> Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects
it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.
I was extremely surprised when, out of solder recently, I just bought some Draper lead free solder from my local Home Depot(!), and it flowed so much better than my previous roll of fancy lead-free solder from a decade ago. Basically indistinguishable from leaded. I was very surprised.
not really? I have a habit of using the wrongest solder for my projects. The stuff I use currently was formulated for wave soldering, no clue why it comes in spools but it was cheap.
In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.
I can make no claims as to the brands mentioned in the parent post, but a 3 second heating time isn't all that fast for a real nice soldering iron. Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.
> Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.
Metcal Fixed Temperature Induction soldering irons. Still the gold standard after decades because instead of using PID with a heating element and sensor, it exploits the curie effect. The tips are made of a special alloy that is only magnetic until a certain temperature after which it doesn’t absorb any more energy from the PSU, which just dumps a constant 25Mhz signal into the tip keeping it at the fixed temperature.
When their patents expired a couple of Metcal engineers left to found Thermaltronics, which makes the same soldering iron (they’re even tip compatible!) for 2-3x cheaper. They’re still more expensive than hobbyist soldering irons but well worth the cost for anyone doing a lot of soldering. The Metcal power supplies are beasts though so you can easily pick up a 20 year old unit for a couple hundred bucks on ebay and it’ll run till the apocalypse comes home to roost. I have an old unit made in the late 90s that is still going strong.
Important to note that these days you really should use lead-free solder. You'll find all sorts of people going around claiming that leaded is better, but it's really not, and it's not worth the health risk. Your iron needs to be about 20c hotter than for leaded and your solder joints will look dull instead of shiny. If you find lead-free solder to not flow properly to be grainy your iron isn't hot enough.
Still wash your hands after using lead-free solder by the way. You don't want to be eating rosin or copper either.
For this example, perhaps not much, but a similar query also works. given this image[0] I queried qwen3.5-35b-a3b "where is waldo", and after thinking some got this back:
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Waldo is located in the *center* of the image.
Here is how to spot him:
1. Look towards the middle of the beach scene.
2. Find the *red and white striped lifeguard stand/booth* on the right side of the center area.
3. Just to the left of that booth, there is a man standing up wearing his signature *red and white striped shirt*, blue jeans, and red hat with a pom-pom. He also has a camera around his neck.
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Which is not generally something OCR can do. If you instead ask "how many horses are in this image?" you get this response:
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Based on a careful look at the image, there are *3* equine animals (which appear to be donkeys or ponies used for beach rides).
1. One is near the top left, being ridden by someone in yellow shorts.
2. Right next to it is another one, being ridden by someone in blue and yellow.
3. On the far right edge of the image (near the water), there is a third grey animal being ridden by someone wearing a hat.
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Now is this all anything you can't do with more boring machine learning? sure, but there's something incredibly convenient about how generic LLMs are. You don't need to train anything, just point the LLM at an image and ask.
I'd recommend you'd give D a try. It manages to have a bunch of the cool features C++ has, while still largely feeling like working in C with some of the cruft fixed.
D's equivalent to "constexpr" is "compile time function evaluation". i.e. in any context where it only makes sense to run code at compile time, it will do so. This makes it trivial to do some pretty complex things at compile time. I put together an example that shows creating static arrays, dynamic arrays, and a dynamic array with a partial fibbonaci sequence all at compile time[0].
you can run playdate games on the desktop using the emulator included in the free SDK. It won't be as fun as running it on an actual device, but nothing stopping people from actually messing with making playdate games without a playdate.
ah I guess I sort of elided actually... saying the point I was trying to make. If it's just about showing games off to your friends (which with a course like this is pretty likely) you can point them to the emulator.
yeah if you're aiming to make a proper professional game with aims of making profit... the playdate probably isn't the way to go. But then I recon that's part of what makes it an awesome platform. It hasn't been captured by capitalism yet.
It is restricted in a way that you would restrict yourself to write high speed software in most languages, and I found it is not that restrictive compared to C that you would have to use if you were to write a fast Python library.
oh for sure, but I still feel like telling people pypy is written in python is misleading. it's written in something significantly like python, but it's not python.
OpenSCAD works natively with triangle meshes. sphere() will create a spherical triangle mesh.
These libraries on the other hand can natively represent a sphere for instance. This means that during CAD-ing you don't need to worry about resolution, that's a consideration for export only.
Do you mean that OpenScad performs boolean/other operations on triangle meshes, but these libraries don't until output? So they might instead use curved surfaces/edges etc as outputs for operations and only convert to triangles for output or export at the very end?
It isn't even necessary to create triangle meshes during export. You can export as step files. It is a commonly used brep based file format supported by almost any "proper" CAD software. Triangle mesh based modelers can't easily export good step files because they don't operate at that level of abstraction.
In professional CAD systems, geometry is not stored as triangle meshes but as mathematically defined surfaces (such as parametric and NURBS surfaces).
Triangle meshes are only generated as approximations for rendering.
This is analogous to vector graphics (SVG/EPS) versus raster images (PNG/JPG).
Any serious manufacturing will work require a STEP (or something equivalent) which stores these parametric surfaces rather than a mesh.
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