This week, Jonathan Bennett talks Session and cryptocurrency skepticism with Kee Jefferys! Why fork Signal? How does Session manage to decentralize? And why the cryptocurrency angle? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 819: Session, It’s All Abot The Metadata”
What has puzzled researchers and philosophers for many centuries is the ‘why’ of sleep, along with the ‘how’. We human animals know from experience that we need to sleep, and that the longer we go without it, the worse we feel. Chronic sleep-deprivation is known to be even fatal. Yet exactly why do we need sleep? To rest our bodies, and our brains? To sort through a day’s worth of memories? To cleanse our brain of waste products that collect as neurons and supporting cells busily do their thing?
Within the kingdom of Animalia one constant is that its brain-enabled species need to give these brains a regular break and have a good sleep. Although what ‘sleep’ entails here can differ significantly between species, generally it means a period of physical inactivity where the animal’s brain patterns change significantly with slower brainwaves. The occurrence of so-called rapid eye movement (REM) phases is also common, with dreaming quite possibly also being a feature among many animals, though obviously hard to ascertain.
Most recently strong evidence has arisen for sleep being essential to remove waste products, in the form of so-called glymphatic clearance. This is akin to lymphatic waste removal in other tissues, while our brains curiously enough lack a lymphatic system. So is sleeping just to a way to scrub our brains clean of waste?
Continue reading “Investigating Why Animals Sleep: From Memory Sorting To Waste Disposal”
In the process of making everything ‘smart’, it would seem that rings have become the next target, and they keep getting new features. The ring that [Aaron Christophel] got his mittens on is the SR08, which appears to have been cloned by many manufacturers at this point. It’s got an OLED display, 1 MB Flash and a Renesas DA14585 powering it from a positively adorable 16 mAh LiPo battery.
The small scale makes it an absolute chore to reverse-engineer and develop with, which is why [Aaron] got the €35 DA14585 development kit from Renesas. Since this dev kit only comes with a 256 kB SPI Flash chip, he had to replace it with a 1 MB one. The reference PDFs, pinouts and custom demo firmware are provided on his GitHub account, all of which is also explained in the video.
Rather than hack the ring and destroy it like his first attempts, [Aaron] switched to using the Renesas Software Update OTA app to flash custom firmware instead. A CRC error is shown, but this can be safely ignored. The ring uses about 18 µA idle and 3 mA while driving the display, which is covered in the provided custom firmware for anyone who wants to try doing something interesting with these rings.
Continue reading “Hacking The 22€ BLE SR08 Smart Ring With Built-In Display”
There are no two ways about it—space will kill you if you give it half a chance. More than land, sea, or air, the space environment is entirely hostile to human existence. Precision-engineered craft are the bare minimum just to ensure human survival. Even still, between the vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, and equipment failures, there are plenty of ways for things to go catastrophically wrong beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Despite the hazards, most spacefaring humans have completed their missions without injury. However, as we look to return to the Moon, tread on Mars, and beyond, it’s increasingly likely that future astronauts could pass away during longer missions. When that inevitably happens, the question is simple—how do you deal with death in space?
Update: The USPS has now resumed acceptance of inbound packages from China. According to the updated Service Alert, they are currently working with Customs and Border Protection to “implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs.’
Some troubling news hit overnight as the United States Post Office announced via a terse “Service Alert” that they would suspend acceptance of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong Posts, effective immediately.
The Alert calls it a temporary suspension, but gives no timeline on when service will be restored. While details are still coming together, it seems likely that this suspension is part of the Trump administration’s Chinese tariff package, which went into effect at midnight.
Specifically, the administration looks to close the “de minimis” exemption — a loophole which allowed packages valued under $800 USD to pass through customs without having to pay any duties or fees. Those packages will now not only be subject to the overall 10% tax imposed by the new tariff package, but will now have to be formally processed through customs, potentially tacking on even more taxes and fees.
The end result is that not only will your next order of parts from AliExpress be more expensive, but it’s likely to take even longer to arrive at your door. Of course, this should come as no surprise. At the end of the day, this is precisely what the administration aims to accomplish with the new tariffs — if purchasing goods from overseas is suddenly a less attractive option than it was previously, it will be a boon to domestic suppliers. That said, some components will be imported from China regardless of who you order them from, so those prices are still going to increase.
Other carriers such as FedEx and UPS will also have to follow these new rules, but at the time of this writing, neither service had released a statement about how they intend to comply.
The USS Cod is a Gato-class submarine that saw combat in the Second World War and today operates as a museum ship in Cleveland, Ohio. While many other surviving WWII-era subs were cut into pieces or otherwise modified for public display, Cod is notable for being intact and still in her wartime configuration. It’s considered to be one of the finest submarine restorations in the world, and in a recent video from their official YouTube page, we get a look at how 3D printing is used to keep the 82 year old submarine looking battle-ready.
In the video below, President of the USS Cod Submarine Memorial [Paul Farace] is joined by one of the volunteers who’s been designing and printing parts aboard the submarine. While the Cod is in remarkable condition overall, there’s no shortage of odd bits and pieces that have gone missing over the sub’s decades of service.
Continue reading “How 3D Printing Helps Bring USS Cod Memorial To Life”
Surface mount devices have gotten really small, so small that a poorly timed sneeze can send your 0603 and 0402 parts off to live with the dust motes lurking at the edge of your bench. While soldering such parts is a challenge, it’s not always size that matters. Some parts with larger footprints can be a challenge because of the pin pitch, and getting them to land just right on the PCB pads can be a real pain.
To fight this problem, [rahmanshaber] came up with this clever custom PCB fixture. The trick is to create a jig to hold the fine-pitch parts securely while still leaving room to work. In his case, the parts are a couple of SMD ribbon cable connectors and some chips in what appear to be TQFP packages. [rahmanshaber] used FreeCAD to get the outline of each part from the 3D model of his PCB, and KiCad to design the cutouts; skip to 7:30 or so in the video below if you don’t need the design lesson. The important bit is to leave enough room around the traces so that the part’s leads can rest of the PCB while still having room to access them.
Using the fixture is pretty intuitive. The fixture is aligned over the footprint of the part and fixed in place with some tape. Solder paste is applied to the pads, the part is registered into the hole, and you’re ready for soldering. [rahmanshaber] chose to use a hot plate to do the soldering, but it looks like there’s enough room for a soldering iron, if that’s your thing.
It’s a simple idea, but sometimes the simplest tools are the best. We’ve seen lots of other simple SMD tools, from assembly jigs to solder paste stencil fixtures. Continue reading “Custom PCB Is A Poor Man’s Pick And Place”
