🖥 Smashed iPad + Pi Zero = Magic Mirror
I built a magic mirror quite a while ago and I've been using a Fire Tablet for the display. My old iPad was finally becoming unusable so I thought I'd try and take it apart and salvage the screen. Hooked it up to a Pi Zero and I've now liberated the Fire Tablet for day to day use!
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#projects #raspberry #display
I built a magic mirror quite a while ago and I've been using a Fire Tablet for the display. My old iPad was finally becoming unusable so I thought I'd try and take it apart and salvage the screen. Hooked it up to a Pi Zero and I've now liberated the Fire Tablet for day to day use!
More information...
#projects #raspberry #display
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📰 US Army Explores Equipping Robots with Living Muscle Tissue
A scientist from the Army Research Lab gave a glimpse into its early work with biohybrid robotics
The Army Research Laboratory believes its bots could use real muscle, which allows most living things to move and manipulate their environments, instead of mechanical arms, wheels, tracks, and other systems to travel across the battlefield. The concept, which some might find disturbing, is an example of the new field of “biohybrids.”
Modern army robots use batteries that power motors, which then drive axles and turn wheels. A biohybrid-powered robot would replace this entire system with lab-grown organic muscle tissue that might power artificial legs or other limbs. Electrical impulses or chemical actuation would control the muscles.
More information...
#news #robots
A scientist from the Army Research Lab gave a glimpse into its early work with biohybrid robotics
The Army Research Laboratory believes its bots could use real muscle, which allows most living things to move and manipulate their environments, instead of mechanical arms, wheels, tracks, and other systems to travel across the battlefield. The concept, which some might find disturbing, is an example of the new field of “biohybrids.”
Modern army robots use batteries that power motors, which then drive axles and turn wheels. A biohybrid-powered robot would replace this entire system with lab-grown organic muscle tissue that might power artificial legs or other limbs. Electrical impulses or chemical actuation would control the muscles.
More information...
#news #robots
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📟 Measuring Wheel
A 3D printed measuring wheel displaying both metric and imperial measurements
The circuit is designed around a ATtiny1614 microprocessor. It uses very little power when in sleep mode. The rotary encoder contains two sets of contacts which can become quite noisy resulting in incorrect readings.
I added a RC network and Schmitt trigger between each contact and microprocessor. This removes any noise generated by the contacts and provides clean switch change signals to the microprocessor. The result is precise and accurate readings. The circuit is powered by a 3.7V 120mA LIPO battery.
More information...
#projects #3d_modeling #electronics
A 3D printed measuring wheel displaying both metric and imperial measurements
The circuit is designed around a ATtiny1614 microprocessor. It uses very little power when in sleep mode. The rotary encoder contains two sets of contacts which can become quite noisy resulting in incorrect readings.
I added a RC network and Schmitt trigger between each contact and microprocessor. This removes any noise generated by the contacts and provides clean switch change signals to the microprocessor. The result is precise and accurate readings. The circuit is powered by a 3.7V 120mA LIPO battery.
More information...
#projects #3d_modeling #electronics
💻 3 Ways to Improve Your Software Development Environment
Leverage a unit test harness
Over the last several years, software development process tools have made huge leaps forward to the point where even the smallest embedded software teams can benefit from using the tools. Test harnesses provide developers with the ability to perform automated regression testing to ensure that the code is working as expected and that no new additions interact with existing code.
Spend less time debugging
According to any number of surveys, and conference talks, the average developer spends about 40 percent of their time debugging. Recovering debug time can benefit by reducing project costs, helping teams deliver on time, reduce stress, and a myriad of other benefits.
Review and improve your processes
The key to sustained success is to have a balanced approach that allows for repeatability but maintains the development team’s flexibility and adaptability.
More information...
#articles #software
Leverage a unit test harness
Over the last several years, software development process tools have made huge leaps forward to the point where even the smallest embedded software teams can benefit from using the tools. Test harnesses provide developers with the ability to perform automated regression testing to ensure that the code is working as expected and that no new additions interact with existing code.
