No Star Trek until May, 2017, at which time you’ll have to pay $5/month to watch it with ads. In the meantime, this is phenomenal and was shut down by Paramount and CBS last year ostensibly because Star Trek: Discovery will be based around the same events.
Tempest in a teacup. That’s how you cleverly introduce the world’s smallest MAME cabinet. This project on Adafruit features a Pi Zero, a 96×64 pixel color OLED display, a few buttons, a tiny joystick, and a frame made out of protoboard. It’s tiny — the height of this cabinet just under two wavelengths of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. Being based on the Pi Zero, it’s a capable arcade cabinet, although we would struggle to find a continuous rotation pot small enough to play Tempest the way it should be played. Check out the video.
[Graham] sent an interesting observation in on the tip line. It’s an election year in the US, and that can mean only one thing. It’s coroplast season. Coroplast is that strange material used for political signage, famous for its light weight, being waterproof, and reasonably strong, depending on how you bend it. There is a severe lack of coroplast builds, but if you have some be sure to send them in.
The ESP32, the followup to the hugely popular ESP8266 , is shipping. [Elliot] got his hands on one and found it to be a very promising chip, but the ESP3212 modules I bought from Seeed haven’t arrived yet. That hasn’t stopped [Ptwdd] from making a breakout board for the ESP3212, though. We don’t know if it works, but it’s just a breakout board, anyway.
The usual arguments for drones involve remote sensing, inspection, and generally flying around for a very long time. Quadcopters don’t do this, but fixed wings can. Over on DIYDrones, [moglos] just flew 425km on a single charge. The airframe is a 3 meter Vigilant C1 V tail, using the stock 300kV motor. The battery is a bunch of Panasonic 18650 cells arranged in 6S 9P configuration for 30600mAh. The all-up weight is 5.7kg. This is significant, and we’re seeing the first glimmer of useful tasks like pipeline monitoring, search and rescue, and mapping being done with drones. It is, however, less than half the range a C172 can fly, but batteries are always getting better. Gas goes further because it gets lighter as you fly.
