I made a ridicously hilarious hack recently. My refrigerator it's broken, it has a huge leak of water, my hack was to let the water flow in a plastic box and make a circuit with two water level sensors, a relay and a PIC16F628A to activate a pump that sucks water away through a tube that I wedged intlside the gasket of the washbasin. This gave me the time to buy a newer and better one.

Participated in an IEEE Hackathon where we built a line following robot. We were the slowest, but we had the most accuracy.

The image is our first attempt at getting it to work, consequently, we were the first team to actually get a prototype finished and working. Other people were trying to cram as many sensors as possible. We stuck with one, and 47 lines of code to make it work. Everyone else had more than 2 sensors and I can only imagine how much code they had.

Paypal Rant #3

One day I'll go to Paypal HQ and...
... change all the toilet rolls to face the wrong way
... remap all the semicolons to be the Greek equivalent character
... change all the door signs so they say "pull" instead of "push" and vice versa
... modify all the stairs to have variable heights
... programmatically shuffle the elevator buttons and randomly assign the alarm key to any of the most visited floors
... pour cocoa onto all the keyboards and wipe them off cleanly
... attach clear duct tape over their mouse sensors and insert really weak batteries or mess with their cables

I'll wait a day or two until they experience a sudden shortage of developers, then bombard them with thousands of fake applications from seemingly amazing candidates, then write an AI bot to continue argumentation with HR.

I'll wait another week or so until the company dissolves and with them, all my issues in life.

No need to be overly vulgar this time because you all know the deal. I hate this fucking company. Please Paypal do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.

Radio Shack store closed near my house. Had a huge fire sale. Electric circuit components were 90% off.
My wife thought I'd gone insane when I got home with two huge bags full of LEDs, resistors, switches, IR sensors, photocells, capacitors, bridge rectifiers, a spare breadboard, a pair of helping hands, etc.
My only regret is that I didn't catch the fire sale in time to grab all their Arduinos.

UPDATE: devRant Trans-Oceanic Journey Community Project

It was a mere 12 days ago that I asked the question; 'Could devRanters, as a community, build a 21st Century Technology-Laden ‘devRant devie-Stressball-in-a-Bottle’ and send it on a journey across the Atlantic ocean?

I am thrilled to report that devRanters enthusiastically accepted this difficult challenge. A core team quickly formed and a tremendous amount of research and progress has been made in a short period of time. I want to give you a high level-flavor of what we are doing. Please keep in mind we still need your help. We welcome all develops to take part in this journey.

I want to give appreciation to the devRant Founders @dfox and @trogus. Without your support and sponsorship this project would not have been possible. devRant brought us together and it a reality. Devie journeying across the Ocean the Columbus sailed will stir the imagination of children and adults worldwide when we launch on May 1, 2017.

Some of the research and action items in progress:

- Slack and trello environments were created to capture research and foster discussion.

- A Stony Brook University Oceanography Professor suggested the Gulf Stream would be a good pathway across the ocean. We researched it very and agree. The Gulf Stream has been a trans-Atlantic conduit for hundreds of years. We are deciding whether to launch from Cape Hatteras, NC or the Virginia coast. Both have easy access to the rapid currents in the Gulf Stream.

- We are researching every detail of the Gulf Stream to make the journey easier and faster for devie. We have maps and a team member gathered valuable ideas reading a thorough book – ‘The Gulf Stream’.

- We decided on using a highly resilient plastic rather than glass for the bottle material. Plastic is much lighter, faster and glass breaks down more easily. The lightweight enclosure will allow us to take full advantage of waves and ample trade winds. We are still discussing the final design as we want to minimize friction and mimic the non-locomotion fish that migrate thousands of miles riding the Gulf Stream.

-The enclosure might be 3D printed unless we can locate a commercial solution. We have 3D specs and are speaking with some experts. There are advantages and dis-advantages to each solution.

- We will be using Iridiums' RockBLOCK two-way satellite technology to bounce lat-long coordinate pings off their 36 low-orbit satellites. The data will be analyzed by our devRant devie analysis software. IOS and Android public apps being built by the team will display devie's location throughout the journey in.

- Arduino will be used as the brains

- Multiple sensors including temperature and depth are being considered

-A project plan will be published to the team Friday 12/9. Sorry I am a few days late but adding some new ideas.

There are still a lot of challenges we must overcome and we will.

That’s all for now. I will send updates and all ideas / comments are valued.

I just spent 100$ on microcontrollers and sensors

Y..yay?

Not a rant - just wondering if anyone else witnessed a really awkward closing talk at a conference.

Attended a mandatory JS conference yesterday where all the speakers gave the typical conference talks on new ideas, frameworks, packages with code demonstrations. Most of talks were great and the some of the speakers were extremly humorous making the whole audience laugh which is hard to do. The talk right before the keynote speaker was like this.

Then the keynote started...

The end presenter was an asian-american woman (normally would not metion race/ gender but it’s important to the story) whose talk was basically how the white males of the world are controlling tech an their bias and privilege are marginalizing the rest of us who are not white american ‘cis-males’

She had no data and weak examples, such as sensors on automatic soap despeners not working on darker skins tones (that’s not racist it’s physics). Another example was a plugin where true=male and false=female. That is not gender biased it’s just lazy programming.

At one point she said:

“Have you even been to a party at a rich white guy’s house? There boring! I’m sorry”

This was just a talk about her feelings, if I was not surrounded by my coworkers I would have left.

