A Mini’s Infotainment System And The Joys Of Aftermarket Car Parts

September 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although [Arkandas] disclaims any interest in being a ‘car guy’, this is somewhat ironic in light of the sheer amount of modding he has performed on a range of cars over the years, a recent misadventure involving a BMW Mini F56’s infotainment system replacement and some light ECU reprogramming included. What happened exactly is covered in a detailed breakdown in a blog post.

The old iDrive infotainment system in the Mini. (Credit: Arkandas)

One of the aspects that [Arkandas] disliked about this car was its iDrive infotainment system, itself a stripped-down version of the full-fat infotainment system in ‘real’ BMW cars, with a small screen and awkward UX. The idea was to replace this with a more full-featured modern system.

Since the infotainment system does hook into the car’s CAN buses and other systems it has to be compatible, of course. This took some research before ultimately a fancy €700 aftermarket replacement was ordered from a Chinese seller.

Long story short, the device was mostly compatible aside from a connector wired wrongly and creating a short. This was fixed, but then the loosely fitted display toppled off during a test drive and broke, so a replacement screen was ordered. This screen arrived without requisite factory programming, so [Arkandas] embarked on a long reverse-engineering session.

Before he was able to extract firmware from the broken display and flash it onto the new display he was offered a brand-new replacement for the whole device, which he accepted in return for sending the old unit back. Although this still left him with a range of questions, at least the new infotainment looks pretty spiffy.

The worst part about the whole experience was just how much waiting and agonizing over poor after-sale support was involved, along with all the things that can go wrong and turn a fun afternoon of fitting shiny new parts into a months-long ordeal. Since modern cars are basically just a stack of computers on wheels, this ensures that even ‘not car guys’ will be doing a lot more of such fun car modding.

Forget Trees, Add Fins To Your 3D Prints Instead

September 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

Perhaps one of the most contentious issues in 3D printing is that of supports, both because they’re an uncomfortable reminder of how gravity affects our prints and because the very idea of there being ‘one right way’ is bound to get you into some spirited discussions. That said, [Matthew Trahan] figured that neither regular grid supports nor organic tree supports are the answer here, and that the better answer is found in fins.

The problem with existing support approaches especially with FDM prints is that they can be fairly wasteful in terms of material, and they can leave serious marks on the printed object’s surface that require post-processing. These fins on the other hand are designed to require as little material as possible and snap off as cleanly as possible. The tool, developed with the assistance of Claude, can either run locally or be accessed via printfins.com.

Currently the idea is that these fins are baked directly into the STL model so that it’s a one-time thing, but it may eventually become available as a slicer plugin. The basic concept was pitched by [Slant3D], who gets credited in the video below, although in their approach they used CAD software to add the fin supports manually.

The fins are there to provide the support base, while small tines can be added to reinforce the connection to the model. These do make it less easy to snap off with minimal scarring, of course. Conceivably these fins could be made even more light-weight by adding gaps, but that probably would add to the print time.

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Why Raindrops Make For Pretty Good Antennae

September 22, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

A good rule of thumb is that everything that can interact with electromagnetic (EM) radiation is an antenna, which includes our mostly-salty-water-containing bodies and also raindrops and moisture in the air. This can be both a benefit or a curse, depending on whether you’re trying to broadcast a signal in rainy weather or operating a weather radar. Here it’s essential to understand what kind of antenna a raindrop really is to optimize for either scenario, which is where a video by [Marshall Bruner] provides a solid primer.

The video focuses on the Rayleigh regime, which may be familiar from atmospheric Rayleigh scattering that also affects EM radiation in the visible spectrum, giving those of us gifted with retinas capable of color vision those nice blue skies.

As the EM radiation passes through these little droplets in the air, their neutral alignment gets disrupted and causes them to turn into dipole antennae, moving along with the incoming frequency. The backscatter part of this event is what returns to the emitter, such as a weather radar. Here the volume and permittivity of the moisture sphere determines the strength of the signal, which is great if you’re actually operating a weather radar and wants to map out the moisture in some clouds, including the presence of snow.

There’s quite a lot of mathematics involved which is covered in the video and expanded upon in a related Python notebook.

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Determining The Body Temperature Of Tyrannosaurus Rex

September 22, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

One of the most fun challenges in paleontology is determining characteristics of long-dead species like their behavior and body temperature based on nothing but some fossils and traces that are usually millions of years old. Something that has long vexed the paleontological community for example has been the question whether non-avian dinosaurs like the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex was cold- or warm-blooded, and if the latter, what temperature this was. Cue a recent study by [Randon J. Flores] et al. in Science Advances in which they seek to answer this question.

Although modern-day dinosaurs in the form of birds are all warm-blooded – meaning capable of regulating their body temperature – species like crocodiles, who also lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs, are cold-blooded and have to cycle between sun-basking and a cool dip in a nearby river to maintain their body temperature.

