FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven

March 3, 2025 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

Have you been to FOSDEM? It’s a yearly two-day megaconference in Brussels, every first weekend of February. Thousands of software and hardware hackers from all across Europe come here each year, make friends, talk software and hardware alike, hold project-specific meetups to drink beer and talk shop, and just have a fun weekend surrounded by like-minded people.

In particular, FOSDEM has free admission – drop by for the weekend, no need to buy entry tickets, just sort out your accomodation, food, travel, and visit for a day or two. I’ve covered FOSDEM quite extensively in 2023, so if you want to know more about how it works, I invite you to check out that article – plenty of stories, cool facts about FOSDEM, showcases, and so on. This year, I’ve also been to FOSDEM, it’s been pretty great, and I’d like to tell you about cool things I’ve seen happen during FOSDEM 2025.

FOSDEM is often described as an open software conference, and you might’ve had been fooled by this if you simply have checked the Wikipedia page. However, let me assure you – there’s always plenty of hardware, large amounts of it! This year, I feel like hardware has taken the spotlight in particular – let me show you at least some of it, so that you know what kinds of cool stuff you can expect and plan for in 2026.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Shopping Cart Locks

February 28, 2025 by Al Williams 49 Comments

Shopping carts are surprisingly expensive. Prices range up to about $300 for a cart, which may seem like a lot, but they have to be pretty rugged and are made to work for decades. Plastic carts are cheaper, but not by much.

And carts have a way of vanishing. We’ve seen estimates that cart theft costs hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide annually. To stem the tide, stores sometimes pay a reward to people to round up carts off the street and return them to the store — it’s cheaper than buying a new one. That led [Elmer Isaacks] to patent a solution to this problem in 1968.

The [Isaacks] system used lots of magnets. A cart leaving the store had a brake that would be armed by running over a magnet. Customers were expected to follow a path surrounded by magnets to prevent the brake from engaging. If you left the track, a rod passing through the wheel locked it.

A third magnet would disarm the brake when you entered the store again. This is clever, but it has several problems. First, you have to insert magnets all over the place. Second, if someone knows how the system works, a simple magnet will hold the brake off no matter what. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Shopping Cart Locks” →

What Game Should Replace Doom As The Meme Port Of Choice?

February 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 115 Comments

DOOM. The first-person shooter was an instant hit upon its mrelease at the end of 1993. It was soon ported off the PC platform to a number of consoles with varying success. Fast forward a few years, and it became a meme. People were porting Doom to everything from thermostats to car stereos and even inside Microsoft Word itself.

The problem is that porting Doom has kind of jumped the shark at this point. Just about every modern microcontroller or piece of consumer electronics these days has enough grunt to run a simple faux-3D game engine from 1993. It’s been done very much to death at this point. The time has come for a new meme port!

Good Game

Doom became a popular meme port for multiple reasons. For one, it’s just complex and resource-intensive enough to present a challenge, without being so demanding as to make ports impractical or impossible. It’s also been open-source for decades, and the engine has been hacked to death. It’s probably one of the best understood game engines out there at this point. On top of that, everybody plays Doom at some point, and it was one of the biggest games of the 90s. Put all that together, and you’ve got the perfect meme port.

However, you can always have too much of a good thing. Just as The Simpsons got old after season 10 and Wonderwall is the worst song you could play at a party, Doom ports have been overdone. But what other options are there? Continue reading “What Game Should Replace Doom As The Meme Port Of Choice?” →

Too Smooth: Football And The “KnuckleBall” Problem

February 26, 2025 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

Picture a football (soccer ball) in your head and you probably see the cartoon ideal—a roughly spherical shape made with polygonal patches that are sewn together, usually in a familiar pattern of black and white. A great many balls were made along these lines for a great many decades.

Eventually, though, technology moved on. Footballs got rounder, smoother, and more colorful. This was seen as a good thing, with each new international competition bringing shiny new designs with ever-greater performance. That was, until things went too far, and the new balls changed the game. Thus was borne the “knuckleball” phenomenon.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Magsafe, And How To Roll Your Own

February 25, 2025 by Al Williams 8 Comments

Apple likes magnets. They started out with magnetic laptop chargers and then graduated to a system that magnetically holds the phone, charges it, and can facilitate communication between the phone and a charger or other device. Even if you are like me and have no Apple devices, you can retrofit other phones to use Magsafe accessories. In fact, with a little work, you can build your own devices. Regardless, the technology is a clever and simple hack, and we are just a little sorry we didn’t think of it.

Terms

Using a magnet to attach a phone isn’t a new idea. But, historically, the phone had either a metal back or an adhesive metal plate attached that would stick to the magnet. This wouldn’t necessarily help with charging, but was perfectly fine for holding the device. The problem is, it is hard to wirelessly charge the phone through the metal.

Magsafe can do several different things. Obviously, it can attach the phone magnetically. However, since it is a ring shape, you can still have a charging coil in the middle of the ring. Better still, the Magsafe system will align the phone and charger with a satisfying click when you put them together.

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The Importance Of Current Balancing With Multi-Wire Power Inputs

February 24, 2025 by Maya Posch 88 Comments

In an ideal world, devoid of pesky details like contact resistance and manufacturing imperfections, you would be able to double the current that can be provided to a device by doubling the number of conductors without altering the device’s circuitry, as each conductor would carry the exact same amount of current as its neighbors. Since we do not actually live inside a simplified physics question’s scenario, multi-wire powering of devices comes with a range of headaches, succinctly summarized in the well-known rule that electricity always seeks the path of least resistance.

As recently shown by NVidia with their newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards, failure to provide current balancing between said different conductors will quickly turn it into a practical physics demonstration of this rule. Initially pinned down as an issue with the new-ish 12VHPWR connector that was supposed to replace the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, it turns out that a lack of current balancing is plaguing NVidia GPUs, with predictably melty results when combined with low safety margins.

So what exactly changed that caused what seems to be a new problem, and why do you want multi-wire, multi-phase current balancing in your life when pumping hundreds of watts through copper wiring inside your PC?

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Be Careful What You Ask For: Voice Control

February 19, 2025 by Al Williams 71 Comments

We get it. We also watched Star Trek and thought how cool it would be to talk to our computer. From Kirk setting a self-destruct sequence, to Scotty talking into a mouse, or Picard ordering Earl Grey, we intuitively know that talking to a computer is better than typing, right? Well, computers talking back and forth to us is no longer science fiction, and maybe we aren’t as happy about it as we thought we’d be.

We weren’t able to pinpoint the first talking computer in fiction. Asimov and van Vogt had talking computers in the 1940s. “I, Robot” by Eando Binder, and not the more famous Asimov story, had a fully speaking robot in 1939. You could argue that “The Machine” in E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” was probably speaking — the text is a little vague — and that was in 1909. The robot from Metropolis (1927) spoke after transforming, but you could argue that doesn’t count.

Meanwhile, In Real Life

In real life, computers weren’t as quick to speak. Before the middle of the twentieth century, machine-generated speech was an oddity. In 1779, a mechanical contrivance by Wolfgang von Kempelen, famous for the mechanical Turk chess-playing automaton, could form simple words. By 1939, Bell Labs could do even better speech synthesis electronically but with a human operator. It didn’t sound very good, as you can see in the video below, but it was certainly expressive.

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