Hands On: Inkplate 6 MOTION

June 6, 2024 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Over the last several years, DIY projects utilizing e-paper displays have become more common. While saying the technology is now cheap might be overstating the situation a bit, the prices on at least small e-paper panels have certainly become far more reasonable for the hobbyist. Pair one of them with a modern microcontroller such as the RP2040 or ESP32, sprinkle in a few open source libraries, and you’re well on the way to creating an energy-efficient smart display for your home or office.

But therein lies the problem. There’s still a decent amount of leg work involved in getting the hardware wired up and talking to each other. Putting the e-paper display and MCU together is often only half the battle — depending on your plans, you’ll probably want to add a few sensors to the mix, or perhaps some RGB status LEDs. An onboard battery charger and real-time clock would be nice as well. Pretty soon, your homebrew e-paper gadget is starting to look remarkably like the bottom of your junk bin.

For those after a more integrated solution, the folks at Soldered Electronics have offered up a line of premium open source hardware development boards that combine various styles of e-paper panels (touch, color, lighted, etc) with a microcontroller, an array of sensors, and pretty much every other feature they could think of. To top it off, they put in the effort to produce fantastic documentation, easy to use libraries, and free support software such as an online GUI builder and image converter.

We’ve reviewed a number of previous Inkplate boards, and always came away very impressed by the attention to detail from Soldered Electronics. When they asked if we’d be interested in taking a look at a prototype for their new 6 MOTION board, we were eager to see what this new variant brings to the table. Since both the software and hardware are still pre-production, we won’t call this a review, but it should give you a good idea of what to expect when the final units start shipping out in October.

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Mining And Refining: Fracking

June 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 53 Comments

Normally on “Mining and Refining,” we concentrate on the actual material that’s mined and refined. We’ve covered everything from copper to tungsten, with side trips to more unusual materials like sulfur and helium. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the geology and chemistry of the material while concentrating on the different technologies needed to exploit often very rare or low-concentration deposits and bring them to market.

This time, though, we’re going to take a look at not a specific resource, but a technique: fracking. Hydraulic fracturing is very much in the news lately for its potential environmental impact, both in terms of its immediate effects on groundwater quality and for its perpetuation of our dependence on fossil fuels. Understanding what fracking is and how it works is key to being able to assess the risks and benefits of its use. There’s also the fact that like many engineering processes carried out on a massive scale, there are a lot of interesting things going on with fracking that are worth exploring in their own right.
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Programming Ada: Records And Containers For Organized Code

June 4, 2024 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

Writing code without having some way to easily organize sets of variables or data would be a real bother. Even if in the end you could totally do all of the shuffling of bits and allocating in memory by yourself, it’s much easier when the programming language abstracts all of that housekeeping away. In Ada you generally use a few standard types, ranging from records (equivalent to structs in C) to a series of containers like vectors and maps. As with any language, there are some subtle details about how all of these work, which is where the usage of these types in the Sarge project will act as an illustrative example.

In this project’s Ada code, a record is used for information about command line arguments (flag names, values, etc.) with these argument records stored in a vector. In addition, a map is created that links the names of these arguments, using a string as the key, to the index of the corresponding record in the vector. Finally, a second vector is used to store any text fragments that follow the list of arguments provided on the command line. This then provides a number of ways to access the record information, either sequentially in the arguments vector, or by argument (flag) name via the map.

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A Treasure Trove In An English Field

June 3, 2024 by Jenny List 12 Comments

This is being written in a tent in a field in Herefordshire, one of the English counties that borders Wales. It’s the site of Electromagnetic Field, this year’s large European hacker camp, and outside my tent the sky is lit by a laser light show to the sound of electronic music. I’m home.

One of the many fun parts of EMF is its swap table. A gazebo to which you can bring your junk, and from which you can take away other people’s junk. It’s an irresistible destination which turns a casual walk into half an hour pawing through the mess in search of treasure, and along the way it provides an interesting insight into technological progress. What is considered junk in 2024?

Something for everyone

As always, the items on offer range from universal treasures of the I-can’t-believe-they-put that-there variety, through this-is-treasure-to-someone-I’m-sure items, to absolute junk. Some things pass around the camp like legends; I wasn’t there when someone dropped off a box of LED panels for example, but I’ve heard the story relayed in hushed tones several times since, and even seen some of the precious haul. A friend snagged a still-current AMD processor and some Noctua server fans as another example, and I’m told that amazingly someone deposited a Playstation 5. But these are the exceptions, in most cases the junk is either very specific to something, or much more mundane. I saw someone snag an audio effects unit that may or may not work, and there are PC expansion cards and outdated memory modules aplenty.

Finally, there is the absolute junk, which some might even call e-waste but I’ll be a little more charitable about. Mains cables, VGA cables, and outdated computer books. Need to learn about some 1990s web technology? We’ve got you covered. Continue reading “A Treasure Trove In An English Field” →

How Facebook Killed Online Chat

May 29, 2024 by Lewin Day 84 Comments

In the early days of the internet, online conversations were an event. The technology was novel, and it was suddenly possible to socialize with a whole bunch of friends at a distance, all at once. No more calling your friends one by one, you could talk to them all at the same time!

Many of us would spend hours on IRC, or pull all-nighters bantering on MSN Messenger or AIM. But then, something happened, and many of us found ourselves having shorter conversations online, if we were having any at all. Thinking back to my younger days, and comparing them with today, I think I’ve figured out what it is that’s changed.

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The Tragic Story Of The Ill-Fated Supergun

May 28, 2024 by Lewin Day 63 Comments

In the annals of ambitious engineering projects, few have captured the imagination and courted controversy quite like Gerald Bull’s Supergun. Bull, a Canadian artillery expert, envisioned a gun that could shoot payloads directly into orbit. In time, his ambition led him down a path that ended in both tragedy and unfinished business.

Depending on who you talk to, the Supergun was either a new and innovative space technology, or a weapon of war so dangerous, it couldn’t be allowed to exist. Ultimately, the powers that be intervened to ensure we would never find out either way.

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Mapping The Human Brain And Where This May Lead Us

May 23, 2024 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

In order to understand something, it helps to observe it up close and study its inner workings. This is no less true for the brain, whether it is the brain of a mouse, that of a whale, or the squishy brain inside our own skulls. It defines after all us as a person; containing our personality and all our desires and dreams. There are also many injuries, disorders and illnesses that affect the brain, many of which we understand as poorly as the basics of how memories are stored and thoughts are formed. Much of this is due to how complicated the brain is to study in a controlled fashion.

Recently a breakthrough was made in the form of a detailed map of the cells and synapses in a segment of a human brain sample. This collaboration between Harvard and Google resulted in the most detailed look at human brain tissue so far, contained in a mere 1.4 petabytes of data. Far from a full brain map, this particular effort involved only a cubic millimeter of the human temporal cortex, containing 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels and 150 million synapses.

Ultimately the goal is to create a full map of a human brain like this, with each synapse and other structures detailed. If we can pull it off, the implications could be mind-bending.

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