Designing & building things across mechanical, electronics & software. I make videos about it too. Aviation geek. ✈️
Germany
Joined February 2019
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Its official. The Pixel Pump 2 is coming 🔥
Will do a proper introduction video soon but here's a few interesting specs 🧵
(It's a tool for PCB hand assembly)
I don't know but every time I assemble a PCB with those tools I get reminded of how convenient this is. 🫦
Robin Reiter retweeted
As most of you, I live in my coding agent interfaces now.
I achieve at least 10x the output of what I could've done coding myself and I love this.
I work on ideas I wouldn't have dared to work on just a year ago.
Write code in languages I am not familiar with and still feel good about the results.
And despite all of this, the amount of thought and polish that is needed to create something amazing hasn't changed at all.
I felt the same.
Let people be people.
Usually demos like these have someone back stage doing the exact same thing, ready for instant cut over. If that also fails, a pre-recorded video is the 2nd cut over.
This made me like OpenAI even more. Live demos are so hard, the internet in this venue can be flakey, you are super nervous, etc..
This stuff takes weeks to prepare and I doubt these presenters had that much time
Taking some product images for the Crowdsupply campaign. Those look almost as if they would have been injection molded.
So clean!
Do small automated PnP machines have a future? I am asking myself this question a lot.
The Pixel Pump is meant to be used as an addition to tweezers. It’s for people who assemble by hand. One offs or small qty batches.
Everything larger would require PCBA or an automated PnP.
The question is, is there a real need for those small machines or will those mid to large size batches slowly migrate towards PCBA?
Not sure.
Finalized the SMD magazines today. The UV laser engraved elements look great. Also I convinced myself that only screws will bring the ultimate quality so every magazine is now held together by 5 screws.
@crowd_supply campaign should start soon. Will take the final product images of all products involved tomorrow. Lets go! 🚀
The hardware is really good. I have a MacBook Air M1. It’s a few years old. You can get them for a pretty decent price second hand.
The second hand non-apple laptops in that price range are not as good.
Same for me. This also gives be just enough „hands on“ so I still understand what’s going on. It’s also the most fun.
I do like making software. I also like thinking about UX.
None of thise works (for me):
- research and plan a huge feature or entire service and let a fleet of agents implement it (agents get lost in slop)
- hold agents by the hand and micromanage them (too slow, inefficient)
- drown agents in rules and guardrails (effectively the previous point)
- let agents roam freely (vibe coding, good for throwaway software - but doesn't work for "regular" software)
What does work:
- a set of reasonable guardrails, rules, linting, a good testing strategy.
- decently sized tasks with research + planning upfront
- work your way through a problem task by task, layer by layer - doing work in parallel if possible
It's been a process but I'm super happy with how these latest models perform with this approach