lochieferrier

Plane Hunters: https://www.plane-hunters.com/

I've been running this for the past few months. It's a search engine / aggregator for used aircraft. It's really hard to search for used aircraft and sort them across all the different websites, even harder to figure out what's a good deal and watch the whole market. I started this service to try and solve those problems for others.

BETA Technologies | Full time | on-site or remote | South Burlington VT

We build the world's highest performance electric aircraft. You can read more about our latest 6,000 lb aircraft we are flying here: https://evtol.com/news/beta-technologies-previews-alia-evtol...

We are looking for folks passionate about flight, particularly: - programmers - aerodynamicists - flight controls engineers

Formal job listings are here, or feel free to reach out to info@beta.team with your story. https://beta.isolvedhire.com/jobs/

Code is here: https://github.com/hoburg/jho

NASA Helios was quite expensive and tricky to build, with not a lot of margin left for useful payload.

There's a weight runaway that occurs with solar powered aircraft, look at Fig 12 in this report: http://hoburg.mit.edu/publications/gassolar.pdf

Disclaimer: I worked on this project, so am super biased.

It's online now! Sorry it had the usual HN flop.

For sure, but they have a limited range of packages installed, and can be tricky to tune towards a specific need.

You can already do this exact thing with a Python library on the user machine, see here for install instructions: https://gpkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

The intent here is to make it easy for people to get started and quickly write models, without needing to go through installing a set of packages.

Yes, there was an issue with someone nuking the compiler box, and we're working on fixing the demo up.

This does more than LPs, it lets you formulate GPs, which are a way of doing non-linear analytical optimization. See here for more: https://gpkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gp101.html#what-is-a-...

Wow, that is really beautiful. Topology optimization is cool stuff.

I think it's key for optimization to be fast so that the designer can get a feedback loop going between the computer and the ideas in their head. Would love to talk about whether geometric programs might help Autodesk generate topology faster.

Near future stuff is probably a real-world component input (optimized shopping), and making things more flexible so you can drag and drop something together from components.

For sure, there's a lot missing, title is probably misleading. Definitely nothing new in terms of the CAD, browser CAD has been well done, just look at professional products like Onshape. Right now it's primitives only for this, one of the next steps is to look at how full meshes can be optimized. A simple example of this could be wings: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/papers/2013_gp_win...

This is correct, much better than what I said.

Yes it's considering the weight of the battery, as well as the weight of the motors. It doesn't factor in the props, I didn't get around to that. The props have inaccurate geometry of course, which I'm looking to fix with a mesher.

Have a look at the console for how the geometric program is assembled.

I think by react you meant react to, which was fair enough, it was dodgy as. Now running well.

The property of getting a guaranteed optimum is something that arises from setting the design problem up as a geometric program. You won't always get a solution (for example, a certain size quad has a minimum prop diameter). Though if you do, it is guaranteed to be optimum because the problem is convex as outlined here: https://gpkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gp101.html

Also, conflicting objectives are naturally traded off until you find a Pareto optimal solution. Using geometric programs lets you balance conflicts in a design quickly. This is why they are super useful for aerospace applications, where you are always looking at a tradeoff between weight and at least one other variable.

Fixed it, didn't know about pythonpath with gunicorn.

Nope, I just have no idea what I'm doing.

Currently solved server side, though assembled on the client side (see console) with gpkitjs and then passed through to GPkit.

Packages here: https://github.com/lochieferrier/gpkitjs and here: https://github.com/hoburg/gpkit

Geometric programs are super cool.

The difference is that there is a simple physics model that's driving the dimensions. So the arms are getting resized according to beam bending, the battery is a certain size for the energy requirement, motors are sized by kw/kg and kw/m^3 and so on.

There's definitely ways to make this sort of model in something like Solidworks through the use of a variables interface that interacts with the drawing dimensions. Though it can't do any sort of fast optimization with the physics relations. What's happening here is a guaranteed global optimal design is being returned for a given set of inputs and objectives in a few seconds.

This is my first time putting something up, everything is breaking, fixing it now.

I wrote the article, what you and everyone else has said is super true. I liked the Apollo 11 missions as much as everyone else, and I think I am off base. It's not a sport.

Hey man, I think you're off base here.

The problem is that the Moon does not have significant resources, so you can't really make anything on the Moon and then launch it from there. It may be possible to make some propellants, but not much else. As a refueling station, it could be a good idea. But for anything other than fuel, the Moon doesn't really work out as you have to lift it from LEO first. Entering Space by Robert Zubrin has more detailed technical arguments about this.

Great service, spotted a typo. "You've applied for the job, you should hear back form the Plume Labs soon! Good Luck!"

Keep it up dude!

We did get flying cars. They just haven't delivered them yet.

Independent project so I probably will not submit it to a journal