This week David Ruggles chats with Jonathan Bennett about his origin story! What early core memory does Jonathan pin his lifelong computer hobby on? And how was a tense meeting instrumental to Jonathan’s life outlook? And how did Jonathan manage to score a squashable brain toy from an equipment manufacturer? Watch the whole show to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 791: It’s All About Me!”
We’ve covered the Tiny Tapeout project a few times on these pages, and while getting your digital IC design out there onto actual silicon for a low cost is super cool, it is still somewhat limited. Now, along comes the German FMD QNC project funding MPW (multi-project wafer) runs not in bog standard Silicon CMOS but Silicon-Germanium bipolar technology. And this is accessible to you and me, of course, provided you have the skills to design in this high-speed analog technology.
The design can be submitted via Github by cloning the IHP-Open-DesignLib repo, adding your design, and issuing a pull request. If your submission passes the correctness checks and is selected, it will be fabricated in-house by the IHP pilot line facility, which means it will take at least four months to complete. However, there are a few restrictions. The design must be open source, DRC complete (obviously!) and below a somewhat limiting two square millimetres. Bonus points for selecting your project can be had for good documentation and a unique quality, i.e., they shouldn’t have too many similar designs in the project archive. Also, you don’t get to keep the silicon samples, but you may rent them for up to two years for evaluation. In fact, anybody can rent them. Still, it’s a valuable service to trial a new technique or debug a design and a great way to learn and hone a craft that is difficult to get into by traditional means. Such projects would be an excellent source of verifiable CV experience points we reckon!
If you fancy getting your hands on your own silicon, but bipolar SiGe is a bit of a stretch, look no further than our guide to Tiny Tapeout. But don’t take our word for it—listen to the creator himself!
We touched on the open source SLS4All DIY SLS 3D printer a year or two ago when the project was in the early stages. Finally, version one is complete, with a parts kit ready to ship and all design data ready for download if a DIY build or derivative is your style. As some already mentioned, this is not going to be cheap: with the full parts kit running at an eye-watering $7K before tax. But it’s possible to build or source almost all of it a bit at a time for those on a budget.
It’s important to note that to access the detailed information, you’ll need to create an account, which is a bit inconvenient for an open source design. However, all the essential components seem to be available, so it’s forgivable. In terms of electronics, there are two custom PCBs: the GATE1 (GAlvo and Temperature Control) and the ZERO1 (Zero-crossing dimming) controller. Other than that, all the electronics seem to be standard off-the-shelf components. Both of these PCBs are designed using EasyEDA.
Unfortunately we couldn’t find access to the PCB Gerbers, nor does there appear to be a link to their respective EasyEDA projects, just the reference schematics. This is a bit of a drawback, but it’s something that could easily be reproduced with enough motivation. Control is courtesy of a Radxa Rock Pi, as there were ‘problems’ with a Raspberry Pi. This is paired with a 7-inch touchscreen to complete the UI. This is running a highly modified version of the Klipper together with their own control software, which is still undergoing testing before release.
The laser head is built around a 10 W 450 nm laser module from China and a high-end galvanometer set. Two 200 W halogen tube heaters heat the print bed, and 200 W silicone heating pads heat both the powder bed and the print bed.
Continue reading “Long-Awaited SLS4All 3D Printer Now Shipping”
This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman chat with Steve Seguin about VDO.Ninja and Social Stream Ninja, tools for doing live WebRTC video calls, recording audio and video, wrangling comments on a bunch of platforms, and more!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 787: VDO Ninja — It’s A Little Bit Hacky”
Accessibility devices are a wonder of modern technology, allowing people with various needs to interact more easily with the world. From prosthetics to devices to augment or aid someone’s vision or hearing, devices like these can open up many more opportunities than would otherwise exist. A major problem with a wide array of these tools is that they can cost a fortune. [3D Printy] hoped to bring the cost down for Braille trainers which can often cost around $1000.
Braille trainers consist of a set of characters, each with six pins or buttons that can be depressed to form the various symbols used in the Braille system. [3D Printy]’s version originally included six buttons, each with a set of springs, that would be able to pop up and down. After some work and real-world use, though, he found that his device was too cumbersome to be effective and redesigned the entire mechanism around flexible TPU filament, allowing him to ditch the springs in favor of indentations and buttons that snap into place without a dedicated spring mechanism.
The new design is modular, allowing many units to be connected to form longer trainers than just a single character. He’s also released his design under the Creative Commons public domain license, allowing anyone to make and distribute these tools as they see fit. The design also achieves his goal of dramatically reducing the price of these tools to essentially just the cost of filament, provided you have access to a 3D printer of some sort. If you need to translate some Braille writing and don’t want to take the time to learn this system, take a look at this robotic Braille reader instead.
Thanks to [George] for the tip!
Continue reading “3D Printed Braille Trainer Reduces Barrier To Entry”
This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls sit down with Mathias Buus Madsen and Paolo Ardoino of Holepunch, to talk about the Pear Runtime and the Keet serverless peer-to-peer platform. What happens when you take the technology built for BitTorrent, and apply it to a messaging app? What else does that allow you to do? And what’s the secret to keeping the service running even after the servers go down?
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 781: Resistant To The Wrath Of God”
We’re not 100% sure which phase of Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” gameplan this represents, but just yesterday the Redmond software giant decided to grace us with the source code for MS-DOS v4.0.
To be clear, the GitHub repository itself has been around for several years, and previously contained the source and binaries for MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 under the MIT license. This latest update adds the source code for v4.0 (no binaries this time), which originally hit the market back in 1988. We can’t help but notice that DOS v3.0 didn’t get invited to the party — perhaps it was decided that it wasn’t historically significant enough to include.
That said, readers with sufficiently gray beards may recall that DOS 4.0 wasn’t particularly well received back in the day. It was the sort of thing where you either stuck with something in the 3.x line if you had older hardware, or waited it out and jumped to the greatly improved v5 when it was released. Modern equivalents would probably be the response to Windows Vista, Windows 8, and maybe even Windows 11. Hey, at least Microsoft keeps some things consistent.
It’s interesting that they would preserve what’s arguably the least popular version of MS-DOS in this way, but then again there’s something to be said for having a historical record on what not to do for future generations. If you’re waiting to take a look at what was under the hood in the final MS-DOS 6.22 release, sit tight. At this rate we should be seeing it sometime in the 2030s.
