“ The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool”

Even easier if you setup debugging using another pico, debug probe or even a Pi (not sure if this works on the 5)

I briefly worked in a team that implemented a JVM on a mobile OS (before the iPhone) and one of the senior devs said Jazelle was in effect very inefficient because of all the context switching between ARM mode and Jazelle mode. Turned out a carefully tuned ARM JVM was in practice th best

How can you be sure putting the finger on the chip raise the temp? If you feel hot that means heat from the chip is being transferred to your finger, that may decrease the temp, no?

From my understanding putting your finger on an uncooled CPU acts like a passive cooler, thus actually decreasing temperature.

wouldn't your finger have acted as a heat sink, lowering the temp? sounds like the program may have worked correctly. could be worth trying again with a hot enough piece of metal instead of your finger

I don't think a larger context window would help with that.

Best comment ;)

Ha. I asked it to write some code for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It told me there might be some confusion as there is no official product release of the RP2350. If it doesn’t know that, then what else doesn’t it know?

Scarily close to satire of humans in denial about AI capabilities (not saying that it's the case here but I can imagine easily such arguments when AI is almost everywhere superhuman)

I just checked. The code it gave me, though syntactically correct, was wrong functionally. The rp2040 temp reading increases and the ADC value decreases. ChatGPT didn’t invert the values.

37 is young. Trust me, in a few weeks I’ll be 60.

My whole life I’ve known I was an engineer. However, for a great chunk of the early years I couldn’t express that and did really badly at school.

I just learnt at my own pace and eventually worked as an electronics engineer in the broadcast industry. Then quit that and moved into sw dev.

One piece of advice is to just build stuff, fail and learn.

Good luck

It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years. I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020.

I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.

I tried code gen for the first time recently. The generated code look great, was commented and ran perfectly. The results were completely wrong. The code was to calculate the cpu temperature from the Raspberry Pi RP2350 in python. The initial value look about right, then I put my finger on the chip and the temp went down! I assume the model had been trained on broken code. This lead me to think how do they validate code does what it says

Nobody is saying that you don't have to read and check the code. Especially for things like numerical constants. Those are very frequently hallucinated (unless it's something super common like pi).

I’ve now retired from professional programming and I’m now in hobby mode. I learn nothing from reading AI generated code. I might as well read the stack overflow questions myself and learn.

You aren't supposed to learn anything. Nobody is using AI to do stuff they couldn't do themselves. AI just does it much much faster.

Did you review the code itself, or test the code beyond just putting your finger on the chip? Is it possible that your finger was actually cooler than the chip and acted as a heat sink upon contact?

The code looked fine. And I don’t think my finger is colder than the chip - I’m not the iceman. The error is the analog value read by the ADC gets lower as the temperature rises.

30 odd years ago, part of my role was to colour balance cameras in a studio environment. We didn’t need computers - but at most there were only 5 cameras :)

I think Newton is on the phone... Once the accelerating force is removed the object will go into an orbit that includes the point at which the force stops. This however is Earth

It doesn't remove fuel entirely, they still need an engine to circularize their orbit.

> The velocity boost provided by the accelerator's electric drive results in a 4x reduction in the fuel required to reach orbit, a 10x reduction in cost, and the ability to launch multiple times per day.

https://www.spinlaunch.com/orbital

Their promotional video shows this at around the 20s mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGO4LtCctTk

I think it's a cool idea. What increase in G's are we talking about launching things this way?

SpinLaunch: ~10000G

Rocket: ~5G

So roughly 3 orders of magnitude.

Wow are there issues with making things like chips that can even survive that? I remember when I was a scientist and 10,000g was some very high speed centrifuging that you better make sure everything like even glass and plastic can handle.

> SpinLaunch: ~10000G

I admit I was surprised people were able to build hardware that survived that.

They plan on launching a small 1st stage with the satellite. You need some delta-V to circularize & fine tune the orbit after the spin launch.

Time to break out Kerbal Space Program and see how well it works...

I believe all the payloads will have a small rocket on them to boost the periapsis up outside the earth

With enough force applied, the Earth will no longer be there when it comes back to that point.

Unless it reaches escape velocity (ie its never coming back) then it will always comeback to where it started from. The object is under the same gravitaional influences as the Earth

As others have pointed out, there is a rocket motor to put the payload into an orbit.

From my experience on the Raspberry Pi rp2040, adding C code to a micropython build is very straightforward