Despite what some people might tell you, self-driving cars aren’t really on the market yet. Instead, there’s a small handful of startups and big tech companies that are rapidly developing prototypes of this technology. These vehicles are furiously testing in various cities around the world.
In fact, depending on where you live, you might have noticed them out and about. Not least because many of them keep causing traffic jams, much to the frustration of their fellow road users. Let’s dive in and look at what’s going wrong.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but an animation, then, must be worth a million. Make that animation interactive, and… well, we don’t know how many words it is worth, but it is plenty! That’s the idea behind [Bartosz Ciechanowski’s] blog where he uses clever interactive animations to explain the surprisingly complex physics of riding a bicycle.
The first animation lets you view a rider from any angle and control the rider’s pose. Later ones show you how forces act on the rider and bicycle, starting with example wooden boxes and working back up to the original bike rider with force vectors visible. As you move the rider or the bike, the arrows show you the direction and magnitude of force.
[Alessandro Carminati] spends the day hacking Linux kernels, and to such an end needed a decent compilation machine to chew through the builds. One day, this machine refused to boot leaving some head-scratching to do, and remembering the motherboard diagnostics procedures of old, realized that wasn’t going to work for this modern board. You see, older ISA-based systems were much simpler, with diagnostic POST codes accessible by sniffing the bus with an appropriate card inserted, but the modern motherboard doesn’t even export the same bus anymore.
See “out 0x80, al” in there? That’s a POST code being written
Do modern machines even run a POST test at all, or are there other standards? After firing up a Linux machine and dumping the first meg of memory address space, it clearly contained some of the BIOS code. [Alessandro] looked at a disassembly of the BIOS update image and saw a similar structure, with POST code data sent to port 0x80 just like machines of old.
But instead of an ISA CPU bus, we have the Low Pin Count (LPC) bus which is used to hook up the ‘super IO’ functions, controlling things such as fans, temp sensors, and other system management functions. It also serves as the connection for the TPM feature, which usually appears as one of the motherboard connectors intended to be user-accessible. It turns out that POST codes can be accessed from this point with an appropriate POST card that can talk LPC.
