Marc's Public Blog

It was tricky to find a safe space in Zaragoza where the horizon would be clear, and be able to retreive my luggage from a store and get to the train station within 50mn for a train to Barcelona. In the end, I was able to scope a place by a bridge thanks to a cab and realized it was close enough to the train station that it was safer to retrieve the luggage first, so we waited by the bridge with the luggage, saw the eclipse and dragged the luggage to the train with 30mn to spare. I spent so long trying to find a viewing location and how to handle luggage just to find out that across the train station was fine:

this was the horizon issue, finding a spot with proper unobstructed view, was important

For some reason my Panasonic ZS200 did pretty poorly though my eclipse goggles this time around, maybe the way they were made was spilling the light in a way that upset the camera lens. The others were taken with a phone, so any phone picture of an eclipse is really better than nothing ;)

It was a mere 90 seconds in Zaragoza which was not exactly on the line, but it was easy, convenient, perfect weather and the required unobstructed low horizon view as the eclipse happened just around 30mn before sunset. I was actually worried it would be underwhelming and hard to separate from a sunset, but not at all, it did feel like a real eclipse and was wonderful for the very short time I lasted (fastest 90 seconds of my life, and that's not what she said, haha)

we had multiple DJs play trance, including Blur

great to see some OJ TFSF members like Spencer Le

and more friends

and then Daxson arrived

Video:

This open sauce was honestly pretty cool and its only downside was the price, which I found excessive ($220 for 2 days, an extra $100 to get in 1h early, and $1500 for industry and close to $1000 for VIP). All that said, itwas was quite enjoyable and I had enough for at least 1.5 days if you went to see a few talks, or a very full day if you saw no talks. To be honest though the talks were all panels and none were great, so it can be done in a full day if you ignore all the talks.

Lots of talks, of uneven quality:

Cool things outside:

Fun people:

Plenty of fun exhibits:

I need to get my realflight work again and fly RC again one day

I got to fly this self built B737 Sim, it wasn't perfect but pretty impressive for a self build

Jonny Five!

these guys recover single use vapes, get the lithium batteries and make powertool batteries with the

The AI video walls are always fun:

Battlebots, they got banned the 2nd day after a couple of lipo fires from battles:

even full size robots that can fight

Whoops, I just found a new monitoring system for my power use at home and bought it :)

Loads of Star Wars stuff:

More stuff outside in the sun:

And I got to see the release version of Wing, doing deliveries:

I remember the full sized one when I worked there for a short while

As well as this one used for early testing in Australia

The daughter board looks like this:

and the back looks like this, input for 12V power from the motherboard and Vret to make 3.3V

Then, because I was reckless, I swapped M2 cards while the PC was powered, thinking they were hot swappable like Sata, but they sure are not. Eventually I caused a partial failure of the board. Gemini helped me debug the linux errors from the cards plugged in itand confirmed my guess that the voltage regulator on the board was now partially damaged and gave power, but not enough to be reliable under load.
A new daughterboard is only $20, but that's 2 week shipping from China while my new server would be down. So, it actually knew the daughterboard, it knew where to buy it from and the shipping delay, and it also knew how it was made before I gave it my picture. It confirmed that the best course of action would be to desolder the 100 component that was an inductor, and I could just unsolder it and connect a new 3.3V source to it.

After helping me find a new 5A Vreg on amazon, it looked at the picture of the board, and it confirmed the top pad, is the one feeding 3.3V to the rest of the board. It suggested I use flux to help unsolder the SMD component after I declined the suggestion to use a hot air gun that would be too likely to remove other components, some of which had to be useful:

yes, it looked ugly, but the inductor was removed safely, I then cleaned the flux

Then I happened to have the right female connector in my collection of cables and plugs (happy it does come handy at least a few times), and soldered in the new Vreg:

I had to move it on the other side so it would fit with the case closed

And there you go, I literally fixed the daughterboard and the PC works again! Yeah! I honestly was impressed by Gemini's knowledge of existing boards and its ability to read pictures I sent it, identify the components and confirm test points and how to verify I was adding the new power source in the correct place.

Back to work!

Met Franck in Paris to ride in how new Artura to Dijon:

very nice dinner in Dijon after we arrived

The next morning, we went to the racetrack, 15mn away. It is a former F1 racetrack and you can top 300kph on the front straight if you have the right car:

There was a very French part of this trackday, is the food and drinks, very French:

orangina for breakfast of course!

real coffee of course too

Michoko! Seriously, Michoko!!! Yes!

I was able to rent a Porsche 992 GT3, which came with Guillaume, a very good coach. That was quite welcome since I didn't know the track at all, and just about everyone else, did ;)

the helmet was a bit much, but it was the only one that fit me :)

Porsche 992 GT3 with excellent tires and brakes

my instructor, Guillaume

Franck was better dressed than me, although it was warm

People brought plenty of cars of all types, including full on racing cars. It was an interesting mix...

Porsche overload :)

you need a bigger wing ;)

a 620R, I didn't even know these existed

The track was not super hard, but took me 2/3rd of the day kind of be in the right place for each turn, even if some I still messed up regularly. Guillaume, my coach, helped a lot of course was able to get down from 1:40-ish to 1:35 at the end of the day when the track, tires and car were hot. Not too bad given that I hadn't driven on a track in almost 2 years :)

I did a few (not super fast) laps in Franck's Artura:

And the last session where I finally hit a 1:35: