Variable Instruction Computing: What Is Old Is New Again

February 19, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 63 Comments

Every twenty to twenty-five years, trends and fads start reappearing. 2016 is shaping up to be a repeat of 1992; the X-files is back on the air, and a three-way presidential election is a possibility. Star Trek is coming back, again. Roll these observations back another twenty-five years, and you have The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and riots at the DNC convention in Chicago.

History repeating itself is not the exclusive domain of politics and popular culture. It happens with tech, too: the cloud is just an extension of thin clients which are an extension of time-sharing. Everything old is new again.

For the last few years, Soft Machines, a fabless semiconductor company running in stealth mode, released the first preview for an entirely new processor architecture. This new architecture, VISC, offers higher performance per Watt than anything available on the market. If you’ve been paying attention for the last decade or so, the future of computing isn’t 200-Watt space heaters that also double as powerful CPUs. The future is low power machines that are good enough to run Facebook or run some JavaScript. With servers, performance per Watt is possibly the most important metric. How will Soft Machines upend the semiconductor market with new processors and new architectures? If you know your history, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

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ATtiny Watch Is Tiny

February 18, 2016 by Kristina Panos 27 Comments

[陳亮] (Chen Liang) is in the middle of building the ultimate ring watch. This thing is way cooler than the cheap stretchy one I had in the early 1990s–it’s digital, see-through, and it probably won’t turn [陳]’s finger green.

The current iteration is complete and builds upon his previous Arduino-driven watch building experiences. It runs on an ATtiny85 and displays the time, temperature, and battery status on an OLED. While this is a fairly a simple build on paper, it’s the Lilliputian implementation that makes it fantastic.

[陳] had to of course account for building along a continuous curve, which means that the modules of the watch must be on separate boards. They sit between the screw bosses of the horseshoe-shaped 3D-printed watch body, connected together with magnet wire. [陳] even rolled his own coin cell battery terminals by cutting and doubling over the thin metal bus from a length of bare DuPont connector.

If you’re into open source watches but prefer to wear them on your wrist, check out this PIC32 smart watch or the Microduino-based OSWatch.

The Contrarian Response To Apple’s Need For Encryption

February 18, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 277 Comments

On December 2, 2015, [Syed Rizwan Farook] and [Tashfeen Malik] opened fire at a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health training event, killing 14 and injuring 22. This was the third deadliest mass shooting in the United States in recent memory, and began a large investigation by local, state, and federal agencies. One piece of evidence recovered by the FBI was an iPhone 5C belonging to one of the shooters. In the days and months after the shooting, the FBI turned to Apple to extract data from this phone.

A few days ago in an open letter to customers, [Tim Cook], CEO of Apple, stated they will not comply with FBI’s request to build a backdoor for the iPhone. While the issue at hand is extracting data from an iPhone recovered from the San Bernardino shooting, [Cook] says building a new version of iOS to extract this data would allow the FBI to unlock any iPhone. Needless to say, there are obvious security implications of this request.

Apple does not publish open letters to its customers often. Having one of the largest companies on the planet come out in support of privacy and encryption is nearly unprecedented. There is well-founded speculation this open letter to the public will be exhibit A in a supreme court case. Needless to say, the Internet has gone a little crazy after this letter was published, and rightly so: just imagine how better off we would be if AT&T said no to the NSA in 2002 – [Snowden] might just be another IT geek working for a government contractor.

There is a peculiar aspect of public discourse that doesn’t make any sense. In the absence of being able to say anything interesting, some people have just decided to add a contrary viewpoint. Being right, having a valid argument, or even having evidence to support assertions doesn’t matter; being contrary is far more interesting. Look at any comment thread on the Internet, and you’ll find the longest comment chain is the one refuting the parent article. Look up the ratings for a cable news channel. You’ll find the highest rated show is the one with the most bickering. When is the last time you saw something from the New York Times, Washington Post, or LA Times on Facebook or your favorite news aggregator? Chances are, it wasn’t news. It was an op-ed, most likely one that was espousing a view contrary to either public opinion or public policy.

As with any headline event on the Internet, the contrarians have come out of the woodwork. These contrarians are technically correct and exceedingly myopic.

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Show Me The Data: Hackaday.io Year #02

February 18, 2016 by Aleksandar Bradic 22 Comments

Hackaday.io has just turned two today and we couldn’t be more excited about how far we’ve come. What started out as a simple proof-of-concept, inspired by ye-olde idea of a “virtual hackerspace,” has truly evolved into a global playground for some of the best, brightest, and most creative minds you have ever met. It also became a home and the place to spend sleepless nights for many of us on the team, and we’re excited to share a few ideas on where we are headed going forward.

