I started collecting screws to put together for my "workshop" were I repair whatever family, friends, enemies want me to look at. I am not great at it, not even good, but I am who they bring things to, and over time I have learned a bit of skills. (Also I fail, sometimes I break stuff and sometimes I hide in my bag and take to a pro without telling anyone.)
Back to screws. I often need one. but there are entirely too many different sizes and shapes. I have spent decent time sourcing various standardized sizes from far and near. Stil I have project where I need two screws and I dont have the right one. I also keep any screw that I come across. If something is broken I harvest the once that are easikly available.
That ends up in a cubbord with lots of different tiny shelves. BUT looking through them so see if one of them is right is again time consuming.
What does this have to do with anything?
Well the design went from 1 type of screws to multiple sizes. (All of well knownm standarized types thank you)
I think it wise to design projects around as few different ones as possible. The previous model managed with one. Clearly somehow V2 could have as well.
Is there I pray an app I have not seen, where I can take a photo of a screw and the app will tell me the exact specifications of it, its name, and where to order them?
It's actually hundreds of screws, bolts, and nuts, I did the sorting as a relaxing week while watching some shows :D
Someone mentioned M* screws and that got me searching to find out what it is and then ended up on the above amazon page. So I like the indexing scheme there and question OP that it can't be done by image and machine learning. Basically, all those indexes [minus material which you can just select] should be trivially recognizable and that just leaves the precision measures.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/tenluno-Checker-SWTC-44-MaleFemale-Id...
BoltDepot has some fantastic pages (and printable reference posters) that explain how fasteners are measured and described: https://boltdepot.com/Fastener-Information/Fastener-Basics
Once you've got the terminology, it's pretty straightforward to take the measurements. Thread diameter is easy to do with a $2 plastic vernier caliper (I use mine constantly), or fit into the holes in any screw checker. https://www.amazon.com/Stainlesstown-Bolt-Thread-Gauge-Blue/...
Thread pitch is best done with a thread gauge, which is a fold-out affair sort of like a feeler gauge. I've got an inch/metric combo one like this: https://www.amazon.com/ChgImposs-Imperial-Whitworth-Industri...
And then length is easy to do with the ruler on the side of the screw checker, or the calipers themselves. (Use the jaws for the overall length of a flush-type screw, the step-shoulder part for the length of a cap screw.)
There are also combo gauges, I'm intrigued by this type and I should pick one up to see how I like it: https://www.amazon.com/WEN-ME210G-Imperial-Multi-Gauge-Carry...
i don’t know if it is good enough for this use case but theoretically possible without a reference object.
Huge selection including obscure styles and finishes. Nuts, bolts, screws, hardware, etc.
One of the best things about them is that they sell small lots including single screws if that is all you need.
Another great thing is that they ship quickly and if your order is relatively small it arrives in your mailbox instead of needing to be delivered by UPS or another shipper. They ship orders in packages appropriate to the order, unlike Amazon.
They also add products to their inventory if customers need something they don't normally carry.
Prices are also reasonable.
I found them years ago and now they are one of my main suppliers. McMaster Carr is another.
They do seem to suffer from the other part that prevented me from ordering from places like this before though; its hard for a hobby project to break the high free shipping minimum order size. This may again be a problem with being in Canada not the US though :)
> Building Internet-connected things seems obvious today, but what about when there’s no Internet?
> The concept often feels like something out of a science fiction movie or a doomsday prepper’s handbook- and while this device can work in both scenarios, it’s also about understanding resiliency for your projects and being a good steward of the systems in place today.
http://www.ruggedpcreview.com/3_notebooks_itronix_gd8200.htm...
https://na.panasonic.com/us/computers-tablets/computers/lapt...
In the event of something so catastrophic happening that the internet stops functioning for an extended period of time, you're not going to be hauling this enormous brick around with you. It's absurd.
In an end-of-society situation you're likely on foot, maybe on bicycle (until the bike breaks down in a way you can't fix, or gets flats and you can't find tubes), and your available weight and space is going to be prioritized towards basics like food, shelter, clothing, basic health/tool items, and self defense.
How you get 90% of the way there: a USB solar panel, a bluetooth keyboard, and a smartphone with an external storage memory device. Maybe a USB to ethernet adapter and a USB hub.
Many modern phones are even water/dust proof to a pretty reasonable degree, more so if you put them in a ruggedized case.
I dare him to carry that thing 10 miles...
I build things that roughly resemble this (low volume, custom, solving use cases that are too niche for an industrial offering to be created), for money. I'd hire this guy in a minute to outsource things to or collaborate with, so I see the project as a kind of personal resume.
IMO he should find a specific scenario where something along these lines would be valuable. One I am personally involved in is marine electronics diagnosis. Primarily NMEA2000 networks and the devices on them, and the same devices on Ethernet. It's too much detail to go into, plus I'm on a flight after spending a week in Vegas for a trade show, but with just a little bit of reconfiguration work this could be a Thing that higher end marine electronics techs would really dig. Then I think you could also delve deeper into the considerations put into the design and component selection details.
