Robotic Coffee Comes To Brooklyn, But Will It Stay?

May 21, 2023 by 25 Comments

Robots are cool. Everyone knows it, and [Eater NY] highlights a coffee shop with a robotic server opening in Brooklyn. While robots able to prepare and serve drinks or food is not new, it isn’t every day a brick-and-mortar café with a robot behind the counter opens up. But expensive automation isn’t the only puzzle piece needed to make a location work.

A robotic coffee shop (like a robotic burger joint) certainly offers novelty, but can it sustain itself beyond that?

As one example, the linked article above points out that the city of New York prohibits entirely cashless businesses. Establishments must accept cash payments, and it’s unclear how the touchscreen-driven system would comply with that requirement.

There are also many tasks involved in running even a modest establishment — loading, cleaning, and maintaining for example — that can’t be realistically taken care of by an immobile robot barista. It’s unclear to what extent the robotic coffee shop will employ human staff, but it’s clear that human involvement is something that isn’t going be eliminated any time soon.

Some of you may remember the robotic burger joint that our own Brian Benchoff managed to check out, and many of his same observations come to mind. The robot burger was perhaps ahead of its time (its single location is listed as closed on Google maps with no recent activity) but maybe the robot coffee place can make it work. Still, expensive automation is only one piece of a system, and the ability to crank out a drink per minute 24/7 might not actually be the missing link.

Intel Suggests Dropping Everything But 64-Bit From X86 With Its X86-S Proposal

May 21, 2023 by 140 Comments

In a move that has a significant part of the internet flashing back to the innocent days of 2001 when Intel launched its Itanium architecture as a replacement for the then 32-bit only x86 architecture – before it getting bludgeoned by AMD’s competing x86_64 architecture – Intel has now released a whitepaper with associated X86-S specification that seeks to probe the community’s thoughts on it essentially removing all pre-x86_64 features out of x86 CPUs.

While today you can essentially still install your copy of MSDOS 6.11 on a brand-new Intel Core i7 system, with some caveats, it’s undeniable that to most users of PCs the removal of 16 and 32-bit mode would likely go by unnoticed, as well as the suggested removal of rings 1 and 2, as well as range of other low-level (I/O) features. Rather than the boot process going from real-mode 16-bit to protected mode, and from 32- to 64-bit mode, the system would boot straight into the 64-bit mode which Intel figures is what everyone uses anyway.

Where things get a bit hazy is that on this theoretical X86-S you cannot just install and boot your current 64-bit operating systems, as they have no concept of this new boot procedure, or the other low-level features that got dropped. This is where the Itanium comparison seems most apt, as it was Intel’s attempt at a clean cut with its x86 legacy, only for literally everything about the concept (VLIW) and ‘legacy software’ support to go horribly wrong.

Although X86-S seems much less ambitious than Itanium, it would nevertheless be interesting to hear AMD’s thoughts on the matter.

Here’s How To Build A Tiny Compiler From Scratch

May 21, 2023 by 27 Comments

Believe it or not, building a tiny compiler from scratch can be as fun as it is accessible. [James Smith] demonstrates by making a tiny compiler for an extremely simple programming language, and showing off a hello world.

Here’s what happens with a compiler: human-written code gets compiled into low-level machine code, creating a natively-executable result for a particular processor. [James]’ compiler — created from scratch — makes native x64 Linux ELF binary executables with no dependencies, an experience [James] found both educational and enjoyable. The GitHub repository linked below has everything one needs, but [James] also wrote a book, From Source Code to Machine Code, which he offers for sale to anyone who wants to step through the nitty-gritty.

The (very tiny) compiler is on GitHub as The Pretty Laughable Programming Language. It’s tiny, the only data types are integers and pointers, and all it can do is make Linux syscalls — but it’s sufficient to make a program with. Here’s what the code for “Hello world!” looks like before being fed into the compiler:

; the write() syscall:
; ssize_t write(int fd, const void *buf, size_t count);
(syscall 1 1 "Hello world!\n" 13)
0

Working at such a low level can be rewarding, but back in the day the first computers actually relied on humans to be compilers. Operators would work with pencil and paper to convert programs into machine code, and you can get a taste of that with a project that re-creates what it was like to program a computer using just a few buttons as inputs.

A Look Back At Computer Displays

May 21, 2023 by 10 Comments

These days, our video cards are actually as powerful as yesterday’s supercomputer and our monitors are bigger than the TVs most of us had as kids. But how did we get there? [RetroBytes] covers computer displays starting with the Colossus computer to today.

Back in the days of Colossus, of course, a display was actually a TeleType-like device printing on a roll of paper. The Manchester Baby actually had a crude display which was actually a Williams tube (no relation) that used phosphor persistence to store data. You could physically see memory on the tube or monitor it on a parallel tube — an early form of memory-mapped display.

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Easy Graphene Production With A Laser Engraver

May 20, 2023 by 13 Comments

Graphene isn’t easy to produce at scale. But making small batches of graphene is doable in a few ways. [Robert Murray-Smith] decided to try producing “flash graphene.” This requires a big capacitor bank that is moderately expensive, so he decided to explain a different technique he read about using an ordinary laser cutter. Check it out in the video below.

We were a little disappointed that he didn’t actually make any graphene this time. He has, however, used other methods in other videos to create some type of graphene. In fact, he has many similar videos going back quite a ways as well as applications with concrete, capacitors, and more. We understand that this method doesn’t produce monolayer graphene, but actually creates a graphene “foam” with interesting properties. [Robert] talks about recent papers that show you can grow graphene on things other than Kapton tape using this method.

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THOR Microwaves Drone Swarms

May 20, 2023 by 39 Comments

In recent years small drones have gone from being toys and photography tools to a deadly threat on the battlefield. Kamikaze drones have become especially prominent in the news due to their use in the war in Ukraine by both sides. While we haven’t seen coordinated swarms being actively employed on the modern battlefield, it’s likely only a matter of time, making drone swarm defense an active field of development in the industry.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory recently conducted tests and a demonstration of an anti-drone weapon that uses pulses of high-power microwave energy to fry the electronics of a swarm of drones. Named the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR  (presumably they picked the acronym first), it’s housed in a 20ft shipping container with large microwave antenna on top. The form factor is important because a weapon is only useful if it can reach the battlefield, and this can fit in the back of a C130.

THOR likely functions similarly to a shotgun, with a relatively large effective “beam.” This would have added advantages like frying multiple drones with one pulse and not needing pinpoint tracking and aiming tech required for projectile and laser-based weapons. Depending on its range and directivity, THOR might come with the downside of collateral damage to electronics close to its line of fire.

Drone swarms are of course the other side of this arms race, but fortunately they also have non-destructive uses like lights shows and perhaps even 3D printing.

An Elegant Solution For Smart Home Device Integration

May 20, 2023 by 49 Comments

Integrating non-smart devices into your home automation system can be a cumbersome process, involving the wiring of multiple modules. However, [Pricelesstoolkit] has created the ESPClicker — a compact, ESP8266-based module that can remotely “press buttons” and simplify this process.

The ESPClicker’s core feature is its three relays that can be soldered to the button terminals of any existing “dumb” device, as [Pricelesstoolkit] demonstrated with his coffee machine in the video after the break. One of the relays can also be configured in the normally closed configuration. A compact twelve pin connector provides a removable wiring interface for the buttons, additional relays, power and even a contactless power detector that can be wrapped around an AC wire.

[PricelessToolkit] has done several Home Assistant related projects, and we recently featured his little Home Assistant controlled guardian bot. We’ve also seen other project that make use of ESPHome, like a iPod style scroll wheel and a LEGO train set.

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