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Philip Edwards

@philipedwards.bsky.social
288 followers 306 following 158 posts

Developer, Game Dev. Working with Unreal. I dabble with Godot, Arduino and Raspberry Pis. Australian. Current projects: - Automatic Sky Tracking Telescope - Rush Hour - Vehicle Animator for Unreal Engine www.gdcorner.com

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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Way better now. Less than 2 seconds at difficulty 20. I think I tried 23 earlier as well and it was like 4-5 seconds maybe. Much more reasonable than 26.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
One thing i'd say, like another commenter it was way longer than I'd wait for any real purpose. But combined with the new WASM method not showing progress it was even longer. If there was a way to show an estimated wait like difficulty / hashes per second or soemthing it would improve the feeling.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
32 seconds on Firefox android, pixel 6. Difficulty 26, ~4.1k hashes per second average.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
The only way it's ever made sense for me is when it's essentially a health pack, only eat when you need to gain health back. Games where you have to eat periodically for time or energy reasons are just tedious.
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Reposted by Philip Edwards
Giant Bomb @giantbomb.com · 13/08/2026
And now, a lesson on CEO-ing from Matthew Karch, CEO of Saber Interactive:
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Oof. Bet that got your heart racing! My alert is for 25 and sometimes I exceed it when domains renew. I almost swiped the alert away mindlessly without checking the figure. Now I know it's a mistake I wish I did haha!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Yep, tomorrows problem, but atleast I might be able to sleep tonight! Since I have a bunch to repair now, might be a good time to migrate more stuff to my VPS's.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Same story here mate. Absolutely freaked for half an hour as I disabled every account and dug through trying to find the source. Finally saw the notice.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Bit of excitement tonight, got an AWS billing alert for a casual 1.3 billion dollars!
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Reposted by Philip Edwards
Wikipedia @wikipedia.org · 01/07/2026
Would you also like to admire the irregular shape of the moons of Mars? 🌚
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Hell House was decent! I stumbled on it last year. Ended up watching the rest of the series over the next few weeks. First definitely was the best IMO
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Wiring up the breadboard for a test. Almost there!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
I gotta have my telescope in working order for this!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
You couldn't even escape these in Australia! If you were into tech you drowned in a sea of these!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
If you want a nice NTP clock and like building stuff, this project is great. Built one a few months back and just found out the software has advanced even more. Can even do OTA updates now. esptimecast.com
esptimecast.com
ESPTimeCast™ - WiFi connected LED Matrix Clock & Weather Display
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Decisions... decisions....
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
The options are: - Move the stepper loop over to the second core - Move the blocking stuff to the second core - Leave it all on core 0, and control steppers via interrupts.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
These take around 1ms (1000us) Unfortunately the adafruit libraries don't support non-blocking reads or anything async from what i can see. I don't feel like rewriting these. Fortunately though there's a whole extra core to play with!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
This was also important since to meet the target slew speed I want, i need to step the motors every 150us, so needed around 10,000 loop it/s. The main problem blocking this was i2c communications with the accelerometer and magnetometer.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Loop iterations: - Added a few simple metric gathering variables - Loop count resetting every 1000ms - Loop count buckets for 100ms within the 1000ms time - An array tracking the 10 largest individual loop times per 1000ms bucket
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Startup time: - Nothing special, a few hardcoded delays leftover from some of the adafruit examples, replaced with proper init checks and max retry counts
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Messaging speedup: - Pico C++ side: Replacing some lazily written buffers, increasing a few buffer sizes - Python side: Add an app side buffering system for messages, add locks on those buffers as the faster speeds showed up some multithreading race conditions
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Performance week! Last Tuesday pings/sec was 73, while the startup time was 1.1 seconds, and the loop it/s was unknown. Today: - Pings/sec 7100+ - Startup time ~0.11 seconds - Loop it/s ~67,000 (target of 10,00) A few things went into this:
Telescope benchmark showing a message throughput on serial communications with 7132 pings per second throughputLog from telescope benchmark showing MCU boot ready time of 0.12 secondsLog from telescope MCU showing 65,924 loop iterations a second
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Unfortunately I'm not near the hardware today, so test results will have to wait until tomorrow.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I've done a fair bit of work previously to eliminate any obvious blocking operations. With that in mind I added some basic profiling instrumentation to the MCU today: - Loop stall detection - Average loops/sec - 10 Longest loop iteration times
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
