This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Cody Zuschlag about the Xen project! It’s the hypervisor that runs almost everywhere. Why is it showing up in IoT devices and automotive? And what’s coming next for the project? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 853: Hardware Addiction; Don’t Send Help”
This week Jonathan talks to Robert Wolff about DevEco! How did this developer group come to be, and what is its purpose? What are the lessons learned about building communities and working with others? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 852: Sir, This Is A Wendy’s”
When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.
Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.
Continue reading “What Happened To Running What You Wanted On Your Own Machine?”
So much news, so little time left until Supercon! We hope you all have your tickets. If not: Workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now. We’re getting down to the last slightly-more-than-two-handfuls, so if you’re thinking of coming, the time for procrastination has passed.
First up, we have two late-addition workshops, and tickets were just made available. Maybe you noticed that Arduino was bought by Qualcomm, and they kicked off the union with a brand-new board? You can get yourself one, and learn how to use it. And not to be outdone, the CEO of Framework, makers of modular laptop computers, is coming with a grab-bag of parts for you to play with.
Leonardo Cavagnis & Tyler Wojciechowicz
Arduino x DigiKey Presents – From Blink to Think: Discover Arduino Uno Q
Explore the power of Arduino Uno Q, the new board combining a microcontroller and a microprocessor. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to get started with Uno Q and unlock its dual-core capabilities for intelligent and connected projects.
This workshop is hosted by Framework’s Founder and CEO, Nirav Patel. You’ll receive a box of assorted returned/refurbished Framework Laptop parts at the start of the workshop. You can then trade parts with other attendees and work together to try to build a functioning computer of some kind. You’ll pick up some tips and tricks on debugging and repair along the way.
In the last edition of our ongoing series on how planets get ore– those wonderful rocks rich in industrial minerals worth mining– we started talking about hydrothermal fluid deposits. Hydrothermal fluid is the very hot, very salty, very corrosive water that sweats out of magma as it cools underground and under pressure.
We learned that if the fluid stays in the magma chamber and encourages the growth of large crystals there, we call that a pegmatite deposit. If it escapes following cracks in the surface rock, it creates the characteristic veins of an orogenic deposit. What if the fluid gets out of the magma chamber, but doesn’t find any cracks?
Perhaps the surrounding rock is slightly permeable to water, and the hydrothermal fluid can force its way through, eating away at the base rock and remineralizing it with new metals as it goes. That can happen! We call it a porphyry deposit, particularly in igneous rock. It’s not exactly surprising that a hydrothermal fluid would find igneous rock: the fluid is volcanic in origin, after all, just like igneous rock. (That’s the definition of igneous: a rock of volcanic origin.) Igneous rocks, like granite, tend not to be terribly reactive so the fluid can diffuse through relatively unchanged.
Igneous rocks aren’t the only option, though. If the hydrothermal fluid hits carbonates, well, I did mention it’s acidic, right? Acid and carbonates are not friends, so all sorts of chemistry happens, such that geologists give the resulting metamorphic formation a special name: skarn. Though similar in origin, skarns are often considered a different type of deposit, so we’ll talk about the simpler case, diffusion through non-reactive rocks, before getting back to the rocks that sound like an 80s fantasy villain. (Beware Lord Skarn!)
Continue reading “Ore Formation: Return Of The Revenge Of The Fluids”
If you want to print, say, a book, you probably will type it into a word processor. Someone else will take your file and produce pages on a printer. Your words will directly turn on a laser beam or something to directly put words on paper. But for a long time, printing meant creating some physical representation of what you wanted to print that could stamp an imprint on a piece of paper.
The process of carving something out of wood or some other material to stamp out printing is very old. But the revolution was when the Chinese and, later, Europeans, realized it would be more flexible to make symbols that you could assemble texts from. Moveable type. The ability to mass-produce books and other written material had a huge influence on society.
But there is one problem. A book might have hundreds of pages, and each page has hundreds of letters. Someone has to find the right letters, put them together in the right order, and bind them together in a printing press’ chase so it can produce the page in question. Then you have to take it apart again to make more pages. Well, if you have enough type, you might not have to take it apart right away, but eventually you will.
Friends, I’ve gotten myself into a pickle and I need some help.
A few years back, I decided to get into solar power by building a complete PV system inside a mobile trailer. The rationale for this doesn’t matter for the current discussion, but for the curious, I wrote an article outlining the whole design and build process. Briefly, though, the system has two adjustable PV arrays mounted on the roof and side of a small cargo trailer, with an integrated solar inverter-charger and a 10-kWh LiFePO4 battery bank on the inside, along with all the usual switching and circuit protection stuff.
It’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself, and literally every word I’ve written for Hackaday since sometime in 2023 has been on a computer powered by that trailer. I must have built it pretty well, because it’s been largely hands-off since then, requiring very little maintenance. And therein lies the root of my current conundrum.
