Perhaps we’ve all found ourselves at one time or another with more computers in use than keyboards and other peripherals at hand to use them with. With a single user you can make do with remote terminals or by simply plugging and unplugging, but with multiple users it’s not so easy. CNX Software’s [Jean-Luc Aufranc] […]
Things are not looking good for iRobot. Although their robotic Roomba vacuums are basically a household name, the company has been faltering financially for some time now. In 2024 there was hope of a buyout by Amazon, who were presumably keen to pull the bots into their Alexa ecosystem, but that has since fallen through. […]
WiFi-enabled ‘smart’ light bulbs are everywhere these days, and each one of them has a microcontroller inside that’s capable enough to run all sorts of interesting software. For example, [vimpo] decided to get one running a minimal Minecraft server. The Bl602-equipped board inside the LED lightbulb. (Credit: vimpo, YouTube) Inside the target bulb is a […]
The human body and sharp objects don’t get along very well, especially when they are being wielded with ill-intent. Since antiquity there have been various forms of armor designed to protect the wearer, but thankfully these days random sword fights don’t often break out on the street. Still, [SCREEN TESTED] wanted to test the viability […]
Over on YouTube [Usagi Electric] shows us how he installed an 84MB hard drive into his PDP-11/44. In the beginning he purchased a bunch of RA70 and RA72 drives and board sets but none of them worked. As there are no schematics it’s very difficult to figure out how they’re broken and how to troubleshoot […]
Rust is the new hotness in programming languages because of how solid its memory protections are. Race conditions and memory leaks are hardly new issues however, and as greybeards are wont to point out, they were kind of a solved problem already: we have Ada. So if you want a memory-protected kernel but aren’t interested […]
[Mellow Labs] wanted to grab a multimeter that could do Bluetooth. Those are cheap and plentiful, but the Bluetooth software was, unsurprisingly, somewhat lacking. A teardown shows a stock Bluetooth module. A quick search found a GitHub with software. But then he had a fiendish idea: could you replace the Bluetooth module with an ESP32 […]
Should you spend some time around the less scientifically informed parts of the internet, it’s easy to find “Free power” stories. Usually they’re some form of perpetual motion machine flying in the face of the laws of conservation of energy, but that’s not to say that there is no free power. The power just has […]
This week Jonathan and Ben chat with Jason Shepherd about Ocre and Atym.io! That’s the lightweight WebAssembly VM that lets you run the same containers on Linux and a host of embedded platforms, on top of the Zephyr embedded OS. What was the spark that led to this project’s creation, what does Atym.io bring to […]
In the global game of nuclear brinksmanship, secrets are the coin of the realm. This was especially true during the Cold War, when each side fielded armies of spies to ferret out what the other guy was up to, what their capabilities were, and how they planned to put them into action should the time […]