Real Time Trends Network

The new campaign will debut on Jan. 1 during the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2SDxhEe via IFTTT

If you’re the kind of person who hates this new generation of smartphone users and longs for a nostalgic past, you’re not far from the new target demographic for many commercial phone manufacturers. Major phone companies like Motorola and Huawei have been developing foldable versions of conventional smartphone designs, intended to be more versatile while maintaining the same functionality as their less flexible counterparts. It’s certainly gimmicky, but phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the Motorola Razr , and the Huawei MateX are elegant from an engineering perspective. Developing a seamless interface experience, maximizing surface area for functionality, and maintaining the same nostalgic flip phone aesthetic while making use of familiar smartphone features isn’t an easy design process. Motorola RAZR hinge shown by CNET’s Patrick Holland during a tour of their labs. For the Razr, a hinge system that takes up about a third of the phone’s internal space allows the OLED display to

Line scan cameras are advanced devices used for process inspection tasks in industrial applications. Used to monitor the quality of silicon wafers and other high-accuracy tasks, they’re often outfitted with top-quality optics that are highly specialised. [Peter] was able to get his hands on a lens for a line-scan camera, and decided to put it to work on some macro photography instead. Macro image taken with the hacked lens. Judging by the specs found online, this is a fairly serious piece of kit. It easily competes with top-shelf commercial optics, which is what piqued [Peter]’s interest in the part. Being such a specialised piece of hardware, you can’t just cruise over to eBay for an off-the-shelf adapter. Instead, a long chain of parts were used to affix this lens to a Sony AIII DSLR, converting from threaded fittings to a Nikon mount and then finally to Sony NEX mount. Further work involved fitting an aperture into the chain to get the lens as close as possible to telecentric. Th

When it comes to building sets and props for movies and TV, it’s so easy to get science fiction wrong – particularly with low-budget productions. It must be tempting for the set department to fall back on the “get a bunch of stuff and paint it silver” model, which can make for a tedious experience for the technically savvy in the audience. But low-budget does not necessarily mean low production values if the right people are involved. Take [Joel Hartlaub]’s recent work building sets for a crowdfunded sci-fi film called Infinitus . It’s a post-apocalyptic story that needed an underground bunker with a Fallout vibe to it, and [Joel] jumped at the chance to hack the sets together. Using mainly vintage electronic gear and foam insulation boards CNC-routed into convincing panels, he built nicely detailed control consoles for the bunker. A voice communicator was built from an old tube-type table radio case with some seven-segment displays, and the chassis of an old LCD projector made a co

Swarms of robotic insects incapable of being swatted away may no longer be the product of science fiction and Black Mirror episodes. A team from EPFL’s School of Engineering has developed an insect propelled at 3 cm/s, dubbed the DEAnsect . What makes this robot unique is its exceptional robustness. Two versions of the robot were initially developed, one tethered with ultra-thin wires capable of being squashed with a shoe without impacting its functions and the second fully wireless and autonomous. The robot weighs less than 1 gram and is equipped with a microcontroller and photodiodes to recognize black and white patterns. The insect is named for its dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), an artificial muscle that propels it with vibrations and enables it to move lightly and quickly. The DEAs are made of an elastomer membrane wedged between soft electrodes that are attracted to each other when a voltage is applied, compressing the membrane. The membrane returns to its original s

A police officer in Kansas got national attention before he was outed for writing the insult on his own cup. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/35fIQ74 via IFTTT

If you’re going to fail, you might as well fail ambitiously. A complex project with a lot of subsystems has a greater chance of at least partial success, as well as providing valuable lessons in what not to do next time. At least that’s the lemonade [Josh Johnson] made from his lemon of a lost-cost vector network analyzer . For the uninitiated, a VNA is a versatile test instrument for RF work that allows you to measure both the amplitude and the phase of a signal, and it can be used for everything from antenna and filter design to characterizing transmission lines. [Josh] decided to port a lot of functionality for his low-cost VNA to a host computer and concentrate on the various RF stages of the design. Unfortunately, [Josh] found the performance of the completed VNA to be wanting, especially in the phase measurement department. He has a complete analysis of the failure modes in his thesis , but the short story is poor filtering of harmonics from the local oscillator, unexpected beha

With 2020 comes the perfect opportunity to start anew: Here are ten self care resolutions for the New Year to help you in your quest. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/35caAJV via IFTTT