I feel like this was not appropiate talk for one track conference since it traps everyone into listening. Especially where attendance is obligatory by your employer.

The conference should have warned people it would be an uncomfortable talk and invite people to start happy hour early if they chose.

To add to the weirdness in the closing remarks of one of the organizers patted himself on the back for supplying the women’s bathroom with tampons. He even created a slide for it with a tampon illustration.

Example slide from her deck.

My high school teacher once asked me to make a digital clock that ticked slower the further away you were from the computer. That without any sensors or webcam or anything...

He had this notion computer's are magical machines that can do anything. And all that in VB out of all languages.

1. Fucking MySQL database clusters.

There's nothing fun about MySQL clusters. Sometimes they start producing deadlock errors for no apparent reason... well, there's probably a reason, but it's never a transparent easy to find reason.

What was even less fun is that those errors took down a Sentry server. When your error log server goes down through ddos from your database messages, it's time to rethink your setup.

2. Wiring up a large factory with $2 arduino clones, each with a $2 esp8266 wifi chip, with various sensors for measuring flow of chemical solutions (I wanted cheap real time monitoring as an early warning system next to periodic sampling).

The scaling issue was getting over 500 streaming wifi signals to work in a 55c moist slightly corrosive atmosphere with concrete and steel everywhere, and getting it all into a single InfluxDB instance for analysis.

I found something even more effective than coffee on hard Mondays mornings. A fresh cup of technology, just the right quantity of silicium, transistors and sensors with a pinch of cloud connectivity.

My wife left to pick up our oldest kid from school and to later buy her outfits to start ballet.

I work from home, but am still on work hours. I sit on the couch next to our baby that is sleeping.

my wife when she leaves: look, she's asleep, just bring your laptop here and try to work.
me: ok I will

(10 minutes later)
me: ok I'll get the laptop now
me: *get up, pick the laptop, sit down again*
baby: wakes the fuck up

I swear to god this thing has fucking movement sensors.

!rant

Went to see my brother today. Before I could say hi, I saw the following:

- Desktop, Windows playing video
- Thinkpad, Linux mint, Arduino IDE
- Arduino board with some sensors
- Coffee
- Complaining about light theme

I've only thought him a bit of C# and SQL. They grow up so fast :')

(Before today, I only knew he was gonna learn Python)

When my poor spatial skills and extremely random associations meet.
Colleague: How big is the sensor?
Me: Well, it's...ugh..about this...hmmm, bigger than the other one, but like...I don't know, like a small bible?

While attending a class for mobile app development a couple of months back, the day the teacher (T) unveiled the class project:
T: You must build an Android app. You can do whatever you want.
T: Don't overcomplicate though. For example, online servers won't be valued!
T: But don't make it too easy. For example, don't make a tic-tac-toe. That won't be valued!
T: And remember, you must use device sensors, like the camera, GPS, accelerometer ...
T: But don't just throw the sensor functionality if it doesn't make sense in the app you're building. That won't be valued either!
T: You have one week to think and send me a proposal.
Me: What the fuck do you want me to do then?

I went to the tech department at my school to get some solder and a few offcuts of wire, but some generous person gave me 6 raspberry pi's that he didn't need anymore! But that's not all, he also gave me 5 rangefinder sensors, 4 motors, a 4 digit 7segment display, a couple of sd cards, a few other various sensors, and some wires
Oh, and I got my solder, too :)

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

Today I finished my robotics project. I had in my team a total idiot (the one who used the hidden divs, some might remember from another rant). I wanted to share with you the beginning of a ranting adventure.

Me: "you can begin with a simple task. I will send you the obstacle avoidance sensors values from Arduino, and you will send the data for the Arduino motors to dodge the obstacle".

The sensors give 1 if clear, 0 if obstacle is detected.

Below is his code (which I brutally rewrote in front of him).

Now, in the final version of the robot we have something like 9 sensors of the same time to work with.
Imagine what would have happened if we kept him coding. (Guess it: 2^9 statements! :D)

I was not that evil, I tried to give him some chances to prove himself willing to improve. None of them were used rightfully.

I'm so fucking glad we finished. I'm not gonna see him anymore, even if I'd like to be a technical interviewer for hiring just to demolish him.

I'm not always that evil, I promise (?)

Ps. He didn't even have any idea on what JSON is, even if we had already seen it during FIVE YEARS of computer engineering. (And should've known anyway if he had a bit of curiosity for the stuff he "studies")

I just switched up my temperature sensors and attached a TMP36 in place of the usual DS18B20.

I did my usual pinout and turned on my Pi, then compiled Python3.6 because I needed it for asyncio.

Ten minutes later when I entered my room again, my Pi was fried and the sensor was smoking.

FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKKK

that feeling when your new toys from aliexpress get delivered earlier than expected... i feel so happy unpacking those sensors, capacitors, heat sinks, microchips, breadboards and all. i feel like i have a geeky shopping addiction, i probably won't have the time to play with them from all the work and other personal projects, but still i hoarded enough electronics to invade the world with a drone army in case i have a few weeks me-time.

I used to think I was so clever by viewing the source code of websites, and would just scroll through it for fun, but what really got me started in programming was the TI-83 calculator I got in grade 10.

