pupdogg

Building FabShack, a white-label instant quoting engine that gives sheet metal fabricators SendCutSend/OshCut-level capabilities without needing an in-house software development team.

https://www.fabshack.io

People are underestimating how much latent frustration there is with airline pricing and UX.

If nothing else, this project is quantifying that frustration in dollars. $22M in soft commitments is basically people saying: ‘I'd pay to see a better version of this industry exist.’

That alone feels like useful data.

Totally agree, a patent by itself doesn't prove something was built or used, just that the idea could be described and cleared prior art.

But are you saying none of those patents are even indirectly related to publicly documented programs like:

    1. Operation Sea-Spray (1950)
    2. Operation LAC (late 1950s–60s)
    3. Operation Dew (ZnCdS tests)

We know these tests only became public decades later through hearings and declassification. Given that history, it seems fair to ask how much related research or enabling tech might still be classified. Lack of a clear public link doesn't really prove there wasn't one - it may just mean it hasn't been disclosed yet.

Below is a comprehensive list of geoengineering-related patents, compiled to the best of my knowledge. Based on the language and scope of several of these patents, their stated purposes do not appear to be inherently human-friendly in any form as the language escalates from weather influence to planetary irradiation, artificial plasmas, relativistic particles, atmospheric weapons-scale energy systems, and even the generation of destructive weather events.

https://gist.github.com/pupdogg/4e796ed1bb0d24338a3f6523e404...

Examples:

    1. System and Method for Irradiation of Planet Surface Areas
    2. Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere
    3. Broadcast Dissemination of Trace Quantities of Biologically Active Chemicals
    4. Method and Apparatus for Creating an Artificial Electron Cyclotron Heating Region of Plasma
    5. Method and Apparatus for Triggering a Substantial Change in Earth Characteristics and Measuring Earth Changes
    6. Planetary Weather Modification System

I read your comment with skepticism but it looks like you are correct. Very odd that they would publish this story so prematurely.

Wow!

Believe it or not, a buddy of mine was dealing with crazy high power bills for three months and couldn’t figure out why. He tried everything to cut back, but nothing worked. Finally, he called an electrician, who found a hidden short in a 30-amp circuit that was constantly drawing power without tripping the breaker. After fixing the issue, his bills went back to normal—no helicopters were involved during the process!

You can run a setup of 8x 4090 GPUs using 4x 1200W 240V power supplies (preferably HP HSTNS-PD30 Platinum Series), with a collective use of just around 20-amps, meaning it can easily run on a single 240V 20-amp breaker. This should be easily doable in a home where you typically have a 100 to 200A main power panel. Running 4x 1200W power supplies 24 hours a day will consume 115.2 kWh per day. At an electricity rate of $0.12 per kWh, this will cost approximately $13.82 per day or around $414.72 per month.

FYI, I can handle electrical system design and sheet metal enclosure design/fabrication for these rigs, but my software knowledge is limited when it comes to ML. If anyone's interested, I'd love to collaborate on a joint venture to produce these rigs commercially.

Amazing setup. I have the capability to design, fabricate, and powder coat sheet metal. I would love to collaborate on designing and fabricating a cool enclosure for this setup. Let me know if you're interested.

Yes, that is correct. The incentive is that our net terms go from 90 days to same day payment.

Yes, a few of our permanent install/broadcasting projects use TouchDesigner and Ventuz. For rental applications, Resolume, Modul8, and VDMX are preferred depending on the use case.

It's strange that a company as large as Walmart has a shopping category dedicated to "HDCP Strippers" at https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/hdcp-stripper. Upon further research, I stumbled upon numerous YouTube videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5-PJpSfDJ8, where the user was able to strip away HDCP 2.2 and still achieve 4K@60Hz output. The user also mentions that it would work with a 120Hz panel. This raises the question of how Walmart is able to get away with this, despite the rule of law.

That would be awesome! Thank you. For time being, I was able to purchase and reserve primitv.co and primitv.net

Sounds good. Thank you again! For time being, I was able to purchase and reserve primitv.co and primitv.net

Thank you! I think I know what you're talking about. I live in a gated subdivision where the gate entrance control panel has a similar 15" screen but with terrible brightness and UI. Your display also sounds a lot like an HMI panel but for outdoors. Do you happen to have a product link for this display with an embedded PC? If the market is big enough, I'd be more than willing to explore some sort of joint venture with you.

Thank you! What you see in there is a WebGL creative put together using ThreeJS running at 60FPS on a RaspberryPi with a custom/frameless Chromium build. This was back in 2017, and I can only imagine what someone can accomplish nowadays!

FYI, this is our current OSD structure: https://imgur.com/xNnsjwT. If you look at the "User Color", it lets you set independent gain/offset for each color channel. You can also select one of the predefined "Color Balance" options between Warm, Normal, Cold, or sRGB. The sRGB option arranges the panel color to the sRGB gamut. Additionally, you can set the Gamma curve between 1.8 all the way up to 2.2. I hope this information helps.

Hi lagrange77, I like this name too. Thank you for the suggestion. It's a bummer that primi.tv is already taken, but I'm fairly optimistic that I can find another easy-to-remember domain. Also, I'll do some digging beforehand to make sure that I'm not overstepping any existing trademarks or copyrights. If everything works out, I'd like to give you one of these displays if and when I get the prototype unit off the ground. Would that be okay?

In that case, I would say that color calibration is very easy to accomplish and having the connectors facing down is something I was already planning to do. Our industrial displays are typically mounted 15-20ft in the air, so customers have an easier time accessing them from the side while on their lift.

As for outdoor TVs, that's a whole other Pandora's box, but yes, we also make those displays, mainly for digital billboards, advertising, and rental purposes. They typically range from 5000 nits to 12000 nits in brightness, and their pixel pitch ranges from 3mm to 9mm. They're all IP67 rated. Displays with a brightness lower than 5000 nits are typically indoor LED displays with much finer pitch, ranging from 0.9mm to 6mm. A 0.9mm pitch would be very similar to Samsung's QN90A series TVs with QLEDs (a marketing gimmick for an actual LED pixel-based display). These displays may cost a pretty penny, but we hope that once semiconductor plants are up and running in the US, costs will start to come down. Here's a project we did with a circular 3mm display back in 2017. This unit is 7ft tall with a 4.5ft diameter: http://bit.ly/43keDD5

I understand what you're saying. We work directly with Samsung. While HDCP may be a challenging idea due to licensing issues, obtaining LCD panels with faster response times and higher refresh rates isn’t a problem for us. In fact, these consumer-grade panels are much more readily available than actual industrial panels. If we encase these 32-40" panels in an industrial metal casing, we can create a product that is more desirable than similar models housed in plastic with SmartOS, and more affordable than an Apple XDR.

You’re correct, unfortunately our displays don’t have speakers.

Large format or digital signage displays are not necessarily industrial displays. In fact, they would not last long in a real rugged manufacturing environment where they could be exposed to extreme heat, toxic chemicals, dust, weld arcs, and physical trauma caused by heavy machinery.

Our company caters to this market by designing and fabricating our own thick metal casings for our displays. We also bond our sourced LCD panels with an additional layer of 1/8” to 1/4” thick anti-glare polycarbonate sheets to help them resist physical trauma. We have also designed our own controller that operates these displays with a super minimal/barebones RTOS. Our controllers can be controlled via RS232, but unlike other displays, we do not have an onboard PHY (Ethernet connectivity capability). This is an industrial requirement that originated due to Stuxnet.

Majority of the large format displays in the market today are more like smart TVs than actual dumb TVs, and though they are great products, they would not last in a real rugged industrial environment. I can create large format displays without the smartness for consumer use at an approximate 50-70% of their price.

Sorry no, not yet. But I will work on getting something setup. Thank you for the suggestion.

I’m not a licensing expert but my general vision is that if we can get assistance from community firmware designers, I’d be more than willing to champion this initiative. Would love to create an evaluation board that others could utilize around come up with their own interpretation of a perfect display.

This is a very good and comprehensive list. Thank you! Our industrial displays already have most of your "must-haves," except for three:

1. Professional color calibration - this is doable, but it adds significant cost. When referring to color calibration, it is not the typical marketing gimmick used for consumer displays, but instead something equivalent to what you would get with Sony's BVM-HX310 reference monitor. So, my question would be what level of professional color calibration is acceptable?

2. HDMI 2.1 - HDMI-2.1a to be specific. Our controllers are all compliant up to HDMI-2.0 as of now. This is something in the works, but due to chip shortages, it has been challenging to come by industrial-grade chips/SoCs that handle HDMI 2.1a. However, this is on our radar.

3. TV Tuner - it is unclear if you mean an actual channel tuner or an auto-scanner for the available input. If referring to a channel tuner for COAX-based inputs, this is something that has been phased out, not by us but by our chip suppliers.

Regarding the price point, that sounds very doable. My personal expertise is in overall system integration and sheet metal design. The intent is to create even the consumer-grade display with a fabricated aluminum shell that feels rock-solid and heavy-duty aesthetically.

FYI, all the "nice-haves" are also already present, with the exception of down-facing connections. Can you clarify? Also, did you check out the pictures from my link above?

Thank you again for your valuable feedback!

You're right, firmware designer just confirmed that Digital Signage applications don't use HDCP (he actually said "prefer not to use") but he does believe that our controllers using MediaTek SoCs support HDCP and a separate firmware build could be made for this use case...or maybe even a toggle DIP switch could serve this purpose on the controller PCB.

We ship globally to our customers right now but I believe having a distribution channel for global retail would be much wiser. I'm definitely open to it once we get to that point.

You're right, extenders can be expensive, but they can save you a lot of trouble if you choose the right one. My go-to choice is Atlona, especially this one: https://atlona.com/product/at-ome-ex-wp-kit-lt/. The best part is that the destination end is powered by PoE, so you get active conversion all the time. We've used these very reliably (I would say they are industrial-grade) for the past 10 years.

We do have a few LCD controller boards that support IP TV, but the downside is that they use 264/MPEG-4 AVC compression for transport.

Majority of our customers use our displays for Digital Signage so I would assume we would've heard of their issues if they couldn't playback their 4k or 8k content. Some of them play this content back on videowalls, as large as 14x8 configuration, without any issues. I will double-check with our firmware designer to be sure. From what I know, I believe HDCP is supported by all versions of HDMI. Older TVs, specifically the ones without HDMI input (i.e. component, vga, rca or coax input), wouldn't be able to support this. Majority of our current controllers are compliant with HDMI2.0 spec. Someone else here asked about HDMI2.1a and I'm going to get an answer on that from our firmware designer this weekend.

I'll talk this over with our firmware designer. I believe most of the things you're asking for come standard as part of the HDMI2.1 spec and the latest spec seems to be HDMI2.1a. As of right now, we are only compliant up to HDMI2.0 due to the nature of our commercial market. They prefer reliability over cutting edge. However, I don't see updating to the new spec as a major issue. High-end FPGAs have really come down in price and have made it much easier to accomplish such tasks due to their high throughput capabilities.