szczys

First of all, good on Google for developing a Bluetooth firmware the hardware they are otherwise bricking.

I have one of these Stadia controllers and recently tried to play Cup Head (a notoriously hard 2d shooter) with it. I found the Bluetooth latency to make this unplayable. I would estimate it to be 2x or 3x the latency of a PS3 or PS4 controller. Anyone want to pontificate on whether that's a hardware limitation or a software implementation issue? (I was playing via Steam on Linux and tried all 3 controllers.)

Unfortunately, no. The highest quality broadcast I get on ATSC is 1080i (the i=interlaced)

I still use an over-the-air antenna on a daily basis (and record from it using MythTV with ATSC tuners in a computer). The changeover from analog has been a bit of a give and take.

With analog broadcast, if you were a bit too far away you would still get a fuzzy image and sounds that had some interference with it. Now if you're a bit too far away the picture breaks up and the audio sounds like auto-tune. It doesn't take much of that to make it unwatchable.

On the other hand, when you get a solid signal the picture is amazing versus the standard-def of analog broadcasts. Add to this the benefit of multiple sub-channels on each broadcast channel and you get a lot more watching options.

I've installed an attic antenna and a pre-amplifier that supplies great signal to all coax (CATV) outlets in the house. That hardware cost what 1-2 months of cable TV subscription would have and that was years and years ago.

On balance the digital changeover has been much better in my experience.

Doesn't that add manufacturing complexity? If you have multiple firmwares it's possible to flash the wrong one at the factory leading to a lot of pain if they get out to the market before this is discovered (your news 16 GB card is only using 8 GB of memory). This current scheme means there is one firmware to rule them all and the configuration of the hardware itself acts as the selector.

I don't have a Tesla, but I had upholstery on the backs of the rear seats (the part that becomes the floor of the hatchback when you fold them down) all off on my Ford C-Max. It looks like an adhesive failure there.

Not making excuses for the big T, just saying that there's a lot places for things to work out poorly in automotive.

I mean, on your first point, it's an automotive grade part. I think any eMMC put under these conditions (75% full and the other 25% written heavily to with log files) is going to have a relatively short life expectancy.

What baffles me is that who is reading these logs? Can't they just turn then off (pipe to /dev/null) and then have cars that need troubleshooting put into a debug mode at some point?

Well that's pretty crappy. We put out a great article at Hackaday that covered the meat and the meaning of this release. Seems like it deserved to be linked on HN for this topic.

Edit: Seems like people voted up the Hackaday article and not the medium article. So you've in effect negated everyone's votes.

I'm kind of baffled by the concept of radar astronomy. Apparently this is one of two radio telescopes that can do radar astronomy [1], but I'm shocked it works at all since the inverse square law leads to such a falloff in power as distance increases. On the other hand, even radio amateurs can achieve moon bounce, so if you consider the enormity of the dish it makes sense that it can hear the radar bounce from much further away. The wiki says Arecibo was used for mapping rings of Saturn and surface features of Mars. Bonkers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy

Unattended package installation without needing the sudo password? Where do I sign up? /s

The topic of undocumented flags is an interesting one (passing flags to dpkg from apt). Wish they had explained how that one was found out.

Well also not really NTSC either. Did you see the part where he talks about them trying to get a recording of gameplay for the commercial?

> "We can't get it to play on the videotape recorder, why?” I say, "Well, it's not really video! There’s no interlace… Treat it as though it’s PAL, just run up through a standard converter.”

I think as Drew mentions in his article, Raspberry Pi is the least-common denominator in the emulation game right now given the price and sheer volume of availalbe guides and software packages for the thing.

Sure, a NUC will blow it away and if you're building a dedicated gaming appliance that's a good way to go. But compared to the Pi3 and it's predecessors there's respectable horse-power on the Pi4.

Oh, that makes sense. Like blowing across the top of a bottle. Those spokes may end up acting like reds as they spin at high speed. Interesting!

I had not thought of the issue of noise. Assuming you have similar tread, and a similar contact patch to existing tires, wouldn't noise remain similar?

Yeah... theramin's bug. This is a great story! What a brilliant example of passively powered electronics from 75 years ago. Now it's all the rage to build this king of functionality into passive sensors, etc.

Yeah, it makes sense that being able to see inside the structure would be a huge help in planning how to take on the fire.

I was wondering about the robot's water stream being used to keep things currently not burning from starting on fire. Do you think this would be used to hose down relics they were trying to protect from the rest of the blaze or is that not even considered when trying to get it under control?

