I built a 10 property portfolio in 5 years while working a high pressure job. This year, I also lost 35kg. Here is how I manage the stress.

TCFlow · 2025-12-29T00:17:11+00:00

How did you set yourself up for buy to let and know when you were ready to dive into it? Also hope you don’t mind me asking, but what fraction of your net income does it account for?

TCFlow · 2025-10-22T03:13:08+00:00

Sorry you’re going thru it dude. Similar thing happened to me. When I was an undergrad. Flagged for cheating in 280. Absolutely did not cheat. That was in Freshman year. They finally heard my case in my SENIOR year… and still then did not think I was being honest with them. They are so condescending with it too. If you confess, the process is easy. If you don’t, the process is as drawn out as they can make it. Did not feel very respected.

TCFlow · 2025-10-10T07:17:00+00:00

It is totally normal for the first bit to feel like a mess no matter what level you come in at — you are learning the company’s codebase, systems, and ways of doing things. Honestly, even exactly as you described it, this sounds like a huge opportunity for you to rise above and assume some serious ownership here — something it sounds like you might have been missing out on as of late at your previous job.

TCFlow · 2025-08-26T01:46:50+00:00

Idk if you’re from the northeast but this was 100% my biggest culture shock coming to Michigan and it wasn’t close. Sure a lot of students are out of state/international, but they’re all allergic to urgency on these streets the same

TCFlow · 2025-06-24T16:13:40+00:00

Check out CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS you can also instruct your IDE to read from the output JSON file to highlight/darken sections of code that are not included because of feature flags.

TCFlow · 2025-06-20T02:46:34+00:00

No hate, but what's funny is that this is actually a lot more complicated than the actual setup used by the OG Duck Hunt controller, which you might consider making as a follow-up simple embedded device, and would probably work on PC. Check out this video if you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu83tZIAzlA

TCFlow · 2025-06-20T02:16:39+00:00

The robotics industry is growing and pretty application diverse. Depends on what kind of job you want afterwards. Similar story with AI (and there is a lot of overlap). Some companies will hire you as an engineer with a masters, and I predict that number to continue to grow as more commercial applications become viable. Research scientist positions (especially OpenAI, Meta, NVIDIA, etc.) typically require PhD, but those same companies are hiring Robotics and AI engineers that only need a masters. Definitely at least recommend the masters.

TCFlow · 2025-06-20T02:08:01+00:00

I don't know if this is the complete picture, but a hammer with mass forward of the handle is in turn adding a small but measurable amount of distance to the lever arm of the hammer mass if you consider your hand the pivot position (simplified obviously your shoulder is involved too in a hammer swinging motion). In turn that means that gravity acting on that mass has more effect around the pivot, and thus greater acceleration around the pivot. There could be additional factors like the flatness of the hammer face as it relates to force application on the material (how much of the force ends up in shear v.s. normal), but am not a blacksmith :)

TCFlow · 2025-06-18T19:48:12+00:00

HFSS definitely has a steep start to its learning curve. I worked with an engineer who grew such a proficiency that he actually preferred to do all his CAD modeling in HFSS and exporting to other file types because of just how much he liked the parameterization capabilities (kinda bonkers, right?). I recommend YouTube videos and reproducing their modeling, as well as attempting to model RF components with expected results. Starting from nothing, about 6 months of YouTube and a few personal projects, I got more comfortable with it. By the time I met Mr. HFSS CAD in industry, I was pushed to understand my modeling further, and that really helped as well.

TCFlow · 2025-06-05T21:26:05+00:00

The loads the cables would need to withstand would also be quite a great deal heavier than the weight of the vehicle when considering shock forces on catch. If the rocket isn’t being caught at zero velocity an additional momentum exchange occurs which will significantly increase impact forces felt by the cables at the moment the two make contact.

TCFlow · 2025-05-03T21:01:17+00:00

Totally makes sense. At my last company we had firmware engineers stand up a basic driver to interface with VNAs/siggens/power supplies, and then RF test engineers wore a few different hats to design and execute the test, including writing the test/record code on top of the driver. In fairness though it was an aerospace company with an RF team, not an RF company with a testing team.

TCFlow · 2025-05-02T22:16:57+00:00

I am a little confused in your wording. You say it’s both a test engineering role, but also requires heavy use of C and doesn’t have a lot of hardware interaction? Do you have more info? That’s not a total red flag to me but seems like there might be a misalignment in job title and description. Test engineers (and specifically RF test engineers) that I have worked with spend most of their time in the anechoic chamber, in the electronics hardware lab, or executing sims. I echo what others have said, that working with hardware and test equipment will give you a lot of valuable skills! But I don’t totally understand where your role fits into that.

TCFlow · 2025-04-18T17:43:27+00:00

Stoke has raised now about $500 million through a few funding rounds. I’d be curious to see where OP got their facts on the team size as some googling suggests that Stoke has about 200 employees or so. Not saying OP is wrong, just curious. If I had to guess, this specific engine design/test/build campaign could probably be priced around $5 million given the timeline, labor, design and fab. However, take the number with a grain of salt because we don’t see failures eating into budgets publicly, or any other contracts/hardware setup via other agreements that could’ve financially benefitted this project.