Spend less time debugging
According to any number of surveys, and conference talks, the average developer spends about 40 percent of their time debugging. Recovering debug time can benefit by reducing project costs, helping teams deliver on time, reduce stress, and a myriad of other benefits.
Review and improve your processes
The key to sustained success is to have a balanced approach that allows for repeatability but maintains the development team’s flexibility and adaptability.
More information...
#articles #software
📰 Nexperia’s Trench Schottky Diodes Seize Power Efficiency
This week, Nexperia has released a new group of trench Schottky diodes which they claim are more efficient than ever
According to their datasheets, these new diodes have impressive specs, with forward voltage drop of around 600 mV, leakage currents around 1 µA, and a reverse recovery step time of 17 ns.
The company claims these specs result from the trench configuration, which allows for low reverse recovery charge and hence faster reverse recovery times.
The company sees these devices finding homes in applications that require high power and high-frequency switching like automotive, and specifically LED lighting. This family now offers devices ranging from 40 V to 100 V and up to 15 A in volume production, with 20 A devices available for sampling.
More information...
#news #electronics
This week, Nexperia has released a new group of trench Schottky diodes which they claim are more efficient than ever
According to their datasheets, these new diodes have impressive specs, with forward voltage drop of around 600 mV, leakage currents around 1 µA, and a reverse recovery step time of 17 ns.
The company claims these specs result from the trench configuration, which allows for low reverse recovery charge and hence faster reverse recovery times.
The company sees these devices finding homes in applications that require high power and high-frequency switching like automotive, and specifically LED lighting. This family now offers devices ranging from 40 V to 100 V and up to 15 A in volume production, with 20 A devices available for sampling.
More information...
#news #electronics
📰 IBM creates First 2nm Chip
Today’s announcement states that IBM’s 2nm development will improve performance by 45% at the same power, or 75% energy at the same performance, compared to modern 7nm processors.
IBM is keen to point out that it was the first research institution to demonstrate 7nm in 2015 and 5nm in 2017, the latter of which upgraded from FinFETs to nanosheet technologies that allow for a greater customization of the voltage characteristics of individual transistors.
IBM states that the technology can fit ’50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail’. We reached out to IBM to ask for clarification on what the size of a fingernail was, given that internally we were coming up with numbers from 50 square millimeters to 250 square millimeters. IBM’s press relations stated that a fingernail in this context is 150 square millimeters. That puts IBM’s transistor density at 333 million transistors per square millimeter.
More information...
#news #electronics
Today’s announcement states that IBM’s 2nm development will improve performance by 45% at the same power, or 75% energy at the same performance, compared to modern 7nm processors.
IBM is keen to point out that it was the first research institution to demonstrate 7nm in 2015 and 5nm in 2017, the latter of which upgraded from FinFETs to nanosheet technologies that allow for a greater customization of the voltage characteristics of individual transistors.
IBM states that the technology can fit ’50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail’. We reached out to IBM to ask for clarification on what the size of a fingernail was, given that internally we were coming up with numbers from 50 square millimeters to 250 square millimeters. IBM’s press relations stated that a fingernail in this context is 150 square millimeters. That puts IBM’s transistor density at 333 million transistors per square millimeter.
More information...
#news #electronics
📃 ARM vs RISC-V Vector Extensions
A comparison of the RISC-V vector extension (RVV) and ARM scalable vector extension (SVE/SVE2)
Microprocessor with vector instructions is going to be the big thing for the future. Why? Because self-driving, speech recognition, image recognition are all based on machine learning and machine learning is all about matrices and vectors.
But that is not the only reason. We have been banging our heads in the wall trying to eek out more performance for years ever since we semi-officially declared Moore’s laws to be over. In the golden old days of microprocessor design, we could simply double the clock frequency of the CPU each year and boom everybody was happy. That wonderful old trick is over.
