🤖 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
📟 How to design a motherboard for your electronics project
After the prototyping phase of any electronics project, I like to make a "Motherboard" PCB. For this phase I will continue to use breakout boards for all of the individual components, but link them together using a PCB.
This allows the PCB design to stay simple and flexible, and makes them easy to hand manufacture them in my workshop. This is a great setup if you want to do a small (10ish) beta run of your project before designing a full product. I have shipped many hardware products using this stage, it's a great way to validate your MVP before putting money into tooling and CM bring up.
This tutorial will walk through the process that I follow to create a motherboard. The intended audience is someone who has already wired up a prototype on a breadboard, and wants to get started bundling them together into a motherboard.
More information:
Part 1
Part 2
#electronics #hardware #design
After the prototyping phase of any electronics project, I like to make a "Motherboard" PCB. For this phase I will continue to use breakout boards for all of the individual components, but link them together using a PCB.
This allows the PCB design to stay simple and flexible, and makes them easy to hand manufacture them in my workshop. This is a great setup if you want to do a small (10ish) beta run of your project before designing a full product. I have shipped many hardware products using this stage, it's a great way to validate your MVP before putting money into tooling and CM bring up.
This tutorial will walk through the process that I follow to create a motherboard. The intended audience is someone who has already wired up a prototype on a breadboard, and wants to get started bundling them together into a motherboard.
More information:
Part 1
Part 2
#electronics #hardware #design
💻 The Lisperati1000 Is a Cyberdeck Terminal Dedicated to Lisp Programming
If you’re new to coding and want something easy to use, Python is great. For performance and capability, it’s hard to beat programming in C. But if you need some complex algorithms — particularly algorithms that do a lot of heavy mathematical lifting — then Lisp is the ideal choice.
Dr. Conrad Barski has a long history of a using Lisp to program enterprise medical software and has even authored books on the language. He wanted a small, portable device for coding Lisp on the go and built the Lisperati1000 cyberdeck terminal for the job.
The Lisperati1000 is a very compact device based on the Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer. Its most striking feature is the 8.8” LCD display, which has an ultra-wide aspect ratio with a resolution of 1920x480.
More information...
#projects #lisp #programming #electronics #3d_modeling #raspberry
If you’re new to coding and want something easy to use, Python is great. For performance and capability, it’s hard to beat programming in C. But if you need some complex algorithms — particularly algorithms that do a lot of heavy mathematical lifting — then Lisp is the ideal choice.
Dr. Conrad Barski has a long history of a using Lisp to program enterprise medical software and has even authored books on the language. He wanted a small, portable device for coding Lisp on the go and built the Lisperati1000 cyberdeck terminal for the job.
The Lisperati1000 is a very compact device based on the Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer. Its most striking feature is the 8.8” LCD display, which has an ultra-wide aspect ratio with a resolution of 1920x480.
More information...
#projects #lisp #programming #electronics #3d_modeling #raspberry
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🚀 How SpaceX lands Starship (optimal trajectory)
As part of a personal push to learn more about non-linear control, I have been playing around with a pretty powerful method known as trajectory optimization. Once the base code is set up, it’s fairly easy to go apply to various systems.
While waiting for Starship SN15 to launch (it was in fact scrubbed, sad), I decided to pull together an estimate for some of it’s dynamics and see if I could get my toy 2D simulation to perform that epic flip and land itself.
To my excitement, after some finessing, it worked quite well. But what really surprised me was when I played the output side by side with actual landing footage: it lined up very very well.
To me, this means one of two things: either I got incredibly lucky, or SpaceX is running a very similar optimization on their actual system. I think both are true.
More information...
#articles #control #software
As part of a personal push to learn more about non-linear control, I have been playing around with a pretty powerful method known as trajectory optimization. Once the base code is set up, it’s fairly easy to go apply to various systems.
While waiting for Starship SN15 to launch (it was in fact scrubbed, sad), I decided to pull together an estimate for some of it’s dynamics and see if I could get my toy 2D simulation to perform that epic flip and land itself.
To my excitement, after some finessing, it worked quite well. But what really surprised me was when I played the output side by side with actual landing footage: it lined up very very well.
To me, this means one of two things: either I got incredibly lucky, or SpaceX is running a very similar optimization on their actual system. I think both are true.
More information...
#articles #control #software
🤖 China's Zhurong rover makes history with Mars landing
China's Zhurong rover touched down on Mars early Saturday, state media reported.
