60C outside, it is still 50C in the heart of the mountain when everything has doors...

I have half the map covered in agriculture and the heat is so intense (35-60C and never ever ever drops below that) means that I have to use every bit of spare wood for cooking and every single day is a fight to have enough food. I have to rotate out cooks because they will pass out in the kitchen.

Then I am hit with heatwave after >70C heatwave. Crippling and incapacitating all of my colonists for a week at a time until everyone is starving. Don't even think of cooking during a heatwave. Then it will get to over 80 in the room to cook one meal and the colonist will instantly go down. Not to mention the frequent heat storms during the heatwave to set everything on fire, but of course there I'd no technology like "a bucket of water" so my colonists have to let it all burn or die of heatstroke trying to pat it out lovingly with their bare hands.

2 raiders in 3 years, 0 chance to supplement my 5 colonists in any way at all. Each of those 2 raids had the people instantly killed, so no chance to recruit.

I can't hunt because my tech is so bad and my colonists are so slow that shooting an elephant once means they charge across the map and wipe out all 5 colonists in 30s

I can't raid because every single day is a fight for food for the day and the colonist tech is so bad they would get destroyed instantly.

I can't research armor because that would take years and years and I need to sink every minute in every day trying to get electricity so the next heatwave doesn't wipe me out.

Pretty much I am stuck in the most difficult fight for my colony every minute of every day and it simply isn't fun at all. Not eventful at all either. There is no story, just a slow grind of no technology and brutal, never ending heatwave conditions. This is what I assumed desert would be like, not arid shrublands...

That isn't even mentioning the weekly "mad hare"... some world that this is, 1 mad rabbit will beat 2 people, 1 with a spear and one with a revolver. What on earth. Then I am down to 3 people for at least 3 days while they recover. No way they will go down my completely open spike corridors either, they will just wait outside until I need someone to harvest agave outside of the walls where 1 single scratch takes your colonist down to 20% movement speed and it can just run them down...

/rant

Sorry, I hear people say that arid shrublands are the easiest biome, but holy hell would I disagree. If your farm isn't churning out rice within the first few days, you are simply completely dead.

In Belgium, we are forced by law to use Cca data cables because of "lower fire risk" while I hear literally everywhere that CCA data cables have a much higher fire risk.

Everything here has to comply with the euroclass chart level cca or higher which is confusing because they seem to be combustibility(ca) ABCDEF rating. Making the minimum required in Belgium (and the most prevalent) Cca.

I think for example that getting this for PoE (sorry, in Dutch) would be fine because it does say that it is pure copper, but it also says that it is CCA which is confusing.

Not really a question or anything, just very confusing considering Cca and Eca are the 2 cable types used for residential homes which happen to correspond also to Copper clad aluminum and Enhanced Circuit Integrity. Adds extra probably completely unnecessary stress.

Hey everyone,

I am completely stripping my house and am currently thinking about how to set up the home network.

This is my usecase:

• home server that can access the internet + homeassistant that can access IoT devices

• KNX that I want to have access to home assistant and vice versa

• IoT devices over WiFi (maybe thread in the future) that are the vast majority homemade via ESPHome. I want them to be able to access the server and the other way around. (Sending data updates and in the future, sending voice commands)

• 3 PoE cameras through a PoE 4 port switch

• a Chromecast & nintendo switch that need internet access

Every router worth anything already has a guest network, so I don't see much value in separating out a VLAN in a home use case.

My IoT devices work locally, not through the cloud. I want them to work functionally flawless with Home assistant, especially anything on battery so it doesn't kill its battery retrying until home assistant polls.

The PoE cameras can easily have their internet access blocked on most routers via parental controls or similar and I want them to be able to send data to the on-server NVR

I already have PiHole blocking most phone homes from the chromecast or guest devices.

So far it seems like a VLAN is not too useful for me because I would want bidirectional access to the server which in turn should have access from the LAN and WiFi. And vice versa.

Maybe I am not thinking of the access control capability of VLANs correctly (I am thinking in terms of port based iptables: port X has only incoming+established and no outgoing for example).

I figure if my network is already penetrated, it would most likely be via the WiFi or internet so the attack vector seems to not protect from much in my specific use case.

Am I completely wrong on this?

I got immich with SSO up and running. It runs like a dream compared to Photoprism and is simple enough for me, but also has necessary features like user accounts.

There is one thing I couldn't find in the docs:

I already have a library of 5000 photos and 150 videos on my server that sync to my phone with Syncthing to 4 different directories (one for each phone I took the photos on) in Immich. Right now I have that directory as an external library, but I don't think this is the "right way."

My goal:

• No duplicates between phone app and desktop app
• Don't have to re-upload every image from my phone as my network is 100/30 mbps
• Am able to manage my photos from the Immich app and web app (deleting photos that will propagate between devices)

Can I just map the "Upload" folder to that syncthing photo base folder and get parity between my phone and my server? Or do I have to re-upload everything from my phone? Or am I waiting for a feature that doesn't quite exist yet? I noticed some feature discussions about photo hashing and de-duplication.

I tried asking in a discussion on the repo, but nobody answers those much.

For the past few months or so, steam precaching has been out of control. I have to download between 10 and 30 GB of shader precache data per day. That is extremely ridiculous. Steam's shader caches are quite often almost as large as the game itself. For example: the image here is a game that is ~7GB for the full game, downloading 10GB of shader precache. If I download an average of 30GB of shaders per day, then that is almost 1TB of data downloaded written per month just in shaders...

