Collaborate Disseminate
After a journey of a decade, what started as Project Loon by Google is no more. Promoted as a way to bring communications to the most remote parts of the globe, it used gigantic, high-altitude balloons equipped with communication hardware …read more
Back in 1990 [Benjamin Zotto] wrote – while in elementary school – a dog racing game called Wonderland 2. The BASIC source code and images for the game were stored on a single ProDOS formatted, soft-sectored 5.25″ floppy disk. …read more
Continue reading Reconstructing Data From A Corrupt Apple ][ Floppy Disk
Humans have unfortunately not yet evolved the ability to photosynthesize or recharge from an electricity source, which is why astronauts well into the future of spaceflight will need to have access to food sources. Developing ways to grow food in …read more
Continue reading NASA Challenge Offers Prizes for Sprouting Astronaut Food Systems
For any smaller and larger software product that aims to be compatible with Apple’s MacOS, the recent introduction of its ARM-based Apple Silicon processors and MacBooks to go with them came as a bit of a shock. Suddenly one of …read more
Continue reading Porting Firefox To Apple Silicon: Tales From The Trenches
For many years now, the so-called ‘Blue Pill’ STM32 MCU development board has been a staple in the hobbyist community. Finding its origins as an apparent Maple Mini clone, the diminutive board is easily to use in breadboard projects thanks …read more
Continue reading Blue Pill Vs Black Pill: Transitioning From STM32F103 To STM32F411
Linker scripts are one of those things which nobody who does software development really wants to deal with, but like many things in life sometimes they are inevitable to make things work. Although one could keep pretending linker scripts do …read more
Continue reading The (Probably) Most Thoroughly Commented Linker Script For The SAM D21 MCU
The history of storage devices is quite literally a race between the medium and the computing power as the bottleneck of preserving billions of ones and zeros stands in the way of computing nirvana. The most recent player is the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), something of a hybrid of what …read more
Continue reading NVMe Blurs The Lines Between Memory And Storage
Although most types of radiation are invisible, except for the visible part of the EM spectrum, there are many ways that we can make various types of radiation visible. One of these methods is called ‘scintillation’, which can be used to make ionizing radiation visible. Recently [Lukas Springer] demonstrated how …read more
Continue reading Visualizing Ionizing Radiation With DIY Plastic Scintillators
One of the most basic and also most versatile communication interfaces on an MCU is the UART, or Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. Usually found in the form of either a UART or USART, the former allows for pure asynchronous serial communication, whereas the latter adds flow control. When working with MCUs, …read more
Continue reading Bare-Metal STM32: Universal, Asynchronous Communication With UARTs
At this point in time, one would be hard pressed to find anyone who is not at least aware of some of the uses of exoskeletons as they pertain to use by humans. From supporting people during rehabilitation, to ensuring that people working in industrial and warehouse settings do not …read more