[Bwack] had some scanned pictures of an old Commodore card and wanted to recreate PC boards from it. It’s true that he could have just manually redrawn everything in a CAD package, but that’s tedious. Instead, he used SprintLayout 6.0 which allows you to import pictures and use them as a guide for recreating a PCB layout. You can see the entire process including straightening the original scans. There are tools that make it very easy to place new structures over the original scanned images. One might think the process could be more automated, but it looks as though every piece needs to be touched at least once, but it is still easier than just trying to eyeball everything together. Most of the video is sped up, which makes it look as though he’s really fast. Your speed will be less, but it is still fairly quick to go from a scan to a reasonable layout. The software is not free, but you can do something somewhat similar in KiCAD. The trick is to get the image scaled perfectly and c

Animated ‘Last Ride’ ad includes references to Warhol, the Beatles and ‘Footloose.’ from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2sDym46 via IFTTT

From 'tokenization' to the so-called 'consumer journey,' we highlight the biggest buzzword offenders in a space that's littered with them. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2FefWtn via IFTTT

Consent management platforms and contextual advertising can help brands stay connected to consumers. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2tfSxVS via IFTTT

By now most readers will be familiar with the Miniware TS100 and TS80 soldering irons, compact and lightweight temperature controlled soldering tools that have set a new standard at the lower-priced end of the decent soldering iron market. We know they have an STM32 processor, a USB interface, and an OLED display, and that there have been a variety of alternative firmwares produced for them. Take a close look at the TS80, and you’ll find the element connector is rather familiar. It’s a 3.5 mm jack plug, something we’re more used to as an audio connector. Surely audio from a soldering iron would be crazy? Not if you are [Joric], who has created a music player firmware for the little USB-C iron. It’s hardly a tour de force of musical entertainment and it won’t pull away the audiophiles from their reference DACs, but it does at least produce a recognisable We Wish You A Merry Christmas as you’ll see from the video below the break. Since the TS100 arrived a couple of years ago we’ve

We’re well versed in the merits of engaging in a digital detox, and we occasionally like to head out of the city, swapping smoke fumes and screen time for the great outdoors and sleeping underneath the stars. And whether we’re pitching up in a treehouse or a teepee, glamping or gorge crossing, we like to make sure we pack a few striking hiking essentials to take to our favoured secluded spot. Italian accessories specialist Piquadro has recently bolstered its backpack offering with a sturdy pine green leather version, complete with carabiner clip fastening, multiple pockets and easy-access zips. We’re fond, too, of Smythson’s collaboration with New York reusable water bottle brand S’well, a sleek water bottle and calf leather holder based on a 1920s beaker set from the Smythson archives. We also recommend Geox’s rugged lace-up boots and a Victorinox Swiss army knife for when a spot of foraging is called for. § from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2u6LgZ0 via I

For the past 16 years, my husband and I have spent the festive holidays somewhere warm, and that means New Year’s Eve typically spent in a resort. The first was in Jamaica, where we holidayed with old friends and met new ones, Tina Lutz and Justin Morris of Lutz Morris (W*246). In 2004, we went to the Chedi Muscat hotel and were invited, or let’s say instructed, to participate in (pay for) a gala dinner. Tables were for set for six or eight, and we nervously sat at one, chancing our luck with the other hotel guests. As it happened, we did well: we shared the table with Michael and Carolin from Munich, and, 15 years on, we have been to each other’s weddings and on holiday together, just as with Tina and Justin. In 2017, we spent New Year’s Eve with Nina Yashar, of Nilufar Gallery, and her partner Angelo at the Hotel Esencia in Mexico. The food was OK and the entertainment thankfully brief, but we lucked out again with the company; I got the advance lowdown on Nilufar’s Lina Bo Bardi e

Moscow’s old Frunze Central Aerodrome may have been long decommissioned, but its proximity to the city centre has encouraged developers to create a new residential neighbourhood around it, whilst inspiring New York-based design studio Asthetique to inject an appropriately aeronautical spin into the décor of Café Polet. From every angle, the interiors are head-turning cinematic set-pieces that are equal parts Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, and David Lynch’s ‘Dune’, the retro-futuristic mood set by convex porthole windows, Martian winged goddesses rendered in six-metre-high stainless steel, flying saucers reimagined as lamps, and alien landscapes cut as wall panels. Little wonder that head chef Aleksandr Airapetyan has to work hard to stand out from the fabulist background, the St. Petersburg native working a menu of European and Georgian standards. Recent standouts have included a salad of grilled squid, smoked baby potatoes and truffle mayonnaise, finished with a dessert of crisp biscuit

