A blue screen is visible, with an ASCII image of the text "Hello World" is displayed.

Designing A CPU For Native BASIC

December 17, 2025 by 12 Comments

Over the years there have been a few CPUs designed to directly run a high-level programming language, the most common approach being to build a physical manifestation of a portable code virtual machine. An example might be the experimental Java processors which implemented the JVM. Similarly, in 1976 Itty Bitty Computers released an implementation of Tiny BASIC which used a simple virtual machine, and to celebrate 50 years of Tiny BASIC, [Zoltan Pekic] designed a CPU that mirrors that VM.

The CPU was created within a Digilent Anvyl board, and the VHDL file is freely available. The microcode mapping ROM was generated by a microcode compiler, also written by [Zoltan]. The original design could execute all of the 40 instructions included in the reference implementation of Tiny BASIC; later iterations extended it a bit more. To benchmark its performance, [Zoltan] set the clock rate on the development board equal to those of various other retrocomputers, then compared the times each took to calculate the prime numbers under 1000 using the same Tiny BASIC program. The BASIC CPU outperformed all of them except for Digital Microsystems’ HEX29. Continue reading “Designing A CPU For Native BASIC” →

Molecular beam epitaxy system Veeco Gen II at the FZU – Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The system is designed for growth of monocrystalline semiconductors, semiconducting heterostructures, materials for spintronics and other compound material systems containing Al, Ga, As, P, Mn, Cu, Si and C.

Germanium Semiconductor Made Superconductor By Gallium Doping

December 17, 2025 by 10 Comments

Over on ScienceDaily we learn that an international team of scientists have turned a common semiconductor germanium into a superconductor.

Researchers have been able to make the semiconductor germanium superconductive for the first time by incorporating gallium into its crystal lattice through the process of molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). MBE is the same process which is used in the manufacture of semiconductor devices such as diodes and MOSFETs and it involves carefully growing crystal lattice in layers atop a substrate.

When the germanium is doped with gallium the crystalline structure, though weakened, is preserved. This allows for the structure to become superconducting when its temperature is reduced to 3.5 Kelvin. Read all about it in the team’s paper here (PDF).

It is of course wonderful that our material science capabilities continue to advance, but the breakthrough we’re really looking forward to is room-temperature superconductors, and we’re not there yet. If you’re interested in progress in superconductors you might like to read about Floquet Majorana Fermions which we covered earlier this year.

Underwater Jetpack Is Almost Practical

December 17, 2025 by 3 Comments

The jet pack is one of those pre-war sci-fi dreams that the cold light of rational consideration reveals to be a terrible idea. Who wants to cook their legs with hot exhaust while careening out of control? Nobody. Yet it’s such an iconic idea, we can’t get away from it. What if there was a better environment, one where your jetpack dreams could come true? [CPSdrone] has found one: the world’s oceans, and have taken that revelation to build the world’s fastest underwater jetpack.

Underwater? Yeah, water drag is worse than air drag. But there are two big advantages: one, humans are fairly buoyant, so you don’t need fight gravity with rocket thrust, and two, the high density of water makes small, electric props a reasonable proposition. The electric ducted fans on this “jetpack” each produce about 110 pounds of thrust, or just over 490 N. The first advantage is helped further by the buoyancy provided by the air-filled “hull” of the jetpack. That’s necessary because while the motors might be rated for submersion, but the rest of the electronics aren’t.

Alas, wearing the device on the back is considerably less hydrodynamic than hanging on behind in the standard ‘water scooter’ configuration. While they’re able to go faster than a swimming human, the ESCs weren’t able to handle the motors full power so we can’t tell you if this device would allow [CPSdrone] to outrun a shark with those 220 lbf on tap, which was the design goal. Apparently they’re working on it.

From the testing done on-screen, it’s safe to say that they’d at least need to hang on behind to get their desired speed goals, and abandon their jet pack dreams just as we landlubbers were forced to do long ago. Well, some of us, anyway.