You couldn't view the code of most programs on that calc without a computer connection, but I managed to get my hands on the source code of something simple and learned how to prompt for values and calculate things with them. Before I knew it, I was making little programs in BASIC that did formulas for me (Area/circumference of a circle, etc.). One of my professors caught me showing my calculator to another student in class, and assumed I was being a bad student. When I said I made a program as a shortcut for one of the formulas we were learning, she tried to call my bluff and said to write the whole program on the whiteboard for the class to see. 10 minutes of writing and more than one blank stare from my classmates later, the teacher just waved me off and continued the lesson. I was chuffed :-). I made these simple programs for all my math classes throughout high school.

Unfortunately, my first year of university I took a CS course, and my teacher was probably the worst I've ever had in my life. I decided it wasn't for me, and though I did maintain my general aptitude for tech (and was still the person who fixed everyone's printers and viruses), I took a different path, eventually getting an Arts degree in Anthropology.

Where I live, the market for this is more than stale. In fact, it's completely flat, so I thought I would take a course about programming with Arduinos for fun and see if I should return to school for a different certification. It was AWESOME! I made a wireless weather station with Xbees and sensors and built my own anemometer.

I got a job at a manufacturing company, and had the fortune to build a robot which eventually made it's way to the second season of Battlebots. The level of intelligence and enthusiasm I encountered really inspired me, and now here I am at 31, halfway through a BSc in Computer Science and working for a company that makes 3D printers.

It's been a long journey, but the adventure always starts anew tomorrow.

You do know that "why do I need you if I can copy-paste code from SO?" joke floating around, right? Today I had a real-life situation perfectly illustrating it.

So I bought a set of parking sensors. Cheap ones, from AliExpress. Prolly the cheapest ones I could find. Installed them w/ engine turned off. All seemed fine. Cleaned it all up, got ready to go, started the engine and beeeep beeep beeepeeeeep beepp ..... beeeeeeeeep.

fuck.

Tried unplugging/replugging them one-by-one to find the faulty one. Nada. Apparently they all were false-alarming. They must all be bad, bcz they seem to work well w/ engine turned off (ignition on) and only false-alarm when engine is on.

Allright, I'll get a new set next weekend, a more expensive one and replace them again.

There goes my €20 and another week basically w/o parking sensors (car length is >5 meters, so sensors do help a lot).

Today I spend a few hours removing my rear bumper again, replacint all the sensors, wiring, etc. Tests show promising results - all sensors seem OK even w/ engine on! Close it all up, start a car again and.... beeep bep bep beeep beeee..eeeeppp.

MOTHER FUCK!

Another 30min-hour goes by while looking for a possible culprit. And I found it. The fix could did not take longer than 5 seconds. Apparently a wire feedint the sensors' controller was too close to sensors' wires. All I had to do is to push that wire a lil further from the controller with my index finger.

I could have saved €30, a week of time, half a day of work if I only knew what wire to [literally] poke.

shit...

------------Weeklyrant-------------------------------------
So I bought a smart watch to go with my Samsung Galaxy back when I was 12, and upon inspecting the watchface maker app I came across lua scripting files. This amazed me. Animations, complex math, hexadecimal color system, variables, sensors...
I spent about four months
learning/experimenting with lua until I discovered arduino and C++.

I am now 14 and have been fascinated with robotics and learned java and dos since.

My current dream project is sailing a 21st Century Message in a Bottle across the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe, satellite tracking it in apps and desktop environment and more importantly inspiring school children everywhere that anything you can imagine is possible. Fortunately, the project is rapidly becoming a reality - here's how:
- teamed with a few amazing devs virtually
- team created an effective infrastructure for communication and knowledge sharing
- researched oceanic patterns, satellite communications, sensors, material design, recovery logistics...
- developed budget and received funding sign off
- created realistic, yet aggressive project plan with deliverable dates
- built relationships with two Universities for Oceanic knowledge assistance
- developed a partnership with NOAA and will share info

Oh yeah, we did all that and are having fun in only 25 days so far! More challenges to come but we embrace the challenges!

- I need heat shrink tubes
- go to aliexpress, find the one set I need, order
- receive them to my PO, use a few of them

- I needed parking sensors
- to to aliexpress, find the set I need, order
- the parcel arrives in my country, on its way to my PO

- Today I visit a random site

Conclusion: AI is great at knowing what I have already bought and suggesting the exact same items I've ordered. Because if you've ordered them once you're likely to order them again, right?

Soooo.... It's almost summer alright.. Centralized heating is long gone already and they forecast +1C tonight.

I mean I do have to survive... Guess I'm keeping this overnight

yeah, pic qlty us shitty, sensors say it's 70-80

this will be included in every of my next project, definitely xD

How fucking stupid can people actually be?!
So a Swiss ISP called "Swisscom" is giving out a Picasso, like the real thing for you to keep at home for a few days or so... and they built sensors into the Frame... AND THEY HAVE A FUCKING PICTURE OF THE GPS SENSOR IN THE VIDEO! Thats not the worst... why not OPEN UP THE FRAME AND STEAL THE PICTURE?!

Can someone explain me...

... WHY GOOGLE PLAY SERVICES NEEDS ALL PERMISSIONS FOR WEBAUTHN(U2F)???

NEED MY CONTACTS, CALENDAR, BODY SENSORS, SMS AND SO ON! ALL FOR U2F???