The 1.85 meters tall rover is solar-powered and has a mass of around 240 kg, making it far smaller than the huge, 1,025-kg radioisotope-powered Perseverance but larger than NASA’s earlier Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
The six-wheeled rover has a top speed of 200 meters-per-hour and was tested out at a site built by the China Academy of Space Technology. The rover carries six science payloads to study the topography, geology, soil structure, minerals and rock types and atmosphere in the area:
▫️ NaTeCam: A pair of 2048 × 2048 pixel navigation and terrain cameras.
▫️ MSCam: A multispectral camera installed on the mast between the NaTeCams to provide information on surface materials.
▫️ MarSCoDe: The Mars Surface Composition Detector includes a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) spectrometer.
More information...
#news #robots
China's Zhurong rover touched down on Mars early Saturday, state media reported.
The 1.85 meters tall rover is solar-powered and has a mass of around 240 kg, making it far smaller than the huge, 1,025-kg radioisotope-powered Perseverance but larger than NASA’s earlier Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
The six-wheeled rover has a top speed of 200 meters-per-hour and was tested out at a site built by the China Academy of Space Technology. The rover carries six science payloads to study the topography, geology, soil structure, minerals and rock types and atmosphere in the area:
▫️ NaTeCam: A pair of 2048 × 2048 pixel navigation and terrain cameras.
▫️ MSCam: A multispectral camera installed on the mast between the NaTeCams to provide information on surface materials.
▫️ MarSCoDe: The Mars Surface Composition Detector includes a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) spectrometer.
More information...
#news #robots
💻 12 common attacks on embedded systems
Interesting article that sums up the most popular attack types on embedded systems.
Software-based attacks: target the brains of the system — the application that manages the devices. A successful attack on software allows a hacker to access data or gain control over an embedded system. Searching for vulnerabilities in software design and code is the most popular vector of attack because it’s possible to conduct such an attack remotely.
Network-based attacks: exploits network infrastructure vulnerabilities and can also be performed remotely. Using these vulnerabilities, hackers can listen for, intercept, and modify traffic transmitted by an embedded system.
Side-channel attacks: intend to use hardware security flaws in embedded systems to hack them. A side-channel attack is the hardest and most expensive type of attack, as it requires precise knowledge of the hardware design and physical availability of the target system.
More information...
#articles #security
Interesting article that sums up the most popular attack types on embedded systems.
Software-based attacks: target the brains of the system — the application that manages the devices. A successful attack on software allows a hacker to access data or gain control over an embedded system. Searching for vulnerabilities in software design and code is the most popular vector of attack because it’s possible to conduct such an attack remotely.
Network-based attacks: exploits network infrastructure vulnerabilities and can also be performed remotely. Using these vulnerabilities, hackers can listen for, intercept, and modify traffic transmitted by an embedded system.
Side-channel attacks: intend to use hardware security flaws in embedded systems to hack them. A side-channel attack is the hardest and most expensive type of attack, as it requires precise knowledge of the hardware design and physical availability of the target system.
More information...
#articles #security
🤖 ANYmal - autonomous robot for solving industrial inspection and maintenance tasks
ANYmal’s design enables autonomous navigation throughout complex and large-scale industrial facilities. Onboarding ANYmal does not require special preparations within your facility, the robot uses its built-in sensors to adapts to its surroundings. The robot is waterproof and weatherproof, sparing your staff unnecessary exposure to harsh or dangerous conditions.
Robot optimizes routine condition monitoring tasks through its ability to collect and report visual, thermographic, and vibration analysis. AI-based algorithms provide consistent, reliable, and up-to-date information on the health of your equipment and infrastructure.
Features:
▫️ Edge computing: Built-in data processing for short reaction times and bandwidth savings
▫️ Geo-localized: All inspection data is associated with accurate temporal and 3D spatial information
▫️ Open API: Enables integration with third-party solutions
More information...
#articles #robots
ANYmal’s design enables autonomous navigation throughout complex and large-scale industrial facilities. Onboarding ANYmal does not require special preparations within your facility, the robot uses its built-in sensors to adapts to its surroundings. The robot is waterproof and weatherproof, sparing your staff unnecessary exposure to harsh or dangerous conditions.
Robot optimizes routine condition monitoring tasks through its ability to collect and report visual, thermographic, and vibration analysis. AI-based algorithms provide consistent, reliable, and up-to-date information on the health of your equipment and infrastructure.
Features:
▫️ Edge computing: Built-in data processing for short reaction times and bandwidth savings
▫️ Geo-localized: All inspection data is associated with accurate temporal and 3D spatial information
▫️ Open API: Enables integration with third-party solutions
More information...
#articles #robots