Huge Names Confirm Their Supercon Appearances
We’re excited to announce the next batch of speakers for the 2017 Hackaday Superconference.
We are especially pleased to welcome Michael Ossmann as a speaker. He presented an RF design workshop at the 2014 Superconference which was sold out, standing room only, and still turned away dozens of people before becoming a hit on the Internet. This year he takes the stage with colleague Dominic Spill as they focus on infrared communications and the uses and abuses of such.
Dr. Christal Gordon threw down an incredible talk on biologically inspired sensors last year and we suspect she will outdo herself …read more
There Is No Such Thing As An Invalid Unit
The Mars Climate Orbiter was a spacecraft launched in the closing years of the 1990s, whose job was to have been to study the Martian atmosphere and serve as a communications relay point for a series of other surface missions. It is famous not for its mission achieving these goals, but for the manner of its premature destruction as its orbital insertion brought it too close to the planet’s atmosphere and destroyed it.
The cause of the spacecraft entering the atmosphere rather than orbiting the planet was found in a subsequent investigation to be a very simple one. Simplifying matters …read more
In-Band Signaling: Quindar Tones
So far in this brief series on in-band signaling, we looked at two of the common methods of providing control signals along with the main content of a transmission: DTMF for Touch-Tone dialing, and coded-squelch systems for two-way radio. For this installment, we’ll look at something that far fewer people have ever used, but almost everyone has heard: Quindar tones. …read more
AI: This Decade’s Worst Buzz Word
In hacker circles, the “Internet of Things” is often the object of derision. Do we really need the IoT toaster? But there’s one phrase that — while not new — is really starting to annoy me in its current incarnation: AI or Artificial Intelligence.
The problem isn’t the phrase itself. It used to mean a collection of techniques used to make a computer look like it was smart enough to, say, play a game or hold a simulated conversation. Of course, in the movies it means HAL9000. Lately, though, companies have been overselling the concept and otherwise normal people are …read more
The Science Behind Lithium Cell Characteristics and Safety
To describe the constraints on developing consumer battery technology as ‘challenging’ is an enormous understatement. The ideal rechargeable battery has conflicting properties – it has to store large amounts of energy, safely release or absorb large amounts of it on demand, and must be unable to release that energy upon failure. It also has to be cheap, nontoxic, lightweight, and scalable.
As a result, consumer battery technologies represent a compromise between competing goals. Modern rechargeable lithium batteries are no exception, although overall they are a marvel of engineering. Mobile technology would not be anywhere near as good as it is …read more