I PROBABLY SHOULD BE GLAD THAT I DON'T NEED MY GOOGLE ACCOUNT FOR THAT?!?!

Using Firefox and testing WebAuthn instead of the typical dialog I get "Firefox has trouble communicating with Google Play Services" when I try to use that.

If someone knows the responsible people at google, tell them to FIX THAT SHIT.

Today, Linux kernel 5.8 was released, here is how it runs on my new laptop.

- Realtek shit ethernet still doesn't work (no, I didn't return it, because I would have to buy at least 2 times as expensive docking station instead and it is just not worth it), but considering Realtek, it is probably not a Linux kernel issue
- Battery life while watching videos was improved pretty significantly from 6.5 hours to about 7.3 hours (1080p HEVC)
- All temperature sensors are now working correctly
- Fan is a little more silent overall, probably because of some power draw improvements
- Subjectively, the system is a little bit more responsive overall

That moment you ordered a "starter set" for arduino just for the cables, servo and sensors, buy an arduino uno because it wasn't listed in the set description and now you have two...

Never thought it would be so cheap (25€ for the set apparently including a arduino uno)

When you release a mobile framework, here is what should be in the tutorial:

How to do api calls
How to switch screens
How to handle hardware sensors

What are hidden away in an obscure last page on the flutter site? All of the above. The api section just straight up fucking points to a dart page. Good fucking job.

I am currently a high school student. I am currently working in an internship for a local company. Super nice mentors and owner.

Anyhow, I was working on turning sensors data into JSON files which would be later sent to a server through HTML GET requests. I struggled with this for several days. The server received the data but displayed them as 'null'. Mentor came in to help. He changed 'println' to 'print' in the code where the JSON data are compiled. Then the thing works.

Witchcraft, I tell thee.

PS. First post

The fact that Macbook's have palm rest temperature sensors fucking baffles me...

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

A 2d simulation of the mars rover curiosity and its commandControl station. Pure java. The two components talk to each other via apache-kafka. Rover has its own operating system (kernel) and resource management. Hooked up some sensors to NASA API.

I have that idea about starting a non dev project, but use some dev skills.

I'm thinking about raising shrimps 🦐 to distribute (maybe at first just for testing). I can use raspberry pi with some sensors (Oxygen and food etc...) to semi-automate the raising process

Hey guys, my gf and I want to do something with the Arduino we got. We are getting a CS degree, so programming is not a problem, but we have quite basic knowledge of electronics.

What could be a cool simple (but not too introductory) project we could do?

The arduino came with a bunch of sensors (ultrasonic distance sensor, humidity, ...) some input (joystick, RFID reader/writer, buttons) and some outputs (LCD display, 8x8 LED matrix, bunch of color and RGB leds).

I think that was that automated greenhouse thingy.
This is basically a Raspberry Pi with sensors, a fan and a water pump controlling the air circulation and watering of the greenhouse. The data from the sensors gets stored in a database and you can check the temperature & humidity history on a shitty web interface.
This was one of my very first projects and I'm really proud of finishing it although it's really not perfect. When I started it I had never worked with
1) databases
2) sensors on the raspi
3) webinterfaces
before and somehow managed to get it working.

Concept: an app that runs on a smartwatch that activates when you disable an alarm (temporarily, not through the settings) and uses the on board sleep sensors to re-enable the alarm so you dont over sleep. But if you do actually wake up the first time, you dont need to disable a second alarm.

I would love to know if this app already exists or if someone is going to make it

Why the fuck do you need body sensors Google play?

And this is how it starts. I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, quite some time ago. Plain board, just the board and a case. Why? Well, I have no idea. I always wanted one for some reason... and finally got one.

I got a good sd card for it, and flashed raspbian and... now what? What should I do with this?

*Looks up "Cool RPi projects"*

*Nah, I already have a NAS... No, wouldn't really use a media center... play games?*

*Well, let me just install sshd and come back to it later.*

Today, I run pi-hole, jekyll, node, gitd, a ton of other things that ends with d... I am even considering buying an extra one (maybe two).

Now I'm really afraid of what would happen if I give in to the urge of buying sensors and add-on boards.

Best: come up with best idea to real world problem.

Worst: lose to teams who used all the sensors in the kit.... Their system didn't even solve a problem.

var rant: QuantumBool = PartlyTrue

So now I think I've got everything in my app right.... But I can't test it because ***** xcode doesn't create a **** certificate so I can deploy it to my phone (it uses motion sensors)

I deleted all the certificates of developer from the keychain because of a bug and now I **** can't deploy my apps for testing....

Please, does anyone know how to reset the icloud keychain to absolute nothing?

Throughout the years I slowly bought more Arduino boards and stuff. But then RadioShack closed shops in my country. So my inventory has remained relatively small.

But now I have been given a ton of stuff. Boards, sensors, wires. More than what I know what to do with.

Someone, please give me a cool project to make.

So we were building this thing with a raspberry pi, a few sensors and a few motors but for some reason we could not interface a sensor with the pi (this is supposed to be trivial) so we interfaced it with an Arduino and had connected a pin on the Arduino to the Raspberry pi to alert the pi when the sensor reads something!

Not something we were proud of but we had time constraints and couldn't figure out how to make it work. Also, the thing we were building was just for a one time use so we thought it would be okay

iot+Android+Azure+mySQL+GoogleAPI+TwitterAPI

Oh, Only 1 bug. exterminate.

