Alzheimer’s disease remains a frustratingly difficult condition to manage for the millions of patients affected worldwide and their families. The cause of the disease is still not properly understood, and by the time memory loss and cognitive decline become apparent, the underlying brain pathology has often been quietly building for decades.
Who among us does not have a plethora of mains-powered devices on their workbench, and a consequent mess of power strips to run them all? [Jeroen Brinkman] made his more controllable with a multi-way switch box.
At first sight it’s a bank of toggle switches, one for each socket. But this is far more than a wiring job, because of course there are a couple of microcontrollers involved, and each of those switches ultimately controls a relay. There are also status LEDs for each socket, and a master switch to bring them all down. Arduino code is provided, so you can build one too if you want to.
We like the idea of a handy power strip controller, and especially the master switch with the inherent state memory provided by the switches. This could find a home on a Hackaday bench, and we suspect on many others too. It’s by no means the first power strip with brains we’ve seen, but most others have been aimed at the home instead.
That fireball was LZ37. Nobody wanted to see repeats post-war. Image: “The great exploit of lieutenant Warnefort 1916 England” by Gordon Crosby, public domain.
After all the crashing and burning of Imperial Germany’s Zeppelins in the later part of WWI – once the Brits managed to build interceptors that could hit their lofty altitude, and figured out the trick of using incendiary rounds to set off the hydrogen lift gas – there was a certain desire in airship circles to avoid fires. In the USA, that mostly took the form of replacing hydrogen with helium. Sure, it didn’t lift quite as well, but it also didn’t explode.
Still, supplies of helium were– and are– very much limited, and at least on a rigid Zeppelin, the hydrogen wasn’t even the most flammable part. As has become widely known, thanks in large part to the Mythbusters episode about the Hindenburg disaster, the doped cotton skin in use in those days was more flammable than some firestarters you can buy these days.
That’s a problem, because, as came up in the comments of our last airship article, rigid airships beat blimps largely on Rule of Cool. Who invented the blimp? Well, arguably it was Henri Griffard with his steam-driven balloon in 1857, but not many people have ever heard his name. Who invented the rigid airship? You know his name: Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin. No relation. Probably. Well, admittedly most people don’t know the full name, but Count Zeppelin is still practically a household name over a century after his death. His invention was just that much cooler.
That unavoidable draw of coolness led to the Detroit Airship Company and their amazing tin blimp. The idea was the brainchild of a man named Ralph Upton, and is startling in its simplicity: why not take the all-metal, monocoque design that was just then being so successfully applied to heavier-than-air flight, and use it to build an airship? Continue reading “The “Tin Blimp” Was A Neither Tin Nor A Blimp: The Detroit ZMC-2 Story”→
There have been many questions about what direction Arduino would take after being bought by Qualcomm. Now it would seem that we’re getting a clearer picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer appears to be ‘AI’, with the new Arduino VENTUNO Q SBC being advertised as ‘democratizing AI’ in the Qualcomm press release, although it also references robotics.
This new board is based around the Dragonwing IQ-8275 SoC along with an STM32H5F5 MCU, making it somewhat of a beefier brother of the previously covered Arduino Uno Q, which also offers an SoC/MCU hybrid solution. On the product page we can see the overall specifications for this new board, where the release date is specified as ‘soon’.
Its IQ-8275 SoC is part of Qualcomm’s IQ8 series, with eight 2.35 GHz ARM cores and an Adreno 623 GPU, paired with 16 GB of LPDDR5. The Cortex M33-based STM32H5F5 MCU comes with its own 4 MB of Flash and 1.5 MB of RAM, all on a board that’s significantly larger than the Uno Q and isn’t crippled by a single USB-C port as SoC I/O.
Although clearly more aimed at industrial and automation applications than the solution-in-search-of-a-problem Uno Q board, it remains to be seen whether this board will catch on with Arduino fans, or whether Qualcomm’s goal is more to break into whole new markets under the Arduino brand.
If you think about it, you can’t be sure that what you see for the color red, for example, is what anyone else in the world actually sees. All you can be sure of is that we’ve all been trained to identify whatever we do see as red just like everyone else. Now, think about animal vision. Most people know that dogs don’t see as many colors as we do. On the other hand, the birds and the bees can see into ultraviolet. What would the world look like with extra colors? That’s the question researchers want to answer with this system for duplicating different animals’ views of the world.
Of course, this would be easy if you were thinking about dogs or cats. They can’t see the difference between red and green, making them effectively colorblind by human standards. Researchers are using modified commercial cameras and sophisticated video processing to produce images that sense blue, green, red, and UV light. Then they modify the image based on knowledge of different animal photoreceptors.
We were somewhat surprised that the system didn’t pick up IR. As we know snakes, for example, can sense IR. You’d think more sophisticated animals would have better color vision, but that seems to be untrue. The mantis shrimp, for example, has 12-16 types of photoreceptors. Even male and female humans have different vision systems that make them see colors differently.
Some PCB corrosion on the bottom of the 1541 drive. (Credit: TheRetroChannel, YouTube)
Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in the form of the activity LED blinking just once after power-up with the drive motor continuously spinning. Since the Flash Codes that Commodore implemented and bothered to document start at 2 flashes (for RAM-related Zero Page), this raised the question of what fault this drive had, and whether a single flash is some kind of undocumented error code.
A cursory check showed that the heads were okay and not shorted, ruling out a common fault with the used floppy mechanism. Cleaning up the corrosion on IC sockets and similar basic operations were performed next, without making a change, nor did removing the ICs to induce it to produce the documented error codes, but this helped narrow down the potential causes. Especially after swapping in known-good ICs failed to make a difference. One possibility was that the drive was boot looping, as the activity LED is lit up once on boot.
Some probing around with an oscilloscope between the faulty and a working drive seemed to point to a faulty RAM IC, but while probing the faulty drive suddenly initialized successfully. After some more poking around it appeared that the drive was fine after it had a chance to warm up, which just deepened the mystery.
The drive did talk to a C64 with diagnostic cartridge at this point, but would often glitch out. Ultimately it appears that a dodgy IC socket and a few bad traces were to blame for the behavior, making it an ‘obvious in hindsight’ repair. The bottom of the PCB had some clear corrosion on it, but the affected traces were apparently still hanging on for dear life with the drive still initializing once warmed up.
If this sounds strange, it is because, honestly, it is. It all started when a packet of GEMS (the Cadbury’s version of M&Ms) spilled and randomly fell in the shape of an arrow. There are only six symbols corresponding to the colors in a package. You create your program by arranging the candies and creating a digital image of the result. In practice, you’ll probably use ASCII text to represent your candy layout and let the compiler render the image for you.
The main way of encoding things is by the number of colored candy pixels in a row. So three blue morsels in an opcode, while four is a different opcode. Red candies encode integer literals with one candy being zero, two being one, and so on. Blue indicates control flow, green candy handles variables and stack operations, yellow is for math, and so on.
