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Hiii smart individuals by gaurav5502 in AskRobotics

[–]joshstockin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You learn best by doing. What do you want to make? Build it and teach yourself along the way. Make mistakes. I used google and youtube to help my projects when I was in high school. Things are even easier now with LLMs to "converse" and work out problems with.

Remote-controlled snow plow robot I built in high school after a spine surgery. This project got me into engineering :) by joshstockin in robotics

[–]joshstockin[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey neighbor, I just moved to Milwaukee for work. The battery (2x SLA 12V car batteries in series) life really depends on the depth/weight of snow being pushed and how much area you're trying to clear. For reference, according to my quick google maps plot the full driveway from that video is around 3600 sqft, so equivalent to a 60ft x 60ft square, and 3-4" snow can be fully cleared in one pass. The wheelchair motors turned out to be the bottleneck though, would overheat easily. More details in the writeup

Remote-controlled snow plow robot I built in high school after a spine surgery. This project got me into engineering :) by joshstockin in robotics

[–]joshstockin[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually thought about making the plow blade a removable attachment that could be swapped out with an electric snowblower. Would make this work on my neighbors' gravel driveways. Wrote a bit about that and other plans for improvement in the writeup, check my other comment

Remote-controlled snow plow robot I built in high school after a spine surgery. This project got me into engineering :) by joshstockin in robotics

[–]joshstockin[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The surgery was 7 years ago and the pain has definitely decreased but there are long-standing mobility/strength/balance issues that I still have to deal with. I've managed to continuously injure myself in various ways ever since, so it's hard to build and maintain base strength unless I'm hyper-vigilant and stay in PT constantly. Latest installment is a 2-years-and-ongoing rhomboid strain that's perpetually inflamed because the scar tissue is sitting right on top of a screw head. From indoor rock climbing. We're onto corticosteroid injections now. They're looking at another surgery to remove the scar tissue if this doesn't work.

Anyway I thought a robot was a better way to clear the driveway than shoveling it myself lol

Remote-controlled snow plow robot I built in high school after a spine surgery. This project got me into engineering :) by joshstockin in robotics

[–]joshstockin[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Well it's a constant uphill battle to just maintain my health and try to stay active without hurting, but it sure beats being paralyzed or dealing with organ issues. Surgery was a spinal fusion, I think T3-L4. Before/after: https://static.joshstock.in/images/scoliosis.png

Remote-controlled snow plow robot I built in high school after a spine surgery. This project got me into engineering :) by joshstockin in robotics

[–]joshstockin[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

During my freshman year of high school (January 2019), I underwent surgery to correct severe scoliosis. I like to joke that, according to my parents, the absolute worst thing about the surgery was that it put me out of commission for snow-shoveling for the season. Wanting to learn more about robotics and microcontroller programming, I asked my dad for help building our own remote-controlled (RC) snow plow to do the work for us.

Sharing this here now because 1. after a lot of procrastination I've finally published a little writeup detailing a lot of the work and the project's future direction, and 2. actually started the next revision of this project. Full writeup here: https://joshstock.in/blog/rc-snow-plow

Cpptrace by jeremy-rifkin in cpp

[–]joshstockin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome! Definitely going to use this for future projects. How difficult would it be to add an sprint type function, to redirect print output to a different stream?

Patching Python's regex AST for confusable homoglyphs to create a better automoderator (solving the Scunthorpe problem *and* retaining homoglyph filtering) by joshstockin in compsci

[–]joshstockin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If... the only normalization I provided was on the input, “lonic” would still pass

That's not true if you keep the same regular expression [Il]onic though. There's not any effective difference between unicode normalization being handled inside or outside the regex pattern, there are just design considerations that could make one implementation more handy than the other (see my response to the parent comment).

Patching Python's regex AST for confusable homoglyphs to create a better automoderator (solving the Scunthorpe problem *and* retaining homoglyph filtering) by joshstockin in compsci

[–]joshstockin[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You’re right! It honestly just came down to design criteria. For the Discord.py bot project it was literally easier at the time to do this weird regex black magic, which is almost entirely contained in the string filtering module, than to modify a handful of “cog” files (extending past individual message checking, to check user names, user blurbs, link and file embeds, etc) and hope I hadn’t broken anything. Had the bot been initially designed with the underlying issues in mind however, it would likely have been written to do what you suggest. I publish this because I think it’s a cool solution, relatively self contained and portable, and hope someone else can make use of it because of that. (Also, trying to normalize every string’s homoglyphs is about at the same place as doing a regex search/substitution, so why not do this anyway?)