Ethics In Engineering: Volkswagen’s Diesel Fiasco

September 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 360 Comments

Every so often – and usually not under the best of circumstance – the field of engineering as a whole is presented with a teaching moment. Volkswagen is currently embroiled in a huge scandal involving emissions testing of 11 Million diesel cars sold in recent years. It’s a problem that could cost VW dearly, to the tune of eighteen Billion dollars in the US alone, and will, without a doubt, end the careers of more than a few Volkswagen employees. In terms of automotive scandals, this is bigger than Unsafe at Any Speed. This is a bigger scandal than the Ford Pinto’s proclivity to explode. This is engineering history in the making, and an enormously teachable moment for ethics in engineering.

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A Single-Chip Video Game Console

September 23, 2015 by James Hobson 27 Comments

Ready to feel inadequate with your programming skills? You’ve been warned. Take a look at [Voja’s] single chip video game console using the PIC24. It produces the VGA signal, 5-channel sound, and is presented in a gamepad form-factor with directional pad and two buttons.

He’s been working with PIC24 for a while now generating VGA signals, and he decided it might be fun to create a 2D video game… so he decided to see if he could program a replica of the old Spectrum game Jumping Jack (play it online here).

It uses a PIC24EP512GP202 microcontroller, complete with 512K flash memory, 48k data, and a whopping 28-pins. The game, which is extremely well documented, is laid out over on his projects page. It makes our heads spin just looking at it! This is a great project to compare with the ArduinoCade from last week. Both do an amazing job of pumping out audio and video while leaving enough room for the game to actually run.

Anyway, enough talking about it — just take a look at the following demo!

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Old LISP Language Used For New Raspberry Pi OS

September 23, 2015 by Rud Merriam 30 Comments

On the scale of awesomeness, writing an operating system ranks near the top for software hackers and ranks just below writing a whole new language. [Lukas F. Hartmann] is reaching for the epic status with the Raspberry Pi operating system dubbed Interim. In an interesting mixture of old and new, it’s written in LISP!

LISP (LISt Processing) is the second oldest high-level programming language that received wide-spread usage. The only one older is FORTRAN (FORMula TRANslation), and that is just by one year. LISP is generally associated with artificial intelligence research but it also surfaced as a utilitarian scripting language in various applications like AutoCad. You may have also heard of a more recent dialect, Clojure, which has been receiving a lot of attention.

The source code, an image for the Pi 2, and directions for making it all work are available. [Lukas] also describes how to get a new OS up and running on a Pi.

[Lukas] isn’t the first to create this type of system. Back in the ’70s MIT worked on a Lisp machine that led to commercially available systems. If you have an old Apple IIe around you can make it into a Lisp Machine. You can also find LISP in the Internet of Things. And then there is [kremlint] who actually scored an original LISP Machine. We’ll have to keep an eye on his progress in restoring it to working condition.

Thanks for the tip, [krs013].