Today we play a thousand different clever games to eek out more performance whether that is through adding more CPU cores, adding out-of-order execution, more advance branch predictors or SIMD instructions.
More information...
#articles #electronics #machine_learning
A comparison of the RISC-V vector extension (RVV) and ARM scalable vector extension (SVE/SVE2)
Microprocessor with vector instructions is going to be the big thing for the future. Why? Because self-driving, speech recognition, image recognition are all based on machine learning and machine learning is all about matrices and vectors.
But that is not the only reason. We have been banging our heads in the wall trying to eek out more performance for years ever since we semi-officially declared Moore’s laws to be over. In the golden old days of microprocessor design, we could simply double the clock frequency of the CPU each year and boom everybody was happy. That wonderful old trick is over.
Today we play a thousand different clever games to eek out more performance whether that is through adding more CPU cores, adding out-of-order execution, more advance branch predictors or SIMD instructions.
More information...
#articles #electronics #machine_learning
🤖 Aquanaut, the Underwater Transformer
Aquanaut is an advanced unmanned underwater transformer that can transform itself from a nimble long-distance submarine into a half-humanoid robot capable of carrying out complex underwater manipulation tasks.
Designed by Houston Mechatronics Inc, Aquanaut can inspect subsea oil and gas infrastructure, operate valves, and use subsea tools with just a few mouse clicks.
Operating completely untethered and without support ships, Aquanaut can travel more than 124 miles in submarine mode, has a max speed of 7 knots and a maximum operational depth of 984 feet.
More information...
#articles #robots
Aquanaut is an advanced unmanned underwater transformer that can transform itself from a nimble long-distance submarine into a half-humanoid robot capable of carrying out complex underwater manipulation tasks.
Designed by Houston Mechatronics Inc, Aquanaut can inspect subsea oil and gas infrastructure, operate valves, and use subsea tools with just a few mouse clicks.
Operating completely untethered and without support ships, Aquanaut can travel more than 124 miles in submarine mode, has a max speed of 7 knots and a maximum operational depth of 984 feet.
More information...
#articles #robots
📃 7 Tips for Honing Your Embedded System Skills
The dynamic nature of the field is taking place at an ever-accelerating rate, which means it keeps the practitioners on their toes to constantly learn, adapt and innovate.
Participate in IEEE events
I’ve been actively participating in IEEE-USA for the past seven-plus years and have found it a great place to hone my skill set.
Read one engineering book per quarter
There is a concept known as a forgetting curve which essentially shows that we forget 90% of what we hear and read within one week unless it is reinforced. That’s why it’s a good practice to read a chapter, do some exercises, solidify the take-a-ways into your habits and then move on.
Always have an “experimental” project in the works
I’ve found that having an “experimental” or fun side project is a great way to keep existing skills fresh and learn new skills.
More information...
#articles
The dynamic nature of the field is taking place at an ever-accelerating rate, which means it keeps the practitioners on their toes to constantly learn, adapt and innovate.
Participate in IEEE events
I’ve been actively participating in IEEE-USA for the past seven-plus years and have found it a great place to hone my skill set.
Read one engineering book per quarter
There is a concept known as a forgetting curve which essentially shows that we forget 90% of what we hear and read within one week unless it is reinforced. That’s why it’s a good practice to read a chapter, do some exercises, solidify the take-a-ways into your habits and then move on.
Always have an “experimental” project in the works
I’ve found that having an “experimental” or fun side project is a great way to keep existing skills fresh and learn new skills.
More information...
#articles
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💻 CanoPy
Canopy is a visualization tool for plotting CAN bus message payloads
A basic PC CAN interface simply dumps the bus’s message traffic into the terminal, while more sophisticated tools organize messages by the address of their intended recipients. Both of these approaches digitally lift the hood and let you examine what your car is thinking, but the wall-of-numbers approach makes finding the patterns that hold the keys to reverse engineering difficult.