99 bugs.
Inserted 100 rows of wrong data into tables in a Loop.
RaspberryPi Burnt due to electrical feedback from the sensors.
Android phone froze.

Wow. I still have my sensors fine though.

!rant
But still kindof a Rant...

I Just got my Oculus Rift (Summer Edition bundle)
And I was Soo happy to try the Oculus Touch Controllers!
Except, the Setup was pretty hard because I dont have so much room to move in and the Setup always said: GO FURTHER BACK!
Until I realized that it was because of the Sensors which I put in an Angle not 90°...
Oh hell I was trying for Like an hour until it worked.
But then the Experience was one which I NEVER had! (I Tried VR Rollercoasters, waterslides in VR, PSVR, The HTC Vive, and the gear VR, Oculus DK 1 and DK 2)
It got me a little dizzy after an hour and a half of smaching Robots into pieces...
But still really AMAZING!
So my advice, get it when its on Sale with the Oculus Touch or Just right away.
TL;DR
I bought the Rift and im really happy about it.

The worst technology i had to deal with was probably a piece of hardware. It was a mini-pc combined with sensors and digital IOs and thus, it should have been able to do process control all by itself.

At that time, there was hardware that did that, but this one had an intel cpu, windows embedded and some powerful libraries pre-installed.

Sounds good, didn't work. The thing was so unstable and buggy and crashed on everything. The sensor part had lots of parameters and the right order was trial and error, documentation didn't match behavior, fixes promised but never delivered.

Lucky for us: it was just a demokit, no real project.

I still remember it with a smile. We got in contact to that company at a trade fair and they had most impressive booth. I also remember their companies image movie from their homepage with developers in dark labs with holographic monitors and the boss in his shiny bright office as he looked out of the window and quoted a famous german author.

Hilarious and sad. :-)

Why is mobile development still a thing?
Hear me out. All these simple apps, like shopping centre discount, eshops, vinted, other kinds of webapi consumers. Many have a website and a phone app.

Why??? Why the phone app? What's wrong with just embedding your responsive webpage into a webview and call it a day ffs?

I mean, maintenance becomes trivial and there's no split brain. No? What am I missing?

Not talking about apps that rely on android/ios api, for like camera, calls, storage access, sensors etc

Just found out the API of our zentracloud sensors is sending the units with a space before the actual unit. Couldn't figure out for half an hour why Doctrine is not finding the unit in the database. Encoding? JSON decoding? Character itself? Screw you. Screw you...

Today I have created a server application on Python Tornado which can forward TCP Packets directly to HTTP request queue without any intermediate caching.

Our remote IOT devices (microcontrollers with sensors attached) send sensor reading over TCP Socket to our server and all the connected web applications can show the data instantly using long polling and the above mentioned technique.

I just hate trends...
A few years ago, if a website would show customized content (like news, posts) we would say that the job is done by a robot, scripts, filters...
Now days is AI this, AI that... Buy this bike, it as collision sensors so it's AI powered... New washing machine with inteligent AI.. You don't have to set half or full load because the AI will do that for you...

I'm officially convinced that my computer is cursed by now:

I get a Oculus Touch Bundle. Connect it to the computer, both sensors through USB 2, HMD too. One of them on an extension cord, experimental 360 degree setup (and yes, I'm covering the lenses when not playing).
Works great for a couple weeks, then I start getting 8603 and 8609 errors (USB connection bad or too little bandwidth. Usually happens when you do something else on the same USB controller).
Trying all of the setups that comply with the setup manual, none works...

... Thinking "fuck it, can't get any worse now", I connect both sensors to the USB 3 ports on my board (A big thou shalt not according to the manual).

Works perfectly. No lag, no loss of tracking.

Well, I guess if something applies to 99.9% of all computers in the world, mine is among the 0.1%. I'm a living corner case, 🤣

Guess I'll move to the Netherlands and become a Ganja farmer.

Is told to make a cool football themed board for a planning expo.

Thinks football is stupid, but makes an awesome board with a built in football game made with a Raspberry Pi and optical sensors to detect when you throw a ball through the hole.

Boss tells me that my board doesn’t match the theme and doesn’t even mention the fact that what I made was cool as fuck.

Have to trash the board and make something lame with construction paper footballs instead.

My soul is dead. Business people are such fucking children who punish creativity and reward mediocrity. I need to find a company run by developers.

Hello, today was my First day, internship at Microsoft innovation center BE, a great day with amazing people, my project is called tech Office, we need to process data from sensors in the office, create and use Microsoft AI to optimize and help the office become smarter and more efficient. Make the life better and the environment more productive. I don't really know where to start but I'm happy to be given such an opportunity and will do everything to make this work !

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

Short contract job, helping a solo dev.
Me: what's these "200" everywhere?
Him: the max number of sensors we support. I know it should be a define, but it just became that way.
Me: <shrugs. Well, I'm only staying here a couple of weeks. Goes on working on my own branch>

A week later, manager says: "now we need to support 400 sensors!"

Solo dev: <searches and replaces all occurrences of 200 with 400. The program breaks>
Me: what happened?
Him: I only changed the max number of sensors!
Me: Mmm. <searches for 199 as well... Bingo. Creates a define, searches for 198 and 201 for good measure. Gives him no comment about my change>

Do you guys think I should go for a Lego Mindstorms set as a way to start getting into robotics?