You should listen to Shahriar Shahramian on The Amp Hour Podcast: https://theamphour.com/430-shahriar-discusses-5g/

There's a ton of interesting things, like 5G is for a lot more than cellphones. I've always heard that 5G will have phased array and I wondered how that would work -- he talks about possibility that the array is on the roof of a car and your devices will connect back to that. Lots of issues, like size of antenna and power consumption, to get those blazing fast speeds.

Actually, I think it could last for millennia as built. Just not the full 89,000,000 years as mentioned. Even if you ditch the theory, there's a good chance this will keep running as built for several decades and that's pretty crazy. Makes me want to build one and let it run.

> 640,000 patent applications were filed in fiscal 2018 > The agency had 12,579 employees -- including 8,185 patent examiners and 579 trademark examining lawyers

The number of patents filed is kind of mindboggling. I suppose that's still only 78 patents per examiner per year which doesn't sound so bad. But I can see why they're so backed up.

If a patent claim is made against a large company they are likely to fight back legally. If multiple claims are made against small sellers, they are likely to either stop selling, or settle. Settling means money and possibly some legal precedent (IANAL).

I've heard of practices like this in several different industries. It seems to be a tactic that has little to do with the actual purpose (intent) of the patent system.

Dig into this forum thread which does a great job of reverse engineering the silicon design: http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4150

Theoretically you could reproduce this with discrete components if you can figure out the entire circuit. That would be a pretty epic build that I'd love to see!

I'm excited to hear interest in "hope" being the overall challenge. I'm tired of constantly hearing dystopian prophesy. Yes, it makes for a good sci-fi novel by I don't want to live in a dystopian future, I want to live in one where our scientific achievement is a net benefit for all.

How do we get there? Start by spending time showing what a hopeful future can look like!

Haptic feedback shirt is great for the Human Computer Interface Challenge part of this. You should work on a concept!

I can definitely follow this article, but I still don't feel like I have an intuitive understanding at all the way I do with traditional processors that use plain old electron flow. It makes me wonder if that's how people felt when integrated circuits were first being seen in the world.

He was one of the early adopters of the ESP8266 and wrote a bunch of very interesting firware for those (like the ability for it to act as an AP to set up WiFi credentials without additional hardware.

He was subsequently hired to as a software engineering manager and technical marketing manager at Espressif, who were working on the ESP32 at the time.

I enjoyed Jeroen's recent appearance on the Amp Hour podcast where he talks about a lot of this: https://theamphour.com/359-an-interview-with-jeroen-domburg-...

Sprite_TM is my all time favorite hardware hacker. He is a great friend, and I wish we didn't live on opposite sides of the world so that I could hang out with him more frequently.

His talks are always amazing. There are two others from the Hackaday Superconference which I absolutely loved:

* Tamagotchi singularity builds a botnet of tamagochi by emulating the original 6502 based hardware in an underground server farm * Project Details: http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity * Talk video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_-e_cJ1-Gs

* Tiniest Game Boy Keychain is a hardware tour-de-force... someone else on this thread said they weren't impressed by emulators in small packages. This one should prove you wrong * Project details: I couldn't find it on his site, here's the Hackaday article: https://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/tiniest-game-boy-hides-in-yo... * Talk video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXAZZfJm-g

Those are both flashy, but I love his work on things like reverse engineering the controller for this hard drive and running his own code on it: * Project details: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack * Talk video: http://bofh.nikhef.nl/events/OHM/video/d2-t1-13-20130801-230...

When memory was precious, the humans ordered math functions to make the most efficient use of the stack. Sounds like science fiction but it was actually just the early days of personal calculators.

I think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day.

Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large timescale could do the work at a lower cost.

I've heard of hand trimming before but never seen it. This technique uses a hand file to get precise resistance values. Works great on through-hole parts, didn't work at all on surface mount parts.

I think we actually need an intermediary technology before self-driving can be accepted.

Already there is proof for this. The general public is widely accepting of "lane assist" that warns you if you are drifting over into another lane, and automatic parking that is accepted (less so than lane assist but still a good start).

I'd like to see widespread driver monitoring AI in cars. The should be able to tell where you are looking and warn you if you are looking away from the road too much (ie: looking at your phone), falling asleep, or driving erratically (fatigued or inebriated).

I think with this kind of driver assist becoming widespread, it will be easier for the general public to accept self-driving when it has matured. The intermediary tech is more immediately useful and amounts to a public support campaign.

Wow, I really hope they can deliver. This really completes the low-cost rapid-prototyping lab (joining affordable laser cutters, 3d printers both FDM and goo, ShopBot, etc.)

There are digital copies if you search around the Internet (at least a couple have been linked in other comments).

For me the most interesting part is that there are hand-written notes in this version which are from the development process.