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Building A Flying Blended Wing Body Aircraft Prototype

December 17, 2025 by 10 Comments

Anyone with an inkling of interest in super-sized remote control aircraft probably has at least seen some of the mind-blowing projects that [Ramy RC] has worked on over the years, with examples like the ongoing Airbus A380-800 build approaching the size of a full-sized business jet. That said, they recently got the offer to build a flying prototype of the Natilus Horizon, a blended wing body (BWB) aircraft that’s currently being developed into a full-sized production aircraft.

Suffice it to say that BWB RC aircraft isn’t something that they have built before, but as co-founder of Natilus, [Aleksey Matyushev], explains, they want to prove in this manner that building scale prototypes of future production aircraft is not nearly as complex as it’s often made out to be. Meaning that even two blokes in a shed as is the case here should be able to pull it off.

Natilus was founded in 2016 amidst strongly rising interest in these BWB aircraft designs that may one day threaten today’s tubes-with-wings. Their Kona design would be the cargo version and this Horizon prototype that [Ramy RC] is building the passenger version.

In this first video of two total, we can see the CAD project of the prototype and how the basic aircraft structure is being constructed out of carbon fiber composite, wood and foam. To this the engine nacelles, landing gear and wings are mounted, readying it for its maiden flight. The Natilus engineers have previously done all the simulations that should mean that it’ll fly like a glider, but we will have to wait until the next video to see whether that is the case.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 859: OpenShot: Simple And Fast

December 17, 2025 by 3 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Jonathan Thomas about OpenShot, the cross-platform video editor that aims to be simple to use, without sacrificing functionality. We did the video edit with OpenShot for this episode, and can confirm it gets the job done. What led to the creation of this project, and what’s the direction it’s going? Watch to find out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 859: OpenShot: Simple And Fast” →

The PediSedate: A Winning Combination Of Video Games And Anesthesia

December 17, 2025 by 16 Comments

One can understand that it would be nice to have something to focus on while trying to remain calm ahead of a medical procedure. Credit: PediSedate

Once upon a time, surgery was done on patients who were fully conscious and awake. As you might imagine, this was a nasty experience for all involved, and particularly the patients. Eventually, medical science developed the techniques of anaesthesia, which allowed patients to undergo surgery without feeling pain or even being conscious of it at all.

Adults are typically comfortable in the medical environment and tolerate anaesthesia well. For children, though, the experience can be altogether more daunting. Thus was invented the PediSedate—a device which was marketed almost like a Game Boy accessory intended to deliver anaesthetic treatment in order to safely and effectively prepare children for surgery.

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AI Picks Outfits With Abandon

December 17, 2025 by 3 Comments

Most of us choose our own outfits on a daily basis. [NeuroForge] decided that he’d instead offload this duty to artificial intelligence — perhaps more for the sake of a class project than outright fashion.

The concept involved first using an AI model to predict the weather. Those predictions would then be fed to a large language model (LLM), which would recommend an appropriate outfit for the conditions. The output from the LLM would be passed to a simple alarm clock which would wake [NeuroForge] and indicate what he should wear for the day. Amazon’s Chronos forecasting model was used for weather prediction based on past weather data, while Meta’s Llama3.1 LLM was used to make the clothing recommendations. [NeuroForge] notes that it was possible to set all this up to work without having to query external services once the historical weather data had been sourced.

While the AI choices often involved strange clashes and were not weather appropriate, [NeuroForge] nonetheless followed through and wore what he was told. This got tough when the outfit on a particularly cold day was a T-shirt and shorts, though the LLM did at least suggest a winter hat and gloves be part of the ensemble. Small wins, right?

We’ve seen machine learning systems applied to wardrobe-related tasks before. One wonders if a more advanced model could be trained to pick not just seasonally-appropriate clothes, but to also assemble actually fashionable outfits to boot. If you manage to whip that up, let us know on the tipsline. Bonus points if your ML system gets a gig on the reboot of America’s Next Top Model.

Continue reading “AI Picks Outfits With Abandon” →