I had a colleague deride me for refusing to use LLMs to generate code, instead referring to my process as "artisanal coding".
Anyway, we don't talk anymore.
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Aut
@Aut@hachyderm.io
mastodon 4.7.3(He/ Him) Senior Software Engineer that flies planes as a hobby. Currently serving as the Social Media Coordinator of my EAA chapter and the President of my flying club. I'm building an RV-10 airplane (the kind you can sit in and fly) in my basement 🛩️. Full time Linux user. I dabble in embroidery, theater, circuits, and other random things.
Profile picture from Jazzybee's Stardew Valley Character Creator
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Joined February 01, 2024
Pilot:
PPL ASEL IR
I took my mother flying on Sunday to get brunch in Janesville, WI (KJVL). Since it was overcast there I also got to do an instrument approach which is fun. On our way back we flew over the Tornado damage in Menasha and it's not pretty.
#tornado #severewx #wiwx #wx #avgeek #aviation #flying #generalAviation
My internet just came back on! Almost 1 week exactly from when the Tornado took it out. I can be connected once again!
A _few_ aircraft are trying to get into Oshkosh now that the field isn't IFR from fire smoke. I've seen a lot of very close calls from the map that I hope weren't actually that close.
How wonderful for me I can take a 20 minute drive instead of all that. (If I was flying I'd get an IFR slot)
#avgeek #osh36 #oshkosh #airventure
A pretty cool day but very light winds making for great flying. Mostly I wanted to test the Stratux and it works great.
I flew to Iron Mountain (KIMT) in Upper Michigan to take my mother to brunch today. Then we stopped by her cabin.
I found a video that a worker helping clear my town posted showing some of the conditions here from the EF-3 Tornado last week.
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So while getting familiar with the oddities of GDScript i noticed that it really doesn't have much in way of handling errors as a language feature. So while most languages I'm familiar with use try-catch statements, there just isn't anything. I hate returning nulls or sentinel values from functions so... I took a page from Rust's design and implemented `Result`.
Now if I'm doing an operation where I would want to generate an error to notify the calling function you did something bad, I am in a more functional paradigm.
Attached is a unit test around some bit reading using the `Result` and a match function that will pass along either the value or error message as needed. Second picture is the match function, it is pretty simple. A great use case for Monads overall.
Trying to find information on error handling in GDScript lead to a lot of "Just don't write code with errors in it" advice... which is frankly unrealistic and unhinged. It is okay to admit a language has some missing features.
I needed an ownship icon for my application and I came up with this beauty (I am biased, I own this type).
Flying out to Janesville (KJVL) to take my mother to Bessie's Diner for her Birthday today! She loves flying so this is like a two-for-one present.
#avgeek #aviation #generalAviation #flying
After mucking about for a while I have managed to replay the GDL90 I captured off the Stratux (onto the network) and feed it into my Godot app map. In theory, this would work in in the cockpit off the Stratux.
This live traffic replay is pretty slick. I think I'll integrate it into the app at some point. I watched my departure and getting vectored around some other aircraft on the map. I want to color code the aircraft by height (similar to adsb-exchange) too I think. It gives me an easy scan of how high something is.
I learned a thing. I'm messing around with a way of showing height of an aircraft without just reading the numbers. Lower the cognitive barrier for someone using the map. I tried drop shadows that change based on altitude but they read very poorly over the map so I'm scrapping that idea. I don't want to use color as I want high threat targets to be color coded for traffic alert info when flying. So these leaves perhaps shape / size to play with.
Here is a picture of the map with drop shadows. Not great. I'm not much of a designer but I'll prototype some things and see what reads best.
#godot #avgeek #aviation
I'm going to be flying to Oklahoma for the next two days in my plane (with the family). Feel free to watch me go via https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=aace03
Departing here 10:00am central and traveling until sometime this evening. Then tomorrow, finishing the remaining leg of the journey to Oklahoma City.
#avgeek #aviation #flying #generalAviation
I got the "ownship" data working as expected and imported my icon. It isn't as readable as I would like so I'll have to modify it a bit but overall I'm happy I got to reuse a lot of my code.
I parsed out the traffic alert flag from my stratux and when it is received my map now displays the target as flashing yellow. The nice part about using Godot is I have access to shaders so I get a lot of freedom in visual presentation. I plan on tweaking this a lot more but this is a usable start AND it grabs attention.
I plan on having a banner as well to notify the pilot but one step at a time. This is from an actual flight I took when I was getting ready for takeoff I got a traffic alert.