Automatically plotting the data with CanoPy makes finding correlations much easier, after which the text-based tools can be used to focus in on a few specific addresses.
More information...
#projects #software #python
Canopy is a visualization tool for plotting CAN bus message payloads
A basic PC CAN interface simply dumps the bus’s message traffic into the terminal, while more sophisticated tools organize messages by the address of their intended recipients. Both of these approaches digitally lift the hood and let you examine what your car is thinking, but the wall-of-numbers approach makes finding the patterns that hold the keys to reverse engineering difficult.
Automatically plotting the data with CanoPy makes finding correlations much easier, after which the text-based tools can be used to focus in on a few specific addresses.
More information...
#projects #software #python
🧠 Free Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng
This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include:
▫️ Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks).
▫️ Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning).
▫️ Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI).
More information:
Youtube playlist with lectures
Course on Coursera
Matlab implementation
Python implementation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
#courses #machine_learning #python #artificial_intelligence #programming
This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include:
▫️ Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks).
▫️ Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning).
▫️ Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI).
More information:
Youtube playlist with lectures
Course on Coursera
Matlab implementation
Python implementation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
#courses #machine_learning #python #artificial_intelligence #programming
🚀 Exploring the SpaceX software
The actual work of software development by vehicle engineers is largely done using C++, which has been the mainstay of the company’s code since its early days. The software reads text-based configuration files. “We invented simple domain specific languages to express those things, such that other engineers in the company who are not software engineers can maybe configure it.”
Flight software for rockets at SpaceX is structured around the concept of a control cycle. “You read all of your inputs: sensors that we read in through an ADC, packets from the network, data from an IMU, updates from a star tracker or guidance sensor, commands from the ground,” explains Gerding. “You do some processing of those to determine your state, like where you are in the world or the status of the life support system. That determines your outputs – you write those, wait until the next tick of the clock, and then do the whole thing over again.”
More information...
#articles #software
The actual work of software development by vehicle engineers is largely done using C++, which has been the mainstay of the company’s code since its early days. The software reads text-based configuration files. “We invented simple domain specific languages to express those things, such that other engineers in the company who are not software engineers can maybe configure it.”
Flight software for rockets at SpaceX is structured around the concept of a control cycle. “You read all of your inputs: sensors that we read in through an ADC, packets from the network, data from an IMU, updates from a star tracker or guidance sensor, commands from the ground,” explains Gerding. “You do some processing of those to determine your state, like where you are in the world or the status of the life support system. That determines your outputs – you write those, wait until the next tick of the clock, and then do the whole thing over again.”
More information...
#articles #software
📃 Reverse Engineering an Unknown Microcontroller
As part of my work on reverse-engineering eInk price tags I ran into an interesting problem. One particular company (Samsung Electro Mechanics/SoluM) switched from a third party chip I had figured out (Marvell 88MZ100) to a new chip in their next generation tags. This chip seemed to be made by them, custom, for this purpose.
This never bodes well for reverse-engineering. A friend provided me with a few tags containing this chip to play with. There were two types that had a segment-based e-Ink display and one that had a normal graphical eInk display.
They had the same main chip on them, so I started with the segment-based device, since it is easier to understand a simpler unknown system. It was not quite clear where to start, but, of course, that kind of puzzle is always the most interesting!
More information...
#articles #hardware #reverse
As part of my work on reverse-engineering eInk price tags I ran into an interesting problem. One particular company (Samsung Electro Mechanics/SoluM) switched from a third party chip I had figured out (Marvell 88MZ100) to a new chip in their next generation tags. This chip seemed to be made by them, custom, for this purpose.
This never bodes well for reverse-engineering. A friend provided me with a few tags containing this chip to play with. There were two types that had a segment-based e-Ink display and one that had a normal graphical eInk display.
They had the same main chip on them, so I started with the segment-based device, since it is easier to understand a simpler unknown system. It was not quite clear where to start, but, of course, that kind of puzzle is always the most interesting!
More information...
#articles #hardware #reverse