Not to mention that games I play regularly like CS2 get a precache update literally every 2 days that is 5-10GB and if I manage to cancel it, there is 0 difference in performance at all.

Also fossilize replay that takes 20%-50% CPU load, sometimes for an hour and is the single highest user of disk IO on my entire system. I would be concerned about SSD wear if it was during the early times of ssd just because of the massive amount of writes.

I'm all for downloading shader precaching, but at normal intervals of after updates, not just randomly every few days when there hasn't been a game update in months or years. I don't want to delete all of my games because I only have 100/30 internet, so it would take me a long time too redownload games.

Has anyone else been seeing these ridiculous intervals and datasets of shader cache? Could there at least be a selective pre-caching setting only for games that I play regularly so I am not caching shaders for games that I haven't played in 2 years?

Hey everyone,

There is no real "homenetworking" community like there was on reddit so I thought I would try my luck here.

I live in a 130m^2 house (~1500sqft) that is being completely stripped. That means I am putting in 12-14 Ethernet jacks in the rooms that might need it and have to completely redo my home network setup.

It is a house from the 1950s in belgium, so 21cm thick internal brick walls, a bit thicker concrete floors on the 2 levels. It is essentially a square (8m x 9m outer dimensions), and most of the advice on the internet is built for sprawling American wood houses which have completely different absorption of wireless signals. It has central stairs and essentially 4 rooms, 2 on either side with the kitchen in the back being bigger.

The little advice that I have seen is "brick walls -> get a bunch of access points" but that doesn't sit right with me.

1. Currently we are using a Proximus (our ISP) modem/router in the northwest most far corner or the house and still get weak signal (enough for lower quality videos like Instagram reels) all the way in the southeast corner on the 2nd floor. It goes through 2 brick walls, a concrete floor, and a door and we can still use WiFi 6. Intuitively I would then set up something like an Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 mounted to the staircase wall or in the hallway in the center of the house. I don't know if that would be strong enough to reach everything we need, but it seems better to me than a router in each corner and blasting channel noise at our neighbors' houses since in belgium there isn't much side-garden if any.

2. I have a home server running a variety of local and internet-facing services for myself and family. Due to ease of wiring, I would prefer running modem -> TP-SG1SG016DE -> Wireless Router and using an Asus router. Would the TPlink kind-of-managed-switch be able to isolate the modem fron the rest of the network and just run it to my router to use the LAN of the router for the rest of the ports on my switch? It has port isolation functionality, so I assume so. Then I don't have to run double Ethernet to the hall.

I want to go with Asus because I hear that they generally have more features than other brands. I for sure need port forwarding, QoS, disabling PnP, assigning static IP, and NAT loopback if possible so that local access of services doesn't have to go through cloudflare and can go directly to my reverse proxy. My TPlink Archer A7 that I use now can't do NAT loopback and it makes any file transfers limited by my 5:1: asymmetrical upload speed. Also having VLANs for any cameras would be great, but I think you can do something similar via parental controls on an ASUS (restricting a certain device IP's internet access.

Would the Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 have the festures that I would need for my simpleish home server?

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Tl;dr since nobody reads this long of a post:

• I am running Ethernet (cat6) to every room. Modern laptops as well as phones have no Ethernet port, so I need wifi

• I am looking at 1 wireless router, no "mesh" bs at all. The advice of overstuffing a small house full of a dozen access points is overkill and detrimental to performance without power and channel usage tuning.

• I have specific features I want in a router, can one of the listed ones do all of that like NAT loopback?

Hey everyone!

We are renovating our atelier to be a temporary house while we completely strip and redo the main house for a few years.

One thing I am really struggling with is how to make a large 255cm x 65cm dirty concreate workbench into a kitchen countertop for 2 years or so.

We are based in Belgium, so wood prices are about 2x what they are in the US (250cm x 125cm OSB board is 50€ or so).

The height is already quite high for a countertop (for me and my girlfriend it is perfect) so adding a thick slab of butcher block or something would make it unusable.

I don't really know what my options are. Maybe a wood veneer? Some sort of cheap-ish tile?

We used some iron-on white to finish the edge of our custom sink cabinet made from some old office cupboards, maybe there are larger ones like that that would work for concrete?

We are trying to stay below 2cm thickness. Idealy 0.5cm or so, but that would be difficult.

If anyone has any ideas to throw out, we would be open to it! It is just temporary, so it doesn't have to last more than a few years

Thanks!

Edit: I realized I didn't have any good pictures of the bench itself since it always took a back seat, but here are a few bad ones to give an idea from in the beginning https://imgur.com/a/KgiqHrC

Hey guys, I have been looking at building a home gym (possibly outdoors) in my new house we are renovating.

I want to get back into lifting as it has been about 4 years since I did it seriously.

I was looking at bars and the market here is ridiculout it seems. I can't find a single stainless steel bar for under 475€($520). The Ohio bar is one of the cheaper ones at 550€ instead of $370. Of course I get why it is more expensive for an import bar, but I literally can't find any bar here non-imported that says that it is stainless steel that isn't calibrated and insanely expensive (550€+)

The difference here betweeen cerakote and stainless is even greater (>100€ in some cases).

I was hoping to just get a second hand rack, some basics weights, and a barbell for around 1000€ or so, but it looks like I would have to spend at least 2000€ to get any kind of setup. Cage here are 850€ or so on the lower end just by themselves.

I am looking at strengthshop.eu, roguefitness.eu, fitness-seller.nl, but I don't really know what are the best bang for your buck options.

It looks like one of those sites has a 340€ stainless steel ATX bar, but I don't know if that is a reliable brand.

Anyone in the EU with any advice?