In any normal situation, if you’d read an article that about building your own quantum computer, a fully understandable and natural reaction would be to call it clickbaity poppycock. But an event like the Chaos Communication Congress is anything but a normal situation, and you never know who will show up and what background they will come from. A case in point: security veteran [Yann Allain] who is in fact building his own quantum computer in his garage . Starting with an introduction to quantum computing itself, and what makes it so powerful also in the context of security, [Yann] continues to tell about his journey of building a quantum computer on his own. His goal was to build a stable computer he could “easily” create by himself in his garage, which will work at room temperature, using trapped ion technology. After a few iterations, he eventually created a prototype with KiCad that he cut into an empty ceramic chip carrier with a hobbyist CNC router, which will survive when plac

Most of these stories start with a cat standing on someone’s chest, begging for food at some obscene hour of the morning. But not this one. Chaz the cat is diabetic, and he needs to get his insulin with breakfast. The problem is that Chaz likes to eat overnight, which ruins his breakfast appetite and his chances at properly metabolizing the insulin. [Becky] tried putting the bowl away before bed, but let’s face it — it’s more fun to solve a problem once than to solve the same problem every night. [Becky]’s solution was to design and print a bowl holder with a lid, and to cover the bowl when the cat diner is closed using a small servo and a NodeMCU. It looks good, and it gets the job done with few components . Chaz gets his insulin, [Becky] gets peace of mind, and everybody’s happy. This isn’t going to work for all cats, because security is pretty lax. But Chaz is a senior kitty and therefore disinterested in pawing at the lid to see what happens. Claw your way past the break to see [B

SIM cards are all around us, and with the continuing growth of the Internet of Things, spawning technologies like NB-IoT, this might as well be very literal soon. But what do we really know about them, their internal structure, and their communication protocols? And by extension, their security? To shine some light on these questions, open source and mobile device titan [LaForge] gave an introductory talk about SIM card technologies at the 36C3 in Leipzig, Germany. Starting with a brief history lesson on the early days of cellular networks based on the German C-Netz, and the origin of the SIM card itself, [LaForge] goes through the main specification and technology parts of each following generation from 2G to 5G. Covering the physical basics, I/O interfaces, communication protocols, and the file system located on the SIM card, you’ll get the answer to “what on Earth is PIN2 for?” along the way. Of course, a talk like this, on a CCC event, wouldn’t be complete without a deep and cri

Shell scripting is handy and with a shell like bash it is very capable, too. However, shell scripting isn’t always very efficient. Think about it. If you run grep or tr or sort to do some operation in a shell script, you are spawning a whole new process. That takes time and resources. But there are some answers to reducing — but not eliminating — the problem. Have you ever written a program like this (in any language, but I’ll use C): int foo(void) { ... bar(); } You hope the compiler doesn’t write assembly code like this: _foo: .... call _bar ret Most optimizers should pick up on the fact that you can convert a call like this to a jump and let the ret statement in _bar return to foo’s caller. However, shell scripts are not that smart. If you have a shell script called MungeData and it calls another program or shell script called PostProcess on its last line, then you will have at one time three processes in play: your original shell, the shell running Mung

Public speaking is a great skill to have, and you can hone it while preparing for a keynote. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/35bxEZf via IFTTT

Your cellphone is the least secure computer that you own, and worse than that, it’s got a radio. [Jiska Classen] and her lab have been hacking on cellphones’ wireless systems for a while now, and in this talk gives an overview of the wireless vulnerabilities and attack surfaces that they bring along. While the talk provides some basic background on wireless (in)security, it also presents two new areas of research that she and her colleagues have been working on the last year. One of the new hacks is based on the fact that a phone that wants to support both Bluetooth and WiFi needs to figure out a way to share the radio, because both protocols use the same 2.4 GHz band. And so it turns out that the Bluetooth hardware has to talk to the WiFi hardware, and it wouldn’t entirely surprise you that when [Jiska] gets into the Bluetooth stack, she’s able to DOS the WiFi. What this does to the operating system depends on the phone, but many of them just fall over and reboot. Lately [Jiska] ha

