Technologies: Golang, python, perl but it's rusty. Experimenting with large scale AI data extraction pipelines. 5 years experience in robot arm motion planning. 5 years experience in bioinformatics.
Staff software engineer, most recently at Viam. Wrote most of the motion planning stack, from the linear algebra ground up. Used Universal Robots and Ufactory arms extensively. Medium experience with small-scale electrical engineering for robot projects. Some experience with robot navigation, but not as much as arms.
Do you have an idea of the R-value of the insulation you put in? I'm wondering what this will take to heat and cool during the peaks of summer and winter.
True. Depending on how heavily they compressed it to fit between those studs it will likely be less than R13. No matter whether you use fiberglass or rockwool, you should make sure you buy insulation sized to the depth of the cavity it will insulate. Then use an insulation knife to cut in for obstacles within the cavities.
My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.
We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.
Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.
I recently had GPS put me in a loop. At every point in the loop, I was following the GPS and the road signs. The elements of this loop were the normal GPS route-finding, one bug (where it told me to take a certain road east, when it should have said west), and one incomplete signage (where GPS told me to exit onto a certain road, the exit sign only said the road went one direction, but in fact the same road went both directions). Following the directions as given resulted in not actually doing what the GPS routefinding wanted me to do, and the recalculated path put me to the place where I tried to follow the sign and went the wrong way, which led to it recalculating again, and sent me back around the loop.
I went around this loop twice before I realized that something was obviously broken, pulled into a parking lot, and actually looked in detail at what was happening. Then I was able to see what both problems were, and did the right thing for where I was, rather than what it was telling me to do.
I was laid off in early June (was a staff software eng at Viam writing motion planning software for robots) and have been fiddling with electronics.
Most recently I made a portable AQI meter, since the air quality here in Central Oregon can quickly get bad.
It's a small 3d printed box containing a rpi pico, an 18650 battery, an e-ink display, and a SEN66 sensor.
I hit a button, it turns on, runs the sensor for ~40 seconds to get a good reading, displays on the e-ink, and then turns off. So there's zero power draw when it's off, and the battery lasts for ~1500 readings. Accuracy seems fine, the AQI, temp, and CO2 readings all match my permanently placed sensors inside and outdoors.
Other projects include using some of the old leftover robot scrap to automate irrigation in my apple orchard.
> For a lot of fiction books, my rule is to read the first 50 pages. If I'm not engaged, move on. Life is short.
Just encountered myself doing this. I was reading John Birmingham's Axis of Time books. The first three sucked me in and I devoured them in a day or two apiece. Starting the fourth...something was off. The writing felt stilted, like the author was trying to cram in too many pop culture references or something. I put it down and have given it two more tries since with the same result, so now I'm done.
I'm sad, because I was really looking forwards to having several more books in the series.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.
I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.
But our mission is really heritage trees, which we loosely define as pre-WWII. We do work with landowners to get their trees DNA tested and identified if they're interested. But despite maintaining the encyclopedia I linked in the other comment, we're a small group of volunteers (~6 people) and are mainly focused on a specific geographic region.
I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.
I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.
I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.
Thats awesome! I'm doing apple stuff on the other side of the Cascades (Eugene), starting a cidery and trying to find rare varieties to graft. And doing little software projects like https://pomological.art/. Would love to get in touch if you want people to propagate these varieties you're finding and would potentially be interested in sharing some scion wood!
I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.
The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.
I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.
I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.
I love that idea, actually started something similar awhile back but didn't get far and ran out of time/energy. If you need any help/contributions I'd love to pitch in. And sounds great! I'll shoot you an email with my contact info
I have done similar grafting experiments, although at present I am navigating a change in motivation. I got into apples through cider, but gave up alcohol this year. (As an aside, this was a long time coming and absolutely worth some small sacrifices!)
While I’m interested in heritage apples, I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate. An apple that thrived over a century ago depended on conditions that are different today and are continuing to change.
> I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate.
The neat thing is that these tend to be self-selecting! These older orchards drop a lot of fruit and can self-propagate new seedlings. The ones that manage to survive are the ones well adapted to current local conditions.
Chuck Wendig's 2023 novel Black River Orchard has an apple historian as one of the protagonists. Lots of talk of scion wood and girdling and colonial era apple varieties. You may find this interesting.
We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database they've built. We pay ~$50 per test, which is what most of the groups budget goes towards.
This sounds like a cool mix of genetics and gardening, I like that.
Maybe I should ask some local non profits whether they need help with IT infra, because I don't exactly think "google drive and onedrive folders" is going to be an outlier.
also I came back here after three days, how did this get 713 comments all of a sudden???
A friend in Palouse has found several heritage apple trees and has spent at least a decade grafting and working with them. It’s an interesting hobby to watch him experiment with.
Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes.
Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.
I've never done it but apparently if you graft branches of different varieties on one tree, you can produce a number of different varieties of apples on one tree. This would be especially good if you could get some of the tastiest heirloom varieties.
We haven't been doing that for now. The success rate doing so is somewhat less than directly grafting the whole top of the tree onto rootstock, for a few reasons. Since our primary goal is preservation and a lot of these trees have zero clones and could be wiped out by wildfire on any given year, our first priority is to get clones of every tree.
Remote: yes, or in person here
Willing to relocate: No, but open to travel
Technologies: Golang, python, perl but it's rusty. Experimenting with large scale AI data extraction pipelines. 5 years experience in robot arm motion planning. 5 years experience in bioinformatics.
Resume: https://biotinker.dev/files/Peter_LoVerso_Resume.pdf
Email: biotinker+hn@gmail.com
Staff software engineer, most recently at Viam. Wrote most of the motion planning stack, from the linear algebra ground up. Used Universal Robots and Ufactory arms extensively. Medium experience with small-scale electrical engineering for robot projects. Some experience with robot navigation, but not as much as arms.
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