But before we do that, let’s look at some data.

The Data

We’re thrilled to report that over the last two years, Hackaday.io has grown from zero to a 121,158-member strong community, who have together created a total of 9,736 projects. To put this in context, it is more than a two-fold growth from last year’s milestone of 51,838 users / 4,365 projects. And it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down.

Projects

Though these “vanity” metrics sure are a nice validation, the number that gets us the most excited is the fact that the 9,731 projects currently on the site have been created by a total 4,966 different users. What’s even better is the fact that 949 projects are a result of collaboration between two or more people. Altogether, a total of 7,170 different users have participated in the creation of the vast body of engineering knowledge currently residing on Hackaday.io.

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5D Glass Disc Can Store 360TB!

February 18, 2016 by James Hobson 154 Comments

There’s a small subset of hackers out there concerned with the end of the world. What if our entire existence vanished? How would an alien race learn not to do what we did, what resulted in our demise? We’ve all heard of laser etching metal disks with the Bible, accounts of history, and even just names — pretty sure we’ve sent quite a few into space. But researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optical Research Center have come up with an even superior storage method. They call it the 5D Disc.

According to the researchers, each disc could hold a theoretical 360TB. They can withstand temperatures of up to 1000C, and it’s believe that they could last up to 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading — if that’s true, our sun would be long dead before the disc degraded! Continue reading “5D Glass Disc Can Store 360TB!” →

Building A Sheet Metal Pistol

February 17, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 120 Comments

Floating around the Internet are plans for a semi-automatic pistol constructed out of sheet metal. Like so many plans for 3D printed guns, it appears no one has actually built one of these pistols. It exists only as a technological construct, with diagrams you can photocopy, trace onto a few bits of metal, and presumably assemble into a gun. The only proof these parts can be turned into a gun-shaped object are a few random blog posts from two years ago showing a very ugly pistol spray painted matte black.

[Clinton Westwood] decided to take up the challenge of turning these plans into a real, working gun. He’s documented his efforts on YouTube and put a bunch of pictures up of the entire build process. The gun doesn’t work quite yet, but it almost does, and he’s doing this entirely in a garage shop, with tools anyone can pick up from Home Depot.

Most of the construction of this gun is simple enough – it’s just sheet metal, after all. The magazine was constructed by tracing the pattern onto a piece of metal, wrapping it around a mandrel, and welding it together. The side plates of the gun, again, were created with a jigsaw. Rifling the barrel – the thing that makes this gun both accurate and legal – required the construction of a few interesting tools. The rifling tool is just a piece of round bar that fits through the barrel. A small piece of a hacksaw blade was cut to fit inside this round bar, and the barrel was cut very slowly with a shop-built tool.

The finished result is something that looks like it came from the finest post-apocalyptic craftsman. A gun that looks cool is useless if it doesn’t work, and here the DIY pistol falls short. The spent casings don’t eject. It’s still a step up from the first build of this gun that was only rumored to fire blanks.

Recently, the world of gunsmithing has been inundated with 3D printed pistols that don’t work, and 3D printed guns that do work, but are somehow 200 years behind the state of the art. We’re happy to see some people are still building things with their hands, and hope [Clinton] can eventually get this gun to work.

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About Those Gravitational Waves

February 17, 2016 by Will Sweatman 306 Comments

It was the year of 1687 when Isaac Newton published “The Principia“, which revealed the first mathematical description of gravity. Newton’s laws of motion along with his description of gravity laid before the world a revolutionary concept that could be used to describe everything from the motions of heavenly bodies to a falling apple. Newton would remain the unequivocal king of gravity for the next several hundred years. But that would all change at the dawn of the 20th century when a young man working at a Swiss patent office began to ask some profound questions. Einstein had come to the conclusion that Newtonian physics was not adequate to describe the findings of the emerging electromagnetic field theories. In 1905, he published a paper entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” which corrects Newton’s laws so they work when describing the motions of objects near the speed of light. This new description became known as Special Relativity.

It was ‘Special’ because it didn’t deal with gravity or acceleration. It would take Einstein another 10 years to work these two concepts into his relativity theory. He called it General Relativity – an understanding of which is necessary to fully grasp the significance of gravitational waves.

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