Disappointing news this week for those longing for same-hour Amazon delivery as the retail giant tapped the brakes on its Prime Air drone deliveries. The pause is partially blamed on a December incident at the company’s Pendleton, Oregon test facility, where two MK30 delivery drones collided in midair during light rain conditions. A Bloomberg report states that the crash, which resulted in one of the drones catching fire on the ground, was due to a software error related to the weather. As a result, they decided to ground their entire fleet, which provides 60-minute delivery to test markets in Arizona and Texas, until a software update can be issued.

While we’ve always been skeptical about the practicality of drone delivery, it sure seems like Amazon is taking it seriously and making progress. There’s plenty of money to be made catering to the impatience of consumers and the general need for instant gratification, and where there’s potential for profit, technology is never far behind. So chances are good that someone will get this right, and with an infinite bucket of money and the ability to attract top talent, this is Amazon’s contest to lose. It is a bit alarming, though, that a little rain knocked these drones out of the air. We’d love to find out exactly what happened and how they plan to fix it.

Also in drone news, NATO has decided to deploy “drone boats” to help protect undersea cables and pipelines. A total of 20 uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) will be deployed as part of Operation Baltic Sentry, which will include twelve crewed vessels and an unspecified number of patrol aircraft. The idea is to get eyes and ears on the infrastructure assets under the Baltic Sea, where a number of incidents have occurred over the last year or so, resulting in pipelines and undersea cables being damaged. That’s an understandable goal, but we’re keen on the USV itself. There’s not much information about them, and it’s not even clear which navy in the NATO bloc has these things. It’s also a little hard to tell how big they are, although our guess would be somewhere between a large patrol boat and a small cutter. We’d also like to know if these are remotely operated vessels or autonomous; again, our guess would be a mix of the two.

We got a tip this week about a post over on the Arduino forum with detailed instructions on making your own Dupont jumpers. There’s a link to a PDF with the pictorial guide, which shows exactly how to make these handy tools. Some people commented on this being a waste of time when you can buy jumpers on the cheap. But we’ve heard enough horror stories about those that rolling your own seems prudent. Plus we really liked the tips on crimping two leads into a single connector.

A few decades ago, there was a better-than-average chance that any band’s keyboardist was on mushrooms. Things have flipped, though, and now we’ve got shrooms on the keyboards. It comes to us from “Bionics and the Wire,” a Manchester, UK group that makes music with plants and mushrooms. There’s no detail on the equipment they use, but the business end of the instrument is a set of four solenoid-operated arms positioned over a keyboard. Electrodes are clipped to the caps of a couple of Wood Ear mushrooms, and whatever electrical signals they pick up are presumably passed to some amplifiers that figure out which notes to play. They claim the signals come from natural bioelectric activity in the fungi, but we suppose some of the signals may be coming from random electrical noise picked up by the mushrooms. Either way, the tune is pretty cool.

And finally, a while back we did a piece on electrical substations that took a look at all the cool stuff found in and around the big transformers that keep the grid running. One piece of gear that we read about but couldn’t find enough information on to include in the article was the Bucholz relay, a piece of protective gear that monitors the flow of dielectric oil inside these big transformers. Thankfully, the YouTube algorithm detected our frustration and suggested this cool video on how the Bucholz relay works. It’s remarkably simple, which is pretty much what you want for something that protects millions of dollars of irreplaceable infrastructure. The video also has a lot of nice details on the other bits and pieces inside a transformer. Enjoy!