For this week’s episode, we did something super special — we all convened to answer your burning questions about your hosts, both as hackers and as humans. We kick things off with a segment featuring a hearty round-table discussion between Elliot, Al, Dan, Kristina, and Tom. What’s on our benches? What do we type on? Go find out!
None of us figured out What’s That Sound though a few of us had some creative guesses. Can you guess the sound? There could be a t-shirt in it for ya.
Kristina and Elliot went on to have a normal podcast too, but since the round table section went so long, we’ll process up that section and put it out early next week.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download this epic monument of podcasting and savor it for the next 256 weeks.
- Did you know what that sound was? Fill in the form with your best guess and we’ll see who got it right next week.
ACH 0xff is NOT 256!
Indeed it’s not! What the heck were we thinking?
Fixed in the title here, but it’s wrong forever in audio. Oh the shame.
Likewise, ‘10000000’ is not 256 either. Love me some base conversion early in the morning, tho’.
I did this too – I thought I must be going mad (or at least unable to count the zeros)
Oh god. A binary order of magnitude!
What is 378? 255 in octal is 0377, but the it rolls over to 0400.
There are 8 kind of people who get that joke…. ;-)
No, just 8 people get the joke!
B^)
256 = b 1 0000 0000 not b 1000 0000
I have a bit and brace (actually an eggbeater drill) because it doesn’t need batteries. It never needs recharging when you pick it off the shelf where you left it last year when you used it, and it doesn’t go bad sitting on the shelf after a number of years. Think about it: you buy the manual drill for 50 bucks and it lasts you a lifetime, or you buy a new battery operated drill every so many years when the old one’s batteries go dud.
And for the 555 – there’s a tiny problem using a small AVR to replace it: it doesn’t do voltage ramps, and you get frequency jitter because digital synthesis works in discrete steps with the clock rate. The way they trim the oscillator on those chips is by “skipping beats”, so it runs at the right clock rate on average, but at any given moment the frequency is going to be off by some percentage points. Try generating a tone and listen to it for a few moments – the pitch goes up and down ever so slightly. That’s nasty if you’re trying to make an “analog” synth of some description, because it makes beat frequencies that go all over the place.
Definitely agree with your first paragraph
(I own about 40 hand braces and around 6 “eggbeater” drills)
And since they’re relatively cheap, you can easily have one for each drill bit you commonly use! No time wasted changing bits.
I’ve never listened to one of these podcasts and maybe never will as I assumed all the Hackerday writers were merely Ai bots given suitably acceptable personalities and writing styles. I did actually meet someone how seemed to be in the guise of Jenny List at an EMF camp, but they quickly scuttled away when I started talking about the real state of affairs in Hackerday Central.
Having said this, if I ever do a road trip in the USA, I’ll set up my sound system to play these podcasts from the first edition to what ever edition gets me to my destination, whever that might be.
Haha! We’re _sooo_ not AI bots. No bot would make the same mistakes we do!
Anyone have a link to the low cost bluetooth temperature sensors mentioned in this podcast?
https://github.com/atc1441/ATC_MiThermometer
I wrote up an article about installing the firmware and collecting the data with Python back when it was released:
https://hackaday.com/2020/12/08/exploring-custom-firmware-on-xiaomi-thermometers/
The firmware has actually improved quite a bit since then, it’s a really excellent project.
That was REALLY enjoyable hearing you all talk shop! Ironically I am a 555 neophyte and have also concluded the ATTINY85 is the way to go. Thanks for a great episode and all your great contributions to the show!
Thanks so much for answering my questions.
Thanks for asking inspiring ones!
Hey! We didn’t get to discuss the hacks last week, so here they are:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/hackaday/Hackaday_Podcast-Ep257.mp3
If you subscribe, you should have it pushed out to you already. But if not, you can get it above or head on over to https://hackaday.libsyn.com/
This was such a delight! Please do not wait another 256 episodes to do this again!