Former president Joe Biden hasn't been shy about using Obama's name to help his presidential campaign. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2sBDTbB via IFTTT

The internet now accounts for half of all ad spending; the remainder is split among TV and a shrinking pool of other media. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2Q95VUD via IFTTT

Even when your budget is small, you can still make sure your social media makes a big impression. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2FbUwNv via IFTTT

Assembly lines for electronics products are complicated beasts, often composed of many custom tools and fixtures. Typically a microcontroller must be programmed with firmware, and the circuit board tested before assembly into the enclosure, followed by functional testing afterwards before putting it in a box. These test platforms can be very expensive, easily into the tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, this project uses a set of 12 Raspberry Pi Zero Ws in parallel to program, test, and configure up to 12 units at once before moving on to the next stage in assembly. Fixing Fixture Bottlenecks The company where I work, Propeller Health , develops IoT products that are assembled in a way similar to many other companies; there is a circuit board and a plastic enclosure. The bare PCBs go through SMT twice (components on the front and back), then they go through ICT (In-Circuit Test) where they are programmed and pogo pins on each of the test points verify all components on the circuit

There’s more to digital signage these days than throwing a screen up on the wall in your retail store and promoting your products. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/358wNZe via IFTTT

U.S. employment at ad agencies is 28 percent above its Great Recession-era low point. Employment at PR agencies has surged 39 percent to reach a record high. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2Qq3Oe0 via IFTTT

Chances are pretty good that you have at least one digital image sensor somewhere close to you at this moment, likely within arm’s reach. The ubiquity of digital cameras is due to how cheap these sensors have become, and how easy they are to integrate into all sorts of devices. So why in the world would someone want to build an image sensor from discrete parts that’s 12,000 times worse than the average smartphone camera? Because, why not? [Sean Hodgins] originally started this project as a digital pinhole camera, which is why it was called “digiObscura.” The idea was to build a 32×32 array of photosensors and focus light on it using only a pinhole, but that proved optically difficult as the small aperture greatly reduced the amount of light striking the array. The sensor, though, is where the interesting stuff is. [Sean] soldered 1,024 ALS-PT19 surface-mount phototransistors to the custom PCB along with two 32-bit analog multiplexers. The multiplexers are driven by a microcontroller

Though technically the last year of the ‘10s, for music, 2019 really felt the first year of the ‘20s. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2FbBWFf via IFTTT

From fanciest to fleeciest, here are the looks guaranteed to help you ring in New Year's Eve the right way. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2QbQlIa via IFTTT

Here is a time capsule filled with the pieces of art and culture from the past decade that the GQ staff—and a few friends—don’t want to be lost to time. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2MJpZeq via IFTTT

The new Maillon theatre in Strasbourg’s Wacken business district is, in many ways, not a theatre at all. It is instead a sleek, concrete-and-glass hyper-flexible container where theatre, dance and music can happen in every space and corridor. As lead architect Umberto Napolitano, co-founder of the Paris-based LAN (Local Architecture Network) practice, says, ‘the point of the project was eliminating all boundaries between the public and the artists, and between what is theatre and what is not. We got rid of the idea of a fixed stage and instead created a series of spaces that can accommodate theatre – a sort of artistic machine.’ From a programme point of view this means that in lieu of the traditional proscenium-style theatre (made up of a lobby, auditorium and a backstage area), the design is composed rather of a series of open and closed spaces that are, like a city and traffic, defined by the building’s circulation axes. To further dissimulate any notions of a traditional theatre,

U.S. employment at ad agencies is 28 percent above its Great Recession-era low point. Employment at PR agencies has surged 39 percent to reach a record high. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2ZzELtn via IFTTT

Here's our picks for the best and worst experiential campaigns of the year.  from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2Q65Wsu via IFTTT

Ever since scientists spoke out about the negative effects of modern life on the environment in the 1950s, artists, designers and architects have attempted to use their unique skills to rebalance the Anthropocene. In 1960 Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed a 3km dome over Manhattan to regulate pollution; in 1965 artists founded alternative commune Drop City in south Colorado; while in 1982 artist Agnes Denes harvested a 2-acre crop just two blocks from Wall Street. For the latest exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA), a team of curators – Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Pedro Gadanho and Mariana Pestana – have selected 21 of the ‘eco-visionaries’ of today from across the fields of art, design and architecture. Their contributions, from models, installations and prototypes, to film and photography, each reveal a ‘complex mesh of forces at play beneath the headlines’ says Gadanho, architect, former MoMA curator and director of Lisbon’s MAAT museum. ‘The ecological crisis