I know of a lot of people that recommend going through arduino and buying a bunch of shit and throwing it together etc. But the thing that makes me interested in Mindstorms is how everything seems to be in one place. A smart brick programmable through multiple different programming languages(for example Python, java, C) a good kit that can be really modular and built into different components, all sorts of sensors.

I just think its a good option, but if someone were to recommend a particular book or resource for Arduino or some other stuff I would definitely consider it.

So, what do you lads think?

Competition judges don't believe that a Google Assistant based system running on a Raspberry with recipes, ingredients, YouTube and Spotify streaming, Kodi streaming, lights control and other stuff, qualifies as an IoT project.
For them, it just equates to the number of sensors and ugly wires sticking out a Raspberry, with some 1-file Python program.

Thoughts on this?

So to give you a feel for what evil, clusterfuck code it was in: this projects largest part was coded by a maniac, witty physicist confined in the factory for a month, intended as a 'provisional' solution of course it ran for years. The style was like C with a bit of classes.. and a big chunk of shared memory as a global mud of storage, communication and catastrophe. Optimistic or no locking of the memory between process barriers, arrays with self implemented boundary checks that would give you the zeroth element on failure and write an error log of which there were often dozens in the log. But if that sounds terrifying already, it is only baseline uneasyness which was largely surpassed by the shear mass of code, special units, undocumented madness. And I had like three month to write a simulator of the physical factory and sensors to feed that behemoth with the 'right' inputs. Still I don't know how I stood it through, but I resigned little time afterwards.

Well, lastly to the bug: there was some central map in that shared memory that hold like view of the central customer data. And somehow - maybe not that surprisingly giving the surrounding codebase - it sometimes got corrupted. Once in a month or two times a day. Tried to put in logging, more checks - but never really could pinpoint the problem... Till today I still get the haunting feeling of a luring memory corruption beneath my feet, if I get closer to the metal core of pure C.

When I created my first app on RaspberryPi. It was an app that watches window sensors and shows the information about windows status (close or open) and shows the information on web application. Тhis was my first time when I faced with embedded development with Python.

A group of friends and I when we were 15 competed in a UK-wide competition to build a robot with sonar and touch sensors to navigate through a field of obstacles. The winner was the fastest average. Our robot only travelled in bent lines, and turned when it detected an obstacle infront of it. We had our three tries, the first two taking perhaps 30 seconds. The third time we twisted it slightly on its start position, and without stopping it followed a curve through the whole course, in about 3 seconds. Unfortunately we weren't even mentioned in the runners up :L

I Did NOT realise how fucking great I2C and an esp8266 can be, simply connect up a few sensors like BME 280 and a few others, implement the Adafruit IO capabillity, done. Fucking Amazing!

I am slowly turning my home into an automated smart home, however. I have found a lot of responding devices (media players, sockets, etc..) but no trigger devices (buttons, sensors) I can work with.

Am I looking in the wrong place or do I really have to build something myself using arduino?

My setup is the following: I have a central server in my home that hosts a bunch of docker services that all server a certain purpose. All smart devices have static ips so that server can address them quickly. So it is capable of controlling many things. However, now I want to trigger certain actions through a hardware button. It seems I cannot find such a device....

Any other hads on here?

Fucking pt100 sensors and fucking max31865 amplifiers! Waited a few months to arrive (working on an arduino bbq temp monitor and log server), ordered fucking everything, asembled fucking everything and this piece of fucking shit reads random values between -200 AND 980 DEGREE not even constant and sometimes gives under/over voltage. Tried a whole another max and different pt100s but every fucking time this random madness. WHY THE FUCK IT CANT JUST DISPLAY THE FUCKING TEMPERATURE???

Being a native Android dev for most of my college days(yet to start a full time professional life), i often feel scared of my life choices.

Like, i chose to go into a field in which am totally on my own . Android is not a subject taught or supported by colleges, so a virtual shelter that every fresher gets, i.e that of a "he's just a college passout, he wouldn't know that" is not for me. I am supposed to be a self learner and a knowledgeable android dev by default.

Other than that , idk why i feel that am having a very specific skillset which would be harmful for me if am not the best at it.

I feel the same for entire Android dev. I mean, its nothing but a very specific hardware device with a small screen and a bunch of lmited sensors. Our tools and apps are limited to just manipulate them to do little fancy stuff offline. Other than that everything (and sometimes even this too) could be achieved by a website/webapp of a web dev.

A particular native android dev don't know how the ML/AI stuff works, don't know how backend stuff works don't know how the cloud stuff works, jeck we don't even know how those unity games work!

We are just some end product makers taking data from somewhere handled by someone and printing them in fancy gui.
(But we are good at ranting about stupid mobile hardware manufacturers, i tell u that)

So am not sure if being an Android dev is a going to be good for me in the future. I mean , a web dev always gets to interact at every level of products, but we can't.

I always feel my future will end up being limited to being good in Android, later shifting to IOS to being completely unemployed because everything is controlled by js and web dev tools and native programming is no longer a thing anymore :/

!rant or at least not dev related

I work at a school. Sometimes we get some weird training and shit we have to attend to. This time it had to do with what to do in the event of an active shooter.

Because you know. The U.S IS full of angry white kids with guns that if fucked up enough will just take fire on people.

