It seems like there are two camps, the small group of people who care about UEFI and everyone else who doesn’t really notice or care as long as their computer works. So let’s talk about what UEFI is, how it came to be, what it’s suitable for, and why you should (or shouldn’t) care.
For a few years now it’s been an open secret that Prusa Research was working on a larger printer named, imaginatively enough, the Prusa XL. Positioned at the opposite end of their product spectrum from the wildly popular Prusa Mini, this upper-tier machine would be for serious hobbyists or small companies that need to print single-part objects that were too large for their flagship i3 MK3S+ printer. Unfortunately, the global COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for the Czech company to focus on bringing a new product to market, to the point that some had begun to wonder if we’d ever see this mythical machine.
But now, finally, the wait is over. Or perhaps, it’s just beginning. That’s because while Prusa Research has officially announced their new XL model and opened preorders for the $1,999+ USD printer, it’s not expected to ship until at least the second quarter of 2022. That’s already a pretty substantial lead time, but given Prusa’s track record when it comes to product launches, we wouldn’t be surprised if early adopters don’t start seeing their machines until this time next year.
So what do you get for your money? Well, not an over-sized Prusa i3, that’s for sure. While many had speculated the XL would simply be a larger version of the company’s popular open source printer with a few modern niceties like a 32-bit control board sprinkled in, the reality is something else entirely. While the high purchase price and ponderous dimensions of the new machine might make it a tough sell for many in the hacker and maker communities, there’s little question that the technical improvements and innovations built into the Prusa XL provide a glimpse of the future for the desktop 3D printer market as a whole.
Continue reading “Prusa XL Goes Big, But That’s Only Half The Story”
Glasses wearers, try a little experiment. Take off your glasses and look at this page or, at least, at something you can’t see well without your glasses. Now imagine if you lived in a time where there was nothing to be done about your vision. If you wear contacts or you have good vision — perhaps you had surgery — then congratulations. But for most of us, vision changes with age are a fact of life. Even many young people need glasses or some other intervention to get good eyesight. At first glance, you might think eyeglasses are an obvious invention, but it turns out we didn’t get real glasses for quite some time and modern glasses are truly a piece of high tech that hides — quite literally — right in front of your face.
Were it not for the thin sheath of water and carbon-based life covering it, our home planet would perhaps be best known as the “Silicon World.” More than a quarter of the mass of the Earth’s crust is silicon, and together with oxygen, the silicate minerals form about 90% of the thin shell of rock that floats on the Earth’s mantle. Silicon is the bedrock of our world, and it’s literally as common as dirt.
But just because we have a lot of it doesn’t mean we have much of it in its pure form. And it’s only in its purest form that silicon becomes the stuff that brought our world into the Information Age. Elemental silicon is very rare, though, and so getting appreciable amounts of the metalloid that’s pure enough to be useful requires some pretty energy- and resource-intensive mining and refining operations. These operations use some pretty interesting chemistry and a few neat tricks, and when scaled up to industrial levels, they pose unique challenges that require some pretty clever engineering to deal with.
Continue reading “Mining And Refining: Pure Silicon And The Incredible Effort It Takes To Get There”
Perhaps the second most famous law in electronics after Ohm’s law is Moore’s law: the number of transistors that can be made on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. Since the physical size of chips remains roughly the same, this implies that the individual transistors become smaller over time. We’ve come to expect new generations of chips with a smaller feature size to come along at a regular pace, but what exactly is the point of making things smaller? And does smaller always mean better?
Over the past century, electronic engineering has improved massively. In the 1920s, a state-of-the-art AM radio contained several vacuum tubes, a few enormous inductors, capacitors and resistors, several dozen meters of wire to act as an antenna, and a big bank of batteries to power the whole thing. Today, you can listen to a dozen music streaming services on a device that fits in your pocket and can do a gazillion more things. But miniaturization is not just done for ease of carrying: it is absolutely necessary to achieve the performance we’ve come to expect of our devices today. Continue reading “Smaller Is Sometimes Better: Why Electronic Components Are So Tiny”
Last week we saw the announcement of the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which is basically an improved quad-core version of the Pi Zero — more comparable in speed to the Pi 3B+, but in the smaller Zero form factor. One remarkable aspect of the board is the Raspberry-designed RP3A0 system-in-package, which includes the four CPUs and 512 MB of RAM all on the same chip. While 512 MB of memory is not extravagant by today’s standards, it’s workable. But this custom chip has a secret: it lets the board run on reasonably low power.
When you’re using a Pi Zero, odds are that you’re making a small project, and maybe even one that’s going to run on batteries. The old Pi Zero was great for these self-contained, probably headless, embedded projects: sipping the milliamps slowly. But the cost was significantly slower computation than its bigger brothers. That’s the gap that the Pi Zero 2 W is trying to fill. Can it pull this trick off? Can it run faster, without burning up the batteries? Raspberry Pi sent Hackaday a review unit that I’ve been running through the paces all weekend. We’ll see some benchmarks, measure the power consumption, and find out how the new board does.
The answer turns out to be a qualified “yes”. If you look at mixed CPU-and-memory tasks, the extra efficiency of the RP3A0 lets the Pi Zero 2 W run faster per watt than any of the other Raspberry boards we tested. Most of the time, it runs almost like a Raspberry Pi 3B+, but uses significantly less power.
Along the way, we found some interesting patterns in Raspberry Pi power usage. Indeed, the clickbait title for this article could be “We Soldered a Resistor Inline with Raspberry Pis, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”, only that wouldn’t really be clickbait. How many milliamps do you think a Raspberry Pi 4B draws, when it’s shut down? You’re not going to believe it.
Water is one of the most precious substances required to sustain human life. Unfortunately, in some areas like California, it’s starting to run out.
The ongoing drought has some people looking towards alternative solutions, such as sucking water out of the very air itself. In particular, a company called Tsunami Products has been making waves in the press with its atmospheric water generators, touting them as a solution for troubled drought-stricken areas, as reported by AP News. Today, we’ll look at how these machine capture water, and whether or not they can help in areas short on water.
Continue reading “How Practical Is Harvesting Water From The Air?”
