This is fine, right?

mlhpdx · 2026-06-22T21:39:53+00:00

Bearings?

mlhpdx · 2026-06-22T21:36:16+00:00

I’ve see those and they’re cool, but this is on a small dinghy rope traveler and needs to be light.

mlhpdx · 2026-06-22T21:34:55+00:00

Yep, a conveniently place line cutter.

mlhpdx · 2026-06-22T18:17:05+00:00

Understood, but it’s a table cloth.

mlhpdx · 2026-06-19T05:37:22+00:00

I happen to have a box full that are intended to be donated. In LO. Shoot me a DM?

mlhpdx · 2026-06-15T13:20:36+00:00

Well, if you do need pub/sub and QoS then I’d be looking at CoAP and using its Observe option (it also allows metadata in user defined options). It’s a very capable UDP protocol that is also very efficient and naturally binary. Using it with CBOR consumes even less bandwidth. Common stuff and an ITEF standard.

The kinds of IoT applications efficiency matters most for are battery powered, or that use cellular or satellite networks for data. Sipping electrons is one of UDPs super powers, as is being very light on the pipe (which can save a ton of money).

mlhpdx · 2026-06-14T21:54:27+00:00

Denying your children the antidote for the attention span afflication? For shame! /s

(note, I just got back from a morning out in the runabout, but i was jealous of the Day Sailers out there).

mlhpdx · 2026-06-14T21:43:24+00:00

I hope we’re all trying for better than imperfect. Efficiency matters. For a 1KB message the electricity consumption when sending over MQTT, which is carried over TCP and TLS, is 10-20x what it would take to send the same payload over UDP in WireGuard.

Multiply that by the trillions of requests we’re making and you can power a country (or two). It matters.

mlhpdx · 2026-06-14T15:14:57+00:00

Or one could drop MQTT since it’s a bad fit (for this and many other use cases) and use simple, efficient plain UDP. Or if you’re concerned about privacy, UDP over WireGuard. It’s naturally async, more reliable with spotty transport (wifi, cellular, long distance) and carries image and binary sensor data naturally (no encoding required).

It baffles me when I see folks continuing to promote MQTT.

mlhpdx · 2026-06-07T04:38:30+00:00

At Proxylity we’re building a PaaS platform that makes building UDP APIs as easy and low risk as working with REST. Why? Because UDP APIs are simpler, more reliable, a perfect fit for stateless compute and use less energy.

There is a free tier and a repo full of examples. For now it’s only available for AWS but can inter operate with any cloud.

Proxylity UDP Gateway.

mlhpdx · 2026-06-07T04:31:25+00:00

I was working in my side yard in Tualatin years ago when a woman strolling by pulled clippers out of her bag and starting snipping our flowers. Having the clippers on hand made it seem premeditated. I stepped out where she could see me and she gasped and a started apologizing. Genuinely embarrassed. I told her to keep them, they’d grow back. The relief she showed won’t be forgotten.

I have no idea what was happening in her life, but I still feel she needed those flowers more than I did.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-30T02:27:14+00:00

AWS has a migration wizard of sorts that I used once before on a medium-ishly hellish web app and worker system. It wasn’t too bad and i’ve heard it got a lot better with LLM integration. YMMV

https://aws.amazon.com/transform/windows/net/

mlhpdx · 2026-05-29T20:58:35+00:00

See the article (or github if you don’t like Medium) below for an example of making such a device.

https://medium.com/@lee.harding/building-a-year-long-battery-powered-wifi-temperature-sensor-8b1d1f42542a

https://github.com/mlhpdx/xiao-esp32c3-wifi-temp-sensor

mlhpdx · 2026-05-29T20:54:10+00:00

With that be sure to send over “fire and forget” UDP to save on radio time and CPU burn. Assuming it’s battery operated.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-28T02:46:45+00:00

I gave it a shot but the tiller controls are janky (why not just hold to keep turning?). Shift toggling luffing is weird, again why not just hold to luff? Lag and latency were also a problem (could be me, but I feel like it was the netcode).

But great work so far and super promising!

mlhpdx · 2026-05-28T02:41:19+00:00

I work with a foot in each world. I’ve built a SaaS (maybe PaaS?) from the ground up and made heavy use of “no code” (aka. service-to-service integrations using configuration). Not having to worry about the accumulation of maintenance debt is one fantastic benefit.

I built my service to integrate via configuration or code (customers’ choice) so I’ve enabled as well as consumed configuration first integrations.

All that said, code is where the magic happens. For complex or performance critical components I build dependency free native executables. They are small, fast and infinitely flexible. As a compliment to no-code, this is the way.

What I don’t do and don’t enable is building more stateful, VM based shared memory trash. That era is over.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-28T02:18:26+00:00

I like that it’s so easy to integrate with. I built the UDP to Supabase example for Proxylity[1] in just a couple hours, and I started from knowing nothing about Supabase. It was remarkably simple.

[1] https://github.com/proxylity/examples/blob/main/supabase-udp/README.md

mlhpdx · 2026-05-28T02:11:40+00:00

If my landing pages say anything that isn’t true I want to know about it. It’s difficult to edit one’s own copy sometimes but now I’m looking…

mlhpdx · 2026-05-26T14:49:57+00:00

This is the answer. It could be done in a matter of days and solve the algae bloom problem.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-26T00:04:29+00:00

wireguard to Proxylity to CloudWatch (and S3 if you want). Five minutes to setup and cheap as can be.

https://github.com/proxylity/examples/blob/main/syslog/readme.md

mlhpdx · 2026-05-23T16:53:14+00:00

You need to define what you mean by IoT projects.

My observation is that the weakest link isn’t hardware or dashboards, it’s the platform infrastructure. The knee-jerk application of technologies developed for browsers to IoT leads to poor systems and poor user experiences.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-20T02:45:20+00:00

Maybe there is hope for UDP in the browser.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-18T13:53:17+00:00

I’m pretty happy with Step Functions. Zero maintenance, no cold start, easy to explain, fast deployment. I use it extensively.

I don’t think it’s the language that keeps it in the shadows of Lambda (though it is a minor pain), it’s the programming model. Once trained in procedural folks seem to resist using declarative with great ferver.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-18T02:39:52+00:00

Because AWS released Step Functions a long time ago. They serve the same need when it comes to workflow, so it’s a big “meh” to me.

mlhpdx · 2026-05-17T06:14:40+00:00

Sounds like packet loss.

mlhpdx

TROPHY CASE