Epiphan VGA2USB LR VGA-to-USB devices [Ben Cox] found some interesting USB devices on eBay. The Epiphan VGA2USB LR accepts VGA video on one end and presents it as a USB webcam-like video signal on the other. Never have to haul a VGA monitor out again? Sounds good to us! The devices are old and abandoned hardware, but they do claim Linux support, so one BUY button mash later and [Ben] was waiting patiently for them in the mail. But when they did arrive, the devices didn’t enumerate as a USB UVC video device as expected. The vendor has a custom driver, support for which ended in Linux 4.9 — meaning none of [Ben]’s machines would run it. By now [Ben] was curious about how all this worked and began digging, aiming to create a userspace driver for the device . He was successful, and with his usual detail [Ben] explains not only the process he followed to troubleshoot the problem but also how these devices (and his driver) work. Skip to the end of the project page for the summary, but the w

Co-working space innovator Fosbury & Sons is spreading its humanist approach to office life even further with its fourth space, and third Brussels location, Albert II-laan. Interior design studio Going East has brought a ‘Brazil meets Wall Street’ aesthetic to the 5,000 sq m co-working space in Brussels’ business district, creating warm, lofty spaces with plants and spiral staircases. With their mantra ‘The office is dead!’ the three Fosbury & Son founders – Serge Hannecart, Stijn Geeraets and Maarten Van Gool – had some fun bringing their ethos of comfortable workspaces to the old-fashioned office building, the ‘SEVEN’. Once a clunky office building stuck in the past, it has now been renovated by ASSAR Architects and been given a complete interior makeover. At the Albert, you’ll find a broad and welcoming ground floor lobby, more reminiscent of a jazz club than a reception, with its grand piano and in-house restaurant Midori. Across this area, architectural elements, s

At first blush, the decision to open a boutique hotel on Adrianou Street might not have been the most sensible one given the steady flow of enthusiastic tourists trekking up and down the narrow, colourful, strip – it’s one of the main tourist arteries to the Acropolis – but the point becomes thoroughly moot the moment one steps through the portal of the 19th-century neo-classical pile. The lobby turns out to be a sleek standalone fashion boutique stocked with a handpicked collection of international haute and Greek labels ranging from Chiara Boni and Missoni to local favourite Sophie Deloudi – all of which makes the check-in process particularly dangerous for shopaholics. Upstairs, the 12 double-glazed, sound-proofed rooms have been dressed by Athens-based studio Mutiny in calm lines and colours, the creamy tableau accented by marble and timber floors, brass finishes, and understated black and white photographs by Katerina Messini. Given the physical constraints of the original bui

It can be amusing sometimes, to read an incredulous reaction from outside our community to something that would be bread-and-butter in most hackerspaces. Take the sorry saga of the Cadillac XLR tail light, as reported by Jalopnik . This car was a more-expensive Corvette with a bit of lard around its midriff, and could appear a tempting pick for a bit of inexpensive luxury rubber-burning were it not for the revelation that a replacement second-hand tail light for one of these roadsters can set you back as much as three grand. The trusty auto on the drive outside where this is being written cost around a tenth that sum, so what on earth is up? Is it because a Caddy carries some cachet, or is something else at play? It appears that the problem lies in the light’s design. It’s an LED unit, with surface mount parts and a set of fragile internal PCBs that are coated in something that makes reworking them a challenge. On top of that, the unit is bonded together, and instead of being a tradit

With an ever-growing range of smart-home products available, all with their own hubs, protocols, and APIs, we see a lot of DIY projects (and commercial offerings too) which aim to provide a “single universal interface” to different devices and services. Usually, these projects allow you to control your home using a list of devices, or sometimes a 2D floor plan. [Wassim]’s project aims to take the first steps in providing a 3D interface, by creating an interactive smart-home controller in the browser . Note: this isn’t just a rendered image of a 3D scene which is static; this is an interactive 3D model which can be orbited and inspected, showing information on lights, heaters, and windows. The project is well documented, and the code can be found on GitHub . The tech works by taking 3D models and animations made in Blender, exporting them using the .glTF format, then visualising them in the browser using three.js. This can then talk to Hue bulbs, power meters, or whatever other devices

