Software & Algorithms Engineer with 10 years experience bridging the gap between robust, scalable production software and complex mathematical modelling. I have lead the architecture for IoT systems, developed energy-constrained algorithms, and mentored individuals within cross-functional teams. I enjoy challenging, varied projects and am keen to further expand my leadership and technical expertise. I'd like to see my work out in the real world making people's lives better.
If all the stuff you want to ignore is inside another folder, you can create another .gitignore inside that folder containing just * (i.e. ignore everything). Everything including the .gitignore file itself will be ignored.
Thanks for that feedback - the product is basically ready to go, the reason for Kickstarter was to get pre-orders to get enough capital to pay for a larger manufacturing run. Of course, it's quite possible to take pre-orders without using Kickstarter, so that may be a better route.
At our company we have built a device which monitors your stove with an IR sensor and has an alarm for dangerous situations [0]. It does some processing on the sensor data - if it detects a dangerous situation it beeps loudly and sends you a text/call in case you are out. It can also guide you through recipes, currently there's only a small handful though [2].
We aren't entirely sure how to market it successfully though (there's an alternative landing page [1]), and the chip shortage is also affecting our ability to manufacture.
It doesn't know which smoke point to monitor for. However, the aim (at least for the MVP) is for it to work the majority of the time for the majority of users - and critically to alert several minutes before there is any flame. So while sunflower oil may start smoking a small amount, it would be several minutes more getting to flame, by which time the alarm should have sounded.
If you put a frying pan on with oil in and leave it, the device will alert you at around 450F. This is a fixed threshold (along with some other checks, e.g. we also consider the rate of change of temperature). This gives reasonable behaviour in most cases, and ensures you don't get nuisance alarms when frying on high heat. In cases where individuals have an unusual cooking pattern which causes unreasonable false alarms we can adjust the model parameters to increase/decrease sensitivity in particular situations. In the future we may be able to adjust these automatically but for now there is not a great deal of automated "learning" involved.
If you're a pyromaniac chef, I think you would get some alarms from that! Again this is a bit of an edge case so we haven't but much effort into that for the first iteration of the product, definitely something for the future though - I can imagine it being a challenge to distinguish flambee and a real fire though, since flambee is real fire!
Thanks for the suggestion! We did consider the idea of making it automatically cut the energy source. However at the moment, the install steps are: receive it in the post, pull out the battery tab, and stick it on your stove splashback with a strong sticky pad. Almost anybody can do it themselves. As soon as you need to cut the electricity/gas it requires a qualified engineer to go in and install it, making the install cost an order of magnitude larger. So this wouldn't be a part of the core product.
As an optional paired peripheral, it's a good idea, and perhaps we will look into it further if the main product has some success. If individuals consider it a valuable addition then they could pay to have it installed. A secondary drawback would be reduced battery life on the device, as it would be continuously paired over Bluetooth whenever the stove is in use - usually it is just passively advertising in case you are trying to connect through the phone app.
In terms of saving lives, the automatic cut-off would make a relatively small difference - fire department stats (on smoke alarms) show that having a loud beeping alarm is extremely effective at attracting attention and is enough for the user to go and turn it off manually, or to get out of harm's way if things have turned bad. Where the automatic cut-off would help is in reducing the chance of the house being damaged by smoke or fire when the user is out of range.
I'd be interested if there's research showing whether a one-off popup gives more signups or more annoyance. The marketing people seem to think it's better to have it there.
I agree it's hard to close, I'll see if I can do something about that. It shouldn't keep coming back once closed, which browser are you using? Although it does come back if you refresh the page. I might be able to do something about that as well.
I've been working on a stove safety/smart cooking device which is based on the temperature of your pan [0]. There are a small number of recipes which it currently works with [1]. To do this we defined a JSON format for recipes [2] but if we could use something similar to the text format used by CookLang that would be amazing, as it's much easier to write than JSON and could also be automatically rendered into a web page. Currently we are writing it twice - once in JSON for the cooking app, and once in human readable form.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Not immediately
Technologies: Python, AWS, Docker, Typescript, React, CI/CD, C (ESP32), Matlab. If I don't know it, I can learn it.
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-windsor/
Email: benwindsor at gmail.com
Software & Algorithms Engineer with 10 years experience bridging the gap between robust, scalable production software and complex mathematical modelling. I have lead the architecture for IoT systems, developed energy-constrained algorithms, and mentored individuals within cross-functional teams. I enjoy challenging, varied projects and am keen to further expand my leadership and technical expertise. I'd like to see my work out in the real world making people's lives better.