> In the event of something so catastrophic happening that the internet stops functioning for an extended period of time, you're not going to be hauling this enormous brick around with you. It's absurd.
Yeah, I've always thought these kinds of things were more of a LARP gizmo than any kind of actual "prepping." The priorities are all wrong. IMHO, if society collapses, the things you need will drastically change from your needs now. You don't need an offline Wikipedia or Youtube, even if you use them all the time today, you need something a lot more compact and practical.
IMHO, a real post-apocalyptic "recovery kit" is a cubic meter of K12 textbooks, plus university-level ones on farming, engineering, and medicine locked a away in a time-capsule for a century post-event.
This - I think it's really just a Fallout-aesthetic prop and bunch of text making pretend arguments that it's useful for anything.
I'd replace this with an old Chromebook with regular Linux installed (very cheap, ~ $20 USD), and a 1TB micro-SD card. All solid-state (no hard drive), and good battery life.
(https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t-echo?variant=42306295857333 or https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t3s3-v1-0 maybe?)
Off-Grid Cyberdeck with RPI and Pelican Case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31402558 - May 2022 (91 comments)
Off-Grid Cyberdeck: Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21647398 - Nov 2019 (144 comments)
I've bought a few old Chromebooks off of eBay recently (for around $20 USD each), and re-flashed the BIOS so that I could install Debian on them.
The student-oriented Chromebooks are reasonably sturdy, and at that price point, I just don't care if something bad happens to it.
TTL-level serial port pins exist as well.
Then optionally you can connect your motherboards power/reset pins so you can reboot or turn off remotely.
Video is a third party HDMI capture card that plugs into the Pis camera port.
Is this intended towards like a prepper type scenario? Or what is the envisioned use case of a rugged pi?
Or just cool factor?
The reality is that any scenario that has people relying on this type of thing as a "device of last resort" would also most likely obliterate this thing itself. We are talking about a pretty extreme situation, ruggedized laptops would be more practical. And even if the rugged laptop was $10,000, that's a small price to pay for saving the world.
Beautiful idea, would love to see open specs, but really nice to be sharing!
(Update: the framework board is so close. The first daughtboard in the schematics <https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/blo...> is actually 9.071 inches (115 + 115.4mm, so 230.4mm if i read it right) wide! But alas the mainboard is 274mm (10.8 inches), and that is without the expansion cards added. With the cards, we're talking about 11.7 inches (297mm) and then you still need to plug in things in there! Still there's something there, i think.)
How far are you going for the rugged vs prop aesthetic? Have you considered alternative form factor screens? Have you considered something else than an RPi that could work with a GPT/LLM such as an NVidia Jetson (yes, I know, expensive) or a separate compute module? Do you store just things like Wikipedia or a bunch of PDFs such as "Where there is no doctor?" and "Wilderness Survival Guide?" along with other disaster recovery books?
I missed this project the first couple of times it was posted so glad to see if pop up today.
I've been tempted to go back and do it better, but then a career and life hit me.
It can be found at signalbundle.com for anyone interested, though I warn you that it's pretty long in the tooth at this point, and I eventually opted to host it on Google Drive for availability reasons, but it's still there if anyone's curious and/or has feedback. :)
> (Amazon may be faster but is almost always a scalper or reseller, so beware)
Yeesh. That's a burn (probably correct, though).
what I mean by that : the outside sets a tone of professional heavy-duty post-apocalyptic computing, yet the insides are filled with fragile wire connects, fragile routes, multiple boards and new (read: unproven) non-redundant technologies.
I would expect something that exudes that aesthetic to be wired like a NASA project [0], use radiation hardened components, redundancy, SOMETHING that speaks to the durability.
[0]: https://workmanship.nasa.gov/lib/insp/2%20books/links/sectio...
The availability of commodity hardware is one of the reasons projects like the Recovery Kit can exist. Redundancy and durability can be measured in multiple ways, and I suspect it's cheaper to keep on hand a stack of backup components that can easily be swapped out than to invest the time, energy and money on a more bespoke hardened solution that can't easily be replicated and would put this project out of reach for many people trying to replicate it.
The goal of "Ruggedized Raspberry Pi" seems to have been met quite well, IMO.
I had the same thought at first, "I should really solder these wires."
But then I realized that wires coming loose was inevitable given the hell this project was going to endure being handled by airlines, rolled across different terrain, and poked and proded by trade show attendees.
So I opted to use color coded jumper cables and include extra. In the manual, I included a simple wiring diagram to show how to hook everything up. No solder needed.
In the hands of a consumer, yes, everything should be soldered because there's a higher force needed to break the connection, but repair is also harder. Consumers typically do not repair, so the trade off leans toward solder. I suspect this is the perspective that inspires this comment.
In the hands of a hacker looking for durability, it's actually better for things to be replaceable. Because the hacker can repair, the advantage gained by soldering isn't worth the the friction added repair.
It's somewhat how a Show HN post works, you should expect such feedback and might even be coming for it. Especially when it's not your first one, you know a bit better what to expect.
This is the battery bank I carry on trips. It can power downstream devices while it's charging, but only at >50% battery capacity.
