Data Logging; Everyone’s Doing It, Why Aren’t You?
Between Tesla Motors’ automobiles and SpaceX’s rockets, Elon Musk’s engineers just have to be getting something right. In part, SpaceX’s success in landing their first stage rockets is due to analysis of telemetry data. You can see some of the data from their launch vehicles on the live videos and there is surely a lot more not shown.
An article in MIT Technology Review provides similar insights in how