Well, as a military veteran. I feel pretty confident in knowing what to do when some asshole is trying to get his expert marksman badge on me. So i requested not to waste my valuable time on such bs. I was promptly denied and encouraged to attend the bs training.

The first dumbshit thing they tell you to do is to turn the lights off and hide(if you decide to not fight) for which I mentioned that it would not work.

You see. Our entire buildings have motion sensors on each room which would TURN the fucking lights on if you move........ and even though you can turn the switch on..some offices would still work through the motion sensor....exhibit A: my office.

Fuck this. Couldn't i just keep one of my guns with me?? It would just take about 2 shoots really....and I promise they would stay in.

This sucks man. I need to move to Canadia. I don't want my kids having to hear about "mandatory active shooter training"

That fucking bullshit should never be a norm.

10 bucks and a life says i have better aim than some crazy kid.

A game where you build creatures from muscles, tendons, bones, blood vessels, other fluid containment and transport organs, as well as nerves and brains. Probably would look very gross. Gore-centric game.

Similarly, a game where you build robots out of Pistons, gears, Axels, fluid tanks and hoses, engines, sensors, computers and wires.

Either one of these premises is pretty amenable to a backstory where you're trying to escape-from/survive-on an alien world.

It seems to be the new trend : building "boxes" based on raspberry pi, including sensors to mesure any sort of thing, and sending data to a REST API.

Was contacted for a project like this, to make the backend for the project.
I ask to the client the credentials of the dev who will makes the embedded dev, to know the format of data I will receive and send to the "box", the client respond that "I don't need to know that", and, besides, they don't have any dev for this post for now, but I can begin the dev for the backend without that, not knowing data structure, and will receive all of that for half December, for a deadline in early January.

Tell the client that his project will never be done in the deadline, got ejected from the project, client is pretty sure he will find à dev who will do all the work in 2 weeks.

Fuckin' startup culture.

FUCK YES! I just got accepted for the The Next Web Battle of the Sensors hackathon!

Wish me luck. Starting today on building a modular CCTV camera and alarm system for my home.
Gonna try to integrate accelerometers on the windows to detect when the glass vibrates too much or for too long, as opposed to sonic glassbreak sensors, which also trigger upon my son crying.

So I'm building this environmental monitoring system for one of the Labs to monitor Temperature and Humidity. the "software" that comes as part of the package with these sensors is really just a website you host yourself if you don't choose the cloud option. No big deal really, (see my previous rant about getting windows server through SSC) I setup IIS and get the "software" registered get a couple sensors running looks good. However I don't like the error messages that popup because it's unsecured. do some reading and I find out that most browsers will give you a warning if your not using HTTPS even if it's for internal use only. OK we'll how hard can it be in implement encryption, turns out it's not that hard and you can do it for free how with letsencrypt and other places. I like free, now i have to use SSH to get into the server and run an ACME client. Hey open SSH is part of windows now cool, download an ACME client SSH into the server and nope doesn't work. Oh right I'm behind a corporate firewall and a bunch of other shit I can't control. Why is so damn arduous to setup this god dam internal website and the problems aren't even the site. Now I'm playing with AWS spinning up an instance to be able to try and get an SSL certificate just so i don't have to tell people it's OK to trust this site ignore the big angry warning.
Best part is other similar internal sites don;t use SSL and all have big messages about someone stealing your soul if you go there and these are commercial systems that run all the HVAC for all the campuses across Canada.
I need more Tylenol.

Maybe someone can help me out here...

I'm doing a small robotics project, where I'm building a line following robot.

That in itself is fine, and it works, however, the robot also needs to navigate through a maze.

The thing is, I only have access to two sensors, 1 light sensor, and 1 color sensor, meaning that I can't detect junctions.

Does anyone have any advice or ideas on how I could approach this with my restricted sensor count?

!Rant - birthday gift 🎂

3 days ago was my birthday and my girlfriend still has to buy me a gift, but she doesn't know what to buy. Now the problem is that I don't know either.

I'd like to start programming something related to IoT and maybe learn a bit more of C/C++ (I guess they could be useful to know), so I'm asking you, what should I (she) buy? Arduino or Raspberry PI 3? Is there a kit of sensors I can buy? I accept any suggestion!

Thank you 🙂

Knew nothing about Arduino
Attended a workshop
They had a hackathon after it
Won the hackathon
Got the Arduino uno board as a prize
Gotta buy sensors and other stuff though.
*Me so happy*
What should I make now? (Apart from an Iron Giant replica controlled wirelessly thorugh commands)

Anyone worked with the Nordic API before? Trying to get two small VL53L0X sensors to work, but only managing one. I'm setting ethe address to two different ones when I need the readings, but it still isn't giving any sadly. Any suggestions?

!all device related

Oh boy here we lads!

Had a pretty shitty few weeks lately but the other day sort of got a bit much, first my phone's cameras started to fail and now that I've had the screen replaced, it's not covered under hardware guarantee warranties anymore, the sensors aren't working, work hours are getting cut, receiving near on 10 emails saying they are declining my resume, TAFE have no IT courses, uni is too expensive, the house I was going to buy got sold, my PC is fucking up, I've hurt my back (for the 10 millionth fucking time), none of my projects are coming together, haven't slept properly for weeks now...

Why does it always have to fucking poor when it rains, when can I just get a fucking glimpse at some sunlight on the horizon...