To hit the desired slew speed on the telescope I need the steppers to step every ~150us. That means I need to be able to step the drivers 10,000 times a second with no stalls. I think this is possible. Otherwise I have in mind an ISR based approach that should work also.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Been tinkering with my telescope project the past few weeks. Almost finished converting the controller board from Arduino Mega to Pico. Currently wrestling with moving from breadboard to PCB. This will be my first PCB, and I think I might be in the deep end!
KiCad schematic of a Raspberry Pico MCU and several modules including 2 TMC2209 stepper drivers, an oled screen, GPS module and accelerometer/magnetometer
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Wow that gave me a total flashback to stunts on DOS. Love it!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Fascinating interview. I have a sudden urge to mess with zig. youtu.be/iqddnwKF8HQ
youtu.be
Zig 2026: No-AI Policy, $670K Foundation, Left GitHub & Why Zig Isn’t 1.0 - Andrew Kelley Explains
YouTube video by JetBrains
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Kind of laughable that this used over 60% of the memory on the Arduino mega, but just 5% on the pico.
static.klipy.com
Step Brothers: So Much Room For Activities
ALT: Step Brothers: So Much Room For Activities
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Finally got back into my telescope project last night. Have an initial version of the firmware ported from Arduino Mega2560 to RPi Pico. Missing some features, but most of the kinks and incompatibilities seem to be ironed out. Next step is writing new stepper code for TMC2209 drivers.
PlatformIO log if successful build of firmware for StargazeController
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
That's awesome! Great job with the dial sequence. Does the kit come with lights or did you also have to integrate those?
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
I decided to replay COD4 single player. I'm not sure it was a good idea. 20 years hasn't done it any favours. It's not as amazing as I remembered it.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Also, how many channels does this guy have?!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
This 25 minute video on Vegemite has absolutely no right to be so interesting and dive into so much history of nutrition. youtu.be/D9Ieh_OXjoE
youtu.be
WTF is Up with Vegemite?
YouTube video by Fact Quickie
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Once had to modify a JS library for a large graph structure which was doing tons of wasteful allocations as it modified the graph. By caching and reusing vs wastefully throwing away pulled runtime down from like 20s to <100ms.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Side note I've become very wary of lots of throwaway allocations like that. Been bitten so many times by performance and memory issues with it. Obviously you can't do much if thats the way the library works, but yeah, just another way it bites ya.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Oh wow! yeah that's quite a difference! And yeah I'd expect some % of fluctuation between python versions anyway due to internal changes. But 200 vs 500-1000 is BIG!
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
That was an interesting write up. Thanks for sharing. Do you have any memory stats for after the fix? I didn't see anything absolute. Just curious to see how much the memory growth difference was.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Ahh yeah rubber band would be the same. About piercing the rubber, Only other thing I could think of would be try an oversized driver bit, or even a different shape driver so it doesn't pierce it as much, like a torx or hex?
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
I've never tried it but I've heard you can try putting one of those foam jar lid gripper things down and putting the screwdriver on it, and the friction is sometimes enough.
Jar grips - foam sponges to help grip jar lids
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Reposted by Philip Edwards
The Movie Backlog Reviews @themoviebacklog.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Just Watched 📽️: Project Hail Mary (2026) Amaze Amaze Amaze! Visually fantastic. Good adaptation of the book. Small changes for comedic timing or to work better on film. I wasn't sure Ryan Gosling could pull off Dr. Grace, but very happy to be proved wrong. Worth a watch: yes! #MovieSky #movie 🎬
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
My brother designed and printed a case for this. Looks great!
A home solar, battery and energy consumption epaper display in a blue 3D printed case.A home solar, battery and energy consumption epaper display in a blue 3D printed case.A home solar, battery and energy consumption epaper display in a blue 3D printed case.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
media.tenor.com
a man wearing sunglasses and headphones says " we vibing big time "
ALT: a man wearing sunglasses and headphones says " we vibing big time "
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Reposted by Philip Edwards
The Movie Backlog Reviews @themoviebacklog.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
Just Watched 🎬: Asteroid City (2023) Interesting, funny but odd. I audibly said "wtf am I watching" at one point. Fantastic sets, camera work, minatures and transitions. Felt like I needed a YT breakdown to fully appreciate it. Worth a watch: it's not for everyone. I enjoyed it. #MovieSky #movie
Movie Poster for Asteroid City
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Which part?
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
I will look into making a case later this week.
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
This used a waveshare pico epaper 2.9 display, and a pico w. Home Assistant monitors the solar and battery systems. The pico runs ESPHome and reads from HA. When looking for display examples I found this great dashboard and modified it for my system. www.penguinparade.eu/2026/01/14/e...
penguinparade.eu
ESPHome 2.9″ Waveshare ePaper (296×128): Clean PV Flow Layout – Pengutorial
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Philip Edwards @philipedwards.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
Made a new status display for the home solar and battery system. The epaper display looks so good!
Epaper display showing home solar and battery statistics.
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