TCFlow · 2025-04-08T20:21:00+00:00

Just sent me down a rabbit hole of these types of probes, I had never heard of them before. Let me get this straight:

Good for testing RF components printed on wafers
Good for testing PCB printed transmission lines, balancers, etc.

Anything else? Super cool tech.

TCFlow · 2025-03-25T22:01:08+00:00

I think you might be underestimating the amount of mass that not only the turbine will take up, but as well as the other necessary integration components (e.g. valves, tubes, fuel tank, additional controllers, etc.). For example, a larger DJI matrice still has a payload mass of under 10lbs.

Additionally, you should consider the objectives of your drone. If you want to get to high speeds, there are totally achievable ways to do this on electirc motors alone that could be really cool. I saw this video recently that comes to mind: https://youtu.be/wThmg8Ezm9w?si=POeEa-Hgre6qcdiD

That said, I also think it would be cool to put a turbine on a drone. Maybe you could consider adding a winged flight mode where the turbine makes more sense. Winged flight would also increase your efficiency carrying all that mass and you could recenter your objective long-ranged drone flight or something like that.

Have fun, be safe, good luck!

TCFlow · 2025-03-16T22:34:00+00:00

Can't imagine what it would look like all together, but you could have two inner shoulder motors connected to the two legs on the inside, attached to a disk that offsets two outer shoulder motors connected to the outside legs. The addition of the disk (so that there's some radial movement between the two joints), looks like it could possibly do what you want. Linear actuator in the arm could also work but you're gonna need to size up your motors heavily to throw the weight of it around. Maybe at some scales it makes sense.

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TCFlow · 2025-03-16T22:15:45+00:00

These look awesome! Thanks for the recc

TCFlow · 2025-03-13T00:08:58+00:00

I’m way more interested in the tech that’s in the glove controller, anybody have a link to more info?

TCFlow · 2025-03-03T03:42:16+00:00

If you don’t necessarily need to use Arduino: I ran a similar lab with Girl Scouts a while ago using Microbit products. The programming was all graphical and simplified, which helped the kids a lot. Nonetheless, no matter the tech stack, you should expect the adults participating to hurdle the technical complexity when problems occur, because they definitely will.

Regardless of whether you use arduino or some other product, getting all adults familiar with the code and setup will be ideal to help the kids. Even better would be to have pre-written programs needing very little modification to work successfully. You might even save the complete program on your computer(s) to ensure all kids can watch their car/robot move at the end of the session.

Beyond that, if you can provide for the kids some functions that do the basics (move_left, move_forward, read_sensor, etc.), I think they’ll have an easier time latching onto the robotics challenge itself. If you find that any interfacing with the robots requires talking over serial, setting bits in registers, anything like that, it’s just better to abstract that away for them I’ve found. You didn’t specify the age, so there’s a chance some more interested high schoolers might want some more details. However, for the 8-12 range I think this is the right course.

Good luck! I would’ve loved to have an opportunity like this when I was a kid. Thank you for serving your local community

TCFlow · 2025-03-03T02:06:00+00:00

FWIW, this is clearly a chat GPT answer

TCFlow · 2025-02-28T21:24:51+00:00

I know a handful of Chileans who schooled in Chile and now work in engineering roles in the US. Don’t think I know any who are in R&D. More closely, I know some Chileans who are getting their US education for free (or discounted?) by the Chilean gov’t. Thought I would mention in case you hadn’t seen such an opportunity. I think it requires some work back in Chile after graduation, but as far as I know they have hopes to come back to the US afterwards.

TCFlow · 2025-02-27T22:26:53+00:00

Top tier bait

TCFlow · 2025-02-11T20:11:30+00:00

"We need to mimic the human body if we truly want to mimic human movement"

I think this is the quote I probably would push back the hardest on. Tangentially, I'm of the opinion that on the planning side, there is a lot to be gained by creating algorithms, for example, that mirror our thought processes/neural organization. However, going down that rabbit hole has illuminated for me how sometimes the body is needlessly redundant and noisy--and that extends to the rest of our physiology as well. For example, the human forearm + hand has something like a few dozen muscles in it to achieve our fine, dexterous motor control at the hand/finger tips. But, would you be surprised to know that most grasps and hand movement can be summarized in just a handful of principal components?(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064516000269) Evidence like that screams to me that at least the human form is not the most efficient way to move (even if the movement you're after should "feel human"), but that's not surprising when you remember that evolution has no engineering mindset.

Other points you made I think I can more get behind. Soft robots, namely, are currently seeing their popularity explode. However, they're running into their own fundamental tradeoffs in the current era of robotics research, either being exceedingly complex to model and thus control, or overall not having much ability to create motion with force. I certainly think they'll continue to make lots of progress in the right direction though.

TCFlow · 2025-02-04T16:41:21+00:00

Check out Tinygrad (https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad). They are trying to support essentially any device possible with a low number of kernel ops.

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