The retrocomputing crowd will go to great lengths to recreate the computers of yesteryear, and no matter which species of computer is being restored, getting it just right is a badge of honor in the community. The case and keyboard obviously playing a big part in that look, so when a crowdfunding campaign to create new keycaps for the C64 was announced, Commodore fans jumped to fund it. Sadly, more than four years later, the promised keycaps haven’t been delivered. One disappointed backer, Jim Drew, decided he was sick of waiting, so he delved into the world of keycaps injection molding and started his own competing campaign . Jim details his adventures in his Kickstarter campaign, which makes for good reading even if you’re not into Commodore refurbishment. Here’s hoping Jim has better luck than the competition did. Looking for anonymity in our increasingly surveilled world? You’re not alone, and in fact, we predict facial recognition spoofing products and methods will be a growth in

With open source software, we’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of trust that whatever we are running on our computers is what we expect it to actually be. Thanks to hashing and public key signatures in various parts in the development and deployment cycle, it’s hard for a third party to modify source code or executables without us being easily able to spot it, even if it travels through untrustworthy channels. Unfortunately, when it comes to open source hardware, the number of steps and parties involved that are out of our control until we have a final product — production, logistics, distribution, even the customer — makes it substantially more difficult to achieve the same peace of mind. To make things worse, to actually validate the hardware on chip level, you’d ultimately have to destroy it. On his talk this year at the 36C3 , [bunnie] showed a detailed insight of several attack vectors we could face during manufacturing. Skipping the obvious ones like adding or substitutin

The latest 'Star Wars' movie sidelined Kelly Marie Tran's character allegedly because of technical difficulties with a CGI Carrie Fisher. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2SC74pF via IFTTT

Composing music can be quite difficult – after all, you have to keep in mind all of the elements of musical theory, from time signature and key signature to the correct length for all of the notes. A team of students from Cornell University’s Designing with Microcontrollers class developed a solution for this problem by transcribing sounds from a flute into sheet music . The project doesn’t simply detect the notes played – it is able to convert the raw audio into a standardized music score complete with accurate note timings and beats per minute. Before transcribing the music, some audio processing was necessary. The team chose to use a Sallen-Key filter to amplify the raw audio input due to its complex conjugate poles. They then used a fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to determine the frequency for the input note, converting the signal from the time domain to the frequency domain. The algorithm samples the data to generate an input signal, using the ADC on the microcontroller to receive

A man attacked Hanukkah celebrants with a knife "the size of a broomstick" outside of New York City. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2F1uXih via IFTTT

It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app. While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.

Here are the major men's fashion trends we're seeing in the coming year, and some curated picks to help you pull them off. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2Q3X1rz via IFTTT

Clocks with hands that turn are all well and good for the common folk, but hacker types prefer something different. [Sjm4306] is one such person, and developed this analog dial clock with parts we’d almost consider retro by modern standards. The microcontroller at the heart of the build is a PIC16F886. An 8-bit micro from the Microchip brand, it features no Arduino bootloader or USB interface, being flashed via a dedicated programmer. This is combined with a DS1302 real-time clock to keep accurate time, and a MCP4922 DAC which is responsible for generating the output to drive the dials. The dials themselves are sourced from eBay, being simple voltmeters. They’re given a new backing to display hours and minutes instead of volts, and backlit with LEDs for style. In this day and age, we’re more used to seeing high-end micros used with integrated DACs and USB programming, but it’s nice to see the parts of yesteryear being used, too. It’s not the first clock we’ve seen from [sjm4306], eit

If you want to build a small robot with a motor, you are likely to reach for an L298N to interface your microcontroller to the motor, probably in an H-bridge configuration. [Dronebot] has used L298N chips like this many times. In the video below, he uses a TB6612FNG instead, taking advantage of the device’s use of MOSFETs. The TB6612 may be a little more expensive, but it’s clearly worth it. You can get breakout boards for the tiny chips. [DroneBot] looks at several ready-to-go breakout boards. They are not drop-in compatible, though. For example, the L298N can operate motors from 4.5 to 46V while the TB6612 can go from 2.5 to 13.5V on the motor voltage. The L298N also handles more current. However, because of its relatively low efficiency, it needs a heat sink. The TB6612 boasts up to 95% efficiency and also has a low current standby mode. Of course, the TB6612 drops much less voltage which is great if you are using low voltage motor. Assuming the new device is suitable for your har