Bittersweet Symphony of Designing for X

I was hoping to update this space a bit sooner this time, but you know how it is. Sometimes I don't have a lot to update on, or not a lot of things occurred that are significant enough to write about. This is not that "sometime", since a lot happened in between the last post and this post (Whenever I end up making this public, anyway)

Let's start off with an unusual topic first, the emergence of the Indian variant of COVID-19. Partially because that particular event, apart from taking the lives of so many people, also threw my imaginary plans of a vacation at home under the imaginary bus. The bad part is I saw the whole situation coming from literally 6000 km away, and the worse part is in typical Indian fashion, instead of trying to fix the problem, we are busy playing the blame game. Also, I'm mentioning this bit of news just to annoy the current Indian "Reich" which has ordered the censorship of the term "Indian variant of COVID-19" to protect its image.

My sister's blog goes into more detail and her own thoughts on the matter, but I'd just like to quote George Bernard Shaw - " Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve "

I don't want to go in too deep on this topic, because of the already fatigued COVID news cycle. But here are some things the world should know about India at this moment.

Worrying that Modi-BJP even stood a chance

Censorship of Media

April 2021 Situation

Rural Healthcare system of India

Update Mid June :- Now that the cases have reduced a bit, Indians are back at it again, with a large number of tourists flocking hill stations and other travel destinations. This means that there would be a 3rd wave of COVID-19 sooner than expected. There are already reports of further new variants and a rise in cases in states of Maharashtra where covid restrictions were relaxed.

Now that this is out of my system, let's circle back to the cool stuff.

Over the past few months, I have been working on a project, which I cannot technically share here because it is in R&D.

[Edit:- I really can't share anything about the project, sorry about that]

But since it's in the R&D phase, that means we have access to cool prototyping tools. And the coolest one that is actually now in the reach of your average Joe is 3D-Printing. Although I am not at all trained in CAD designs, as a group we discuss and sketch out ideas of possible equipment that is required, and it really freaking cool to discuss the parts on a Friday evening over a Zoom call, and then physically hold and try out the part the next Monday. If the part is not too complex, or small, it's actually printed within hours! A physical object created out of my imagination within a day, it's amazing.

While we were 3D printing and assembling the parts for our project, there was a discussion about what the aim or the functionality of the part should be. And that was where I thought about the whole "Design for X" concept. Allow me to explain.

This part was designed just to test out our concept and see if the idea is physically feasible to execute or not. It's just 2 stepper motors controlled by 2 DPDT switches to change the direction of rotation and 2 precision potentiometers to control the number of steps the stepper takes. We needed around a degree of rotational accuracy on the ring and millimeter accuracy on the linear axis. Both were quite easy to achieve because of the gearing, and the fact that we were using steppers with a resolution of 1.8 degrees (pretty typical) per step in the first place.

Actually assembling and soldering all the stuff.
Cheers and sincere thanks to all the helpful people at the ITA labs, BTW. :)

However, the Arduino part was assembled by me with the fastest / simplest approach I could think of, using delay functions instead of interrupts to control the motion. Blasphemy, I hear you cry, and yet I still ignore you.

Yes, having interrupts would be better. but do we need it to be better? I don't think so. It works right now, we can test our prototype, and this assembly of 3DP parts and steppers is not the final product. It's not the product at all. It is essentially a "tool" to check that a given process will work. Think of it as a tire pressure gauge for a car that's stuck in the wilderness. You can look for a tire with integrated pressure sensors, a digital external sensor, an analog needle-type meter, or you could just use your hands to see if the tire is stiff enough, or your eyes to see if it is not flat. The aim is not to know the pressure of the tire. The aim is to get the tire in a good enough state so that the car can get out and maybe get to a proper repair station.

That is basically the concept of Design for X. X can be anything you want your priority to be. Cost? Performance? Maintenance? Functionality? UX/UI? For a well-engineered product, it would be a carefully balanced mixture of all possible X-es. But I think for a project in R&D and especially for a tool that is not directly related to the actual project, the X should just be "Is it working?"

Long story short, whenever you are working on a project, Think carefully about the aim, what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it. Fix a goal, and then find the laziest way to achieve that goal. PS - Only in the prototype stage, you don't do lazy for a commercial or a critical application. Never. But the lazy method start point is usually a pretty good starting point, and you can refine that idea itself to make it production-ready. It might happen that the whole approach to the goal becomes different b/w prototype and final product, but that I think is a bit rare.

Getting back to my personal space. My good friend and neighbor moved out (sad), which meant I had to arrange a new source of internet for myself. Thankfully, and as usual, extremely helpful, the other students living nearby (sharing the same courtyard) happily agreed to share and even helped me lay down a 30m Ethernet cable to my room. Which now means I have a hardwired ethernet connection.

Yes, there is a severe lack of management and furniture at my place currently, deal with it.

As a small token of appreciation, I decided to deploy a RaspberryPi 4 running OMV5 for the common network. While it is working just fine now. It was an unexpected pain to set up and get functional. First with all the configs, then some compatibility issues with NTFS shares. Then the HDD itself going into a warning in SMART status due to its old age and then, when I finally got a new 2TB Toshiba Canvio and formatted it as ext4 to use as the NAS drive, somehow permissions got screwed up and made all of the network shares inaccessible. After re-installing OMV multiple times in order to pinpoint the problem, I used the good old chmod 775 to fix the issues.

PS- If you are considering using Canvio basic from Toshiba as a budget NAS drive, it is a good option, apart from the fact that the APM (Advanced Power Management) settings do not work with the drive, and you cannot set spindown and idle times for the drive at all. It will spindown and spin up automatically based on its own firmware. As far as I am aware, a NAS drive should avoid multiple spin cycles since that obviously reduces the life because of repeated load cycling on bearings and other parts. SSD's are immune to that and If you are only mostly reading data, which for a Multimedia NAS, is true, SSDs seem to be a great option.

Grey is the number of DNS queries blocked. The left side is Linux. The right side is Windows. Disturbing.
And this is WITH Adblock extensions on browsers.

I also deployed PiHole and I am loving it so far. The added functionality and the blocklisting capabilities are just amazing, and it also shows how much Microsoft is actually tracking stuff when you are using windows. The graphs showing the blocked requests for Linux vs Windows are significantly different, with windows obviously having higher DNS blocks. I hope the upcoming Windows 11 is more granular on their data approach, but considering the tracking done on MS-Teams, I will not hold my breath.

One of the reasons I got a new HDD was also because I was running out of space. Even after migrating my photos library to my old SSD, which is a big help when transferring 32 MP RAW images from a UHS2 card at 150+MBps, the other 2 HDDs were simply getting too old and too full for comfort, and I did not have any backup for those here. And then Google also decided to stop unlimited photo uploads. I know the HQ uploads that were unlimited still degraded quality quite a bit, but it was still better than having no backups. In case you want to know, the compression is painfully obvious between 1080 video files. The problem is Google Photos has turned out to be an exceptional service and is probably the only service I am willing to pay for. Not so much of a problem for Google.

Speaking of photos...

Oh yesss

God bless Ebay-Kleinanzeigen. Now, I can cover a lot more distances and see cool places around me without having to rely on buses. I have already cycled to Maastricht, which went rather well and cycled through a bit of the Eifel Nationalpark. This also made me aware of the totally ridiculous prices of bike components, especially MTBs. I mean, a front suspension fork for 1500+ Euros? What the actual hell.

Also as a side note, trying to carry a camera and food for a day on a bike with the camera being easily accessible so that you can stop and take pics... is not an easy task. For the penultimate section for the blog post, wallpapers! They are continued from the last place I left, so it's Christmas.