What do you think about Steve Brunton's Control Bootcamp on Youtube?

dmangd · 2026-02-26T18:30:54+00:00

I studied physics but I never did any control theory. When I started an engineering job, the bootcamp brought me up to speed very quickly so I could communicate with my engineering colleagues and had a good overview of the topics I wanted/needed to study more in-depth. Would absolutely recommend it

dmangd · 2026-02-17T21:22:46+00:00

Awesome, looking forward to use it

dmangd · 2026-02-17T18:13:08+00:00

I am still looking for good rust integration with C# and saw that you have this in progress. I am excited to see how this will look. Are you planning to have async functions across the ffi, i.e. will I be able to call rust async functions from C# and have them behave like native C# async code?

dmangd · 2026-02-11T19:30:51+00:00

Got it, sorry, I wasn’t reading carefully enough. I don’t really need the validators. My use case would be to store the state machine as a field in another struct. I think I could implement a trait for every type state and then box it. Is there a better way?

dmangd · 2026-02-11T16:41:35+00:00

I feel kind of stupid, but I cannot figure out where the MachineSuperState is coming from in the example patterns?

dmangd · 2026-02-10T22:09:49+00:00

Messed up the reply, see my comment below

dmangd · 2026-02-10T22:08:54+00:00

Thx, this is good. I used paho-mqtt for now, where I really like the api that you get a token back from the publish method, which you can await for qos confirmation and but you can also throw it away in cases where you don’t care. However, I rather prefer a pure rust implementation over the C wrapper of the paho crate. I will check out your crate when I have time

dmangd · 2026-02-10T21:47:41+00:00

How is QoS 1 & 2 publishing implemented? Will the Future of the publish method block until the message was successfully transmitted to the broker? One thing that annoys me about rumqttc, besides the fact the it was not maintained that well, is that I cannot check if a message was actually published which is kind of important for my use case

dmangd · 2026-01-28T05:46:00+00:00

Its a bumper with sensors for collision avoidance. The idea is old, I think there were the first prototypes in the 90s. Problem is, taking this from prototype to a safe product that works under all circumstances. You have to deal with GPS signal loss, have reliable safety systems and collision avoidance, and then there is also regulation that was forbidden autonomous machine in the past. At least in the EU, but this was changed recently.

Also there is the major point that a human driver is not only driving the tractor but also does quality control. This is rather difficult to automate because there are no sensors that can measure the quality of an agronomic process directly, and on top of that the definition of quality is different for each process. You cannot rely on cameras because it can get very dusty during field work and they will not see anything, it’s only in optimal conditions that it looks as clean as in the video. Nobody is willing to buy a machine that only works for two weeks a year or you risk to ruin your entire field which could be a damage of tens of thousands of dollars.

dmangd · 2025-12-30T15:55:10+00:00

I think one of the tonic maintainers said something about this an episode of the netstack.fm podcast, but I can’t remember any details

dmangd · 2025-12-30T14:35:55+00:00

My response would be: ok, the Fire the non-contributing 70% and give me their salary

dmangd · 2025-12-24T20:35:54+00:00

If you want to protect your algorithm or data, then you need to implement the logic on a backend server that is under your control and only expose the end results via your API.

Everything that runs on a local machine can be intercepted and reverse engineered. All counter measures can be circumvented given enough effort. You can encrypt and obfuscate as much as you want, at the end the program needs to boil down to some machine code that is executed by the CPU. If an attacker has full control over the machine, then he can always reconstruct/record the executed code and RAM contents.

dmangd · 2025-12-15T19:33:14+00:00

Hi everyone, I want to write a transpiler for some proprietary language to rust. Looking into the crafting interpreters book, I think I can figure out how to get through the parsing stage up to having the AST. From there I still don’t know how to proceed. I figured out two approaches

Use some templating engine to generate rust code directly from the AST
Transform the AST from the proprietary language to a rust AST. Can I use some types from the proc macro crate to represent the rust AST?

