Day: November 20, 2025

Mating Cycles: Engineering Connectors To Last

November 20, 2025 by 57 Comments

If you take a look around you, chances are pretty good that within a few seconds, your eyes will fall on some kind of electrical connector. In this day and age, it’s as likely as not to be a USB connector, given their ubiquity as the charger of choice for everything from phones to flashlights. But there are plenty of other connectors, from mains outlets in the wall to Ethernet connectors, and if you’re anything like us, you’ve got a bench full of DuPonts, banana plugs, BNCs, SMAs, and all the rest of the alphabet soup of connectors.

Given their propensity for failure and their general reputation as a necessary evil in electrical designs, it may seem controversial to say that all connectors are engineered to last. But it’s true; they’re engineered to last, but only for as long as necessary. Some are built for only a few cycles of mating, while others are built for the long haul. Either way, connectors are a great case study in engineering compromise, one that loops physics, chemistry, and materials science into the process.

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Diskette Game Floppy Flopper Is Certainly No Flop

November 20, 2025 by 5 Comments

There’s a tactile joy to the humble 3.5″ floppy that no USB stick will ever match. It’s not just the way they thunk into place in a well-made drive, the eject button, too, is a tactile experience not to be missed. If you were a child in disk-drive days, you may have popped a disk in-and-out repeatedly just for the fun of it — and if you weren’t a child, and did it anyway, we’re not going to judge. [igor] has come up with a physical game called “Floppy Flopper” that provides an excuse to do just that en masse, and it looks like lots of fun.

It consists of nine working floppy drives in a 3×3 grid, all mounted on a hefty welded-steel frame. Each drive has an RGB LED above it. The name of the game is to swap floppies as quickly as possible so that the color of the floppy in the drive matches the color flashing above it. Each successful insertion is worth thirteen points, tracked on a lovely matrix display. Each round is faster than the last, until you miss the window or mix up colors in haste. That might make more sense if you watch the demo video below.

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Pong Gets The Boot

November 20, 2025 by 5 Comments

You might be surprised to find out that [Akshat Joshi’s] Pong game that fits in a 512-byte boot sector isn’t the first of its kind. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accomplishment to shoehorn useful code in that little bitty space.

As you might expect, a game like this uses assembly language. It also can’t use any libraries or operating system functions because there aren’t any at that particular time of the computer startup sequence. Once you remember that the bootloader has to end with two magic bytes (0x55 0xAA), you know you have to get it all done in 510 bytes or less.

This version of Pong uses 80×25 text mode and writes straight into video memory. You can find the code in a single file on GitHub. In the old days, getting something like this working was painful because you had little choice but reboot your computer to test it and hope it went well. Now you can run it in a virtual machine like QEMU and even use that to debug problems in ways that would have made a developer from the 1990s offer up their life savings.

We’ve seen this before, but we still appreciate the challenge. We wonder if you could write Pong in BootBasic?