She is waiting for me to get out of bed. #cat
I was playing back my Stratux capture and caught my own traffic report, which is cool. I should be able to get traffic showing on the map from this, which is cool. I'm still combing over the GDL90 specs and figuring out how to best structure it in my code.
Going on week 4 of being sick. I think I got a cold right after I had the flu. Regardless, I spent some time getting a mod for Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge to work on Linux and I've been having a lot of fun playing it. I miss the charm of these games, but it is super cool to play them again. I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s playing these games nonstop. I didn't think I'd be sitting here 26 years later playing them again and having just as much fun.
https://mentalomega.com/
When generating one sectional it gets a little odd where the sectionals overlap depending what gets drawn first. Oshkosh had its info being cut in half and for such a well known airport that is kind of silly. So I messed with shape files for a while and eventually got a cutout that I think looks good for the area.
I'm starting to work on the IFR charts. Since FAA charts are non-standard there is a lot of manual work to cut out the charts and stitch them together.
#godot #avgeek
I discovered some things today while doing GDL90 message parsing:
1) I didn't understand CRC16, and I had a subtle error causing some messages to fail. Fixed now
2) Part of the GDL90 document says to refer to RTCA/DO-282, Section 2.2 for how a payload is specified. This document is not free, because of course it isn't.
3) Stratux was written in go. Reverse engineering parts of the source is challenging for me as I don't know go.
4) Staring a bitshifts and hex will make you go slowly mad
I got all the CRC stuff working in the end. Not sure what I'm doing about the paywall (definitely not paying $800 for a specification that should be free). I'll probably reverse engineer it out of one of the other open source GDL90 parsers.
It has been a while since I got to sit down and be in "the zone" with code. It feels nice.
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@WiredForFlight Thanks. It feels good to rip through a project leveraging a lot of my skills and interests
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@masek@infosec.exchange I have long considered doing the same thing and having unique emails per service. One day I will, I just haven't crossed the threshold yet
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@WiredForFlight@squawk.mytransponder.com That sucks. I've met the owner and toured their facilities, they were so nice. Sucks to see this.
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@WiredForFlight@squawk.mytransponder.com Him being covered in vomit also made my wife quite close to throwing up so it was a very fun ride for her too. The trip just wasn't meant to be
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@WiredForFlight I want to replace my use of ForeFlight with it on my tablet. Bonus: It'll work on android
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@WiredForFlight It'll work on iOS too! But let's assume I would like to target some users then Android seems like a good place to go.
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@KO4ROU@mastodon.hams.social Yeah, I'm using the Godot game engine to run it. I also have some utilities I've written to emulate recorded network information with a Python script, some bash scripts, and some Kotlin code for data processing.
The map application is using Godot and their gdscript / Godot shaders. https://godotengine.org/
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@schrockwell@mastodon.social In flight I expect to do the relative positioning. Out of flight I wanted to do absolute but I could always keep it relative too, or provide a toggle. Most likely I'll shelve this for now and work on some other features and provide the relative +- as that is simple.
I got my Stratux today and assembled it. It didn't work at first so I flashed the SD card with the most recent version and it worked fine. Of course this meant I wanted to go flying right this moment but the weather looks like Tuesday is the earliest.
I plan on doing the same thing I did with the Sentry and recording the network data on my laptop so hopefully I can integrate it into my EFB application and have good test data.
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@13pt8plus I haven't decided what I'm doing with it yet. If possible I'd like to stop working for companies and convert this into something to keep me paying the bills. If that doesn't work out, I'm definitely not against opening it up.
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@clolsonus @WiredForFlight I was using maplibre to show the tiles before I got them working in Godot. They are the format but I wrote a small custom script in Godot to show them based on camera position instead of serving them from a web server.
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@WiredForFlight @audioflyer79 Yeah, CloudAhoy integration as well as I was doing some Safety Management System stuff inhouse.
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@patricktcoakley Yeah, that is the conclusion I was coming to while reading through some discussions about error handling. Thanks for adding another data point.
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@schrockwell Nice! I'll be making an optional class soon too and I'll probably be set then
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@JohnOCFII I am unsure what the parts are. I bought this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089QDHDNJ and a pi 3B+. From some of my testing here on the ground it should be good for a few hours (I also have a 12v outlet with a 5v converter in the plane I can use)
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@cwebber@social.coop Everything and nothing is bad, please avoid doing things but don't do nothing!
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@JohnOCFII I'm curious if you know the power draw offhand. I have a battery bank that is probably sufficient but I'd hate to get caught out.
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@futurshox@squawk.mytransponder.com It looks so cool. I'd definitely go for a flight in it.