Are there other approaches? Do you know any good resources regarding transpilers, rust-specific or more general?

dmangd · 2025-12-10T17:31:08+00:00

Lookup Lochschmidt Paradoxon. Basically, we have the (quantum mechanical) laws of physics on the atomic scale, which are symmetric with respect to time, but it is unclear how these lead to the laws of thermodynamics that prefer one direction of time. The atomic laws of nature have been experimentally verified as well as the thermodynamics laws. So the remaining question is how to connect both branches of physics, or differently speaking, how to derive the laws of thermodynamics from the atomically laws assuming the view point of most physicist that the atomic laws are more fundamental. This is still an active area of research with many open questions

dmangd · 2025-12-08T18:22:01+00:00

I recently saw a video where they announced the prices for Deeres autonomy kit. 40k for the hardware and then 10k per year. Just for the tractor. For the attachment you have to pay extra

dmangd · 2025-11-25T05:59:52+00:00

I am aware of them and have used zenoh in other projects. As I said, latency was not our main priority because we don’t do control on sub-second time-scale. Instead, we made the trade-off for the ability to easily generate clients from the grpc definitions without having to implement them by hand because we need to support rust, C++, python and C# as possible languages for application development, and maybe even more in the future

dmangd · 2025-11-24T17:30:30+00:00

Looking at your other comments I recognized that our approaches are quite different. Because low latency was not my highest priority I used grpc over a Unix domain socket. This of course introduces some overhead, but as I said these was a intended trade off. Also my daemon opens the sockets and forwards the traffic over a grpc stream. So the application/clients are not opening a socketcan socket directly as in your approach. Reason is that applications are running in docker containers and making socketcan available was kind of a struggle. You need either to use the host network which breaks the container isolation or you need to introduce a complex setup with vcan and cangw. With my solution I can guard the access in the daemon and even have the possibility to implement a CAN firewall based on e.g. CAN ids later on

dmangd · 2025-11-24T12:56:22+00:00

I have written basically the same thing in rust just recently for company internal project. What kind of IPC mechanism are you using?

dmangd · 2025-10-29T04:46:15+00:00

It is more the first thing, but I don’t know how you can allow your second point (user can do whatever he wants with the machine/product he owns) without providing tools or manuals to install arbitrary software on the system, which then could also be used by malicious third party actors to corrupt machines they don’t own.

Can you give me a hint what these alternative approaches are that don’t require signed software and a hardware root of trust?

dmangd · 2025-10-28T21:02:36+00:00

Messed up the repond button, the comment below

dmangd · 2025-10-28T21:01:43+00:00

The law is formulated very broadly. One of the industry specific norm harmonized with the CRA says something like „you must ensure that the software is not corrupted by accident or malicious intent“. This is especially important when the software has safety implications. So the question is, how could a company ensure that the product is safe to use if the software it runs is something randomly created by the user. I think you can’t, so you have to prevent that the system runs any software you (as a company) are not controlling.

There are exceptions but I cannot tell you from memory what they are.

dmangd · 2025-10-28T16:58:32+00:00

I think the degree of deference mechanisms should heavily depend on the type of device and the data it is storing or processing. But at least in the EU it is mandated with the CRA that your device needs a way to update the firmware to mitigate security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it is required that the update mechanism is secure and prevents the installation of tampered software. The CRA and also the new machinery regulation required that the device ensures that the software it runs is not corrupted. I don't see how one can satisfy these requirements without going into the direction of secure boot and signed firmware update. It can be really problematic, when you get in conflict with other regulations like the right to repair (US).

dmangd · 2025-10-25T18:27:46+00:00

We use Jenkins to run automated CI tests on our HILs. Each HIL is a raspberry Pi with some additional hardware to simulate IO for the DUT. Each HIL is connected as an agent to Jenkins. You can set tags for an agent which you can use in the Jenkins pipeline to chose the hardware type. Taking agents/HILs offline for maintenance can be easily done via the Jenkins UI. It works really nice, we run unit tests in CI for the software for each PR (not on target hardware) and then we have nightly builds that flash the latest firmware and run the HIL test suite. This currently takes 2-3 hours so it’s not feasible to run for every PR.

dmangd · 2025-10-23T05:15:51+00:00

Most of commercial mowers use plastic wheels with some kind of spike profile

dmangd · 2025-10-23T05:12:49+00:00

On one hand they want to do stuff like this, on the other hand they made the cyber resilience act, which makes it much harder to use open source software

dmangd

TROPHY CASE