By looking at the temperature-dependent formation of carbonate clumped isotopes in three T. rex teeth from the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, they were able to deduce that these dinosaurs had a body temperature of 36.3 ± 2.5°C, comparable to modern-day endotherms. This was also much higher than that of contemporary crocodilian teeth found in the same area.

When popular dinosaur movies like Jurassic Park showed T. rex and other non-avian dinosaurs as being active, warm-blooded hunters, this was pretty much based on cutting-edge science at the time. Fortunately for its creators, later paleontological findings have largely confirmed that portrayal, although these days non-avian dinosaurs have often gained more feathers and other details – even outside of feathered theropods that became birds – that were absent in these early 90s reconstructions.

Raspberry Pi Locks Down RAM Upgrades

September 22, 2026 by Maya Posch 61 Comments

In a recent video [Jeff Geerling] addresses an issue discovered with the Raspberry Pi firmware, specifically how since around 2024 the firmware locks down what RAM size and even module is supported. This isn’t an issue that is widely known, probably because most people just use the board as-is, but it can be an unpleasant surprise for those looking to upgrade or repair their Pi.

Naturally there is a valid reason for wanting to prevent unscrupulous RAM module changes, with a [Geekworm] blog post from earlier this year detailing this exact issue and how each board is marked with a specific code that identifies the model, RAM size, RAM manufacturer and such. Based on the earlier linked forum post and also a 2025-era GitHub ticket on the rpi-eeprom project, the resulting symptoms seem to vary from not seeing the additional RAM to the board not booting at all.

Although you can go back to an older EEPROM firmware image to work around this, it’s still very annoying that this is even a thing. As also noted by [Jeff], the primary frustration here is probably one of ownership. When you can upgrade the RAM on just about any device you can buy, including a modern GPU and even Apple computer, but not on a Raspberry Pi board that loves to flaunt its open source/hardware credentials, then something is very much off.

In the end it’s highly unfortunate that Raspberry Pi has chosen this path that feels a bit too much like the hardware pairing that companies like Apple got rightfully called out on.

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New Research Suggests That A Neutrino Laser Is Impossible

September 21, 2026 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

As cool as it would have been to wield lasers that produce a beam of neutrinos, recently two papers were published by MIT researchers that seem to dampen the likelihood of such lasers being at all possible. In a review paper by [Ana Maria Rey] et al. these two papers are investigated in more detail.

Although the concept behind a neutrino laser is rather simple, using the same superradiance effect involving a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) that allows for stimulation by photons to result in a synchronized direction of emitted photons, the idea of using a BEC of radioisotopes that naturally emit neutrinos in this fashion has now been effectively shot down.

The problem lies in taking the leap from photons with a BEC and applying this to a BEC of radioisotopes. Whereas photons are relatively low-energy at a mere 1 eV, a neutrino with 1+ MeV has a much greater kinetic effect on the particle that emitted it. Unlike a photon emitted by an atom, this leaves precious little time for the other particles in the BEC to be affected.

This first scenario is covered in the (paywalled) paper by [Yu-Kun Lu] et al. with their calculations showing that superradiance cannot occur with neutrinos in a BEC and thus a laser is impossible. In the (also paywalled) second paper by [Hanzhen Lin] et al. the question is asked whether the assumption that a BEC of a radioisotope will at all enhance radioactive decay, to which the answer is a curt ‘no’.

Although it’s impossible to prove a negative with the scientific method, these two studies have slammed close a couple of doors on the concept of a neutrino laser.

Trying A New Radial Impeller Design For Quadcopters

September 21, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Even if the world has already settled on plain old propellers as the way to make quadcopter drones fly, this doesn’t mean that you cannot give other designs a shake to see what kind of flying performance they result in. For example impeller designs that depart radically from standard propellers – themselves a sub-category of axial impellers – and go radically radial instead as in this design by [quadmovr] with accompanying demonstration video.

This is itself a remix of a design by [Baba] to make it fit the target 1750KV T-mount motor. As for whether this is a design that you want to slap on your own quadcopter, the obvious disadvantage is that it’s much heavier than regular propellers.

Weighing [quadmovr]’s drone without battery pack and with these 3D-printed PETG impellers shows them to weigh 189 grams. This compares to 141 grams with the standard three-bladed propellers, or a hefty 12.8 gram weight penalty per impeller. Naturally this translates into less flying time, so what are the advantages?

The noise profile of the impeller design is definitely more pleasant, and much like novice quadcopters with the protective ring around the propellers these impellers should be more robust. On the other hand increased mass adds to inertia, and there is a lot more surface area with the air to add drag, so despite the absolutely sick moves that [quadmovr] pulls off with both impeller configurations in the video one has to admit that regular three-blade propellers do have the edge here.

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