I recently moved to a house where my gf and me each have our separate office space. However, i’m sitting with my back to the door so whenever i’m in the zone with noise cancelling on and my gf walks in i don’t hear her. Resulting in me having a couple of almost heart attacks lately.

I have ideas about mirrors or sensors but since i’m working of three screens i din’t think it will do. The second option is ofcourse to move the desk to the other side of the room so that i’m facing the door more. But there are no power plugs.

My gf basically locks her door by sitting in front of it. Also she doesnt have a noise cancelling head set.

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

How to start learning iot?i mean, here is what i understood after searching for a while: iot consists usually the hardware devices/sensors/robos which generate data/do something ; transmit this data to some server where calculations are performed and then show it to user.. And there are some kits worth a big amount which you gotta buy... is that all right?
Guidance please .:)

I worked on an application to determine drop height of an object based on shock experienced by the object using sensors.

Are there cameras that see like the human eye (single pixels that will directly send their data so that you have a constant datastream as opposed to a whole screen that just takes a picture ever so often in a seconde)?

Also, is it possible to create a simple AI alone? Are there ways to make voices sound nicer(I would love to be able to tell an AI how to speak)

I hate how I have battery issues with every smartphone/tablet I buy. They do well for 1 week and then I have to buy an additional charger for work because after 5 hours of only lying there it only has 50% which wouldnt be sufficient for 30 minutes car drive (Maps, Spotify, Bluetooth, GPS and mobile data)... Fml. I am tired of batteries. My next phone is going to be a huawei mate 10. Maybe I habe more luck with this one. I dont believe im Samsung anymore.

And anyway why the fuck do they introduce better CPUs more sensors etc whilst Keeping the battery capacity the same.. Instead they introduce fast charge etc. Another reason for me to go away from samsung is the fact they bloat each firmware up, my battery got worst after each system update (even the security ones) and also doing 14 factory resets didnt work. Support is shit. They also integrated Clean Master into the system and an "Antivirus Protection"... Can't get worst.

samsungrant@devrant.com # > submit && exit

hey guys which android phone do you find the best in terms of network, connectivity and gps/location while being offline?
thinking of buying a new phone.
- no ios device
- should have good location sensors(most imp, recently had an incident when i was in an unknown city and my device messed up google maps. we ended up circling for 30 mins in the same area)
- good network connectivity ( i know its dependent on sim provider and network towers but i have seen some devices fine signal even in worst areas)
- price: moderate to lower expensive ($1000/INR 60000 max)

i rarely buy phones , like once in 3-4 years, so having a decent build quality will also help
thanks!

It's these individually tiny annoyances in products and software that together form a huge annoyance.

For example, it's 2022 and Chromium-based web browsers still interrupt an upload when hitting CTRL+S. This is why competition is important. If there was no Firefox, the only major web browsers would, without exception, have this annoyance, since they're all based on Chrmoium.

I remember Chromium for mobile formerly locking scrolling and zooming of the currently viewed page while the next page was loading. Thankfully, this annoyance was removed.

In 2016, the Samsung camera software was updated to show a "camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up window when both front and rear sensors of the smartphone were covered while the camera was launched by pressing the home button twice, on the camera software Samsung bundled with their custom version of Android 6. What's more, if that pointless pop-up was closed by tapping the background instead of the tiny "OK" button or not responded to within five seconds, the camera software would exit itself. Needless to say, this defeats the purpose of a quick launch. It denies quick-launching while the phone is in the pocket, and the time necessary to get the phone out could cause moments to be missed.

Another bad camera behaviour Samsung introduced with the camera software bundled with their customized Android 6 was that if it was launched again shortly after exiting or switching to stand-by mode, it would also exit itself again within a few seconds. It could be that the camera app was initially designed around Android 5.0 in 2015 and then not properly adapted to Android 6.0, and some process management behaviour of Android 6.0 causes this behaviour. But whatever causes it, it is annoying and results in moments to not be captured.

Another such annoyance is that some home screen software for smartphones only allows access to its settings by holding a blank spot not occupied by a shortcut. However, if all home screen pages are full, one either needs to create a new page if allowed by the app, or temporarily remove a shortcut to be able to access the settings.

More examples are: Forced smartphone restart when replacing the SIM card, the minimum window size being far too large in some smartphones with multi-windowing functionality, accidental triggering of burst shot mode that can't be deactivated in the camera software, only showing the estimated number of remaining photos if less than 300 and thus a late warning, transition animations that are too slow, screenshots only being captured when holding a button combination for a second rather than immediately, the terminal emulator being inaccessible for the first three minutes after the smartphone has booted, and the sound from an online advertisement video causing pain from being much louder than the playing video.

Any of these annoyances might appear minor individually, but together, they form a major burden on everyday use. Therefore, developers should eliminate annoyances, no matter how minor they might seem.

The same also applies for missing features. The individual removal of a feature might not seem like a big of a deal, but removing dozens of small features accumulates to a significant lack of functionality, undermining the sense of being able to get work done with that product or software when that feature is unexpectedly needed. Examples for a products that pruned lots of functionality from its predecessor is the Samsung Galaxy S6, and newer laptops featuring very few USB ports. Web browsers have removed lots of features as well. Some features can be retrofitted with extensions, but they rely on a third-party developer maintaining compatibility. If many minor-seeming features are removed, users will repeatedly hit "sorry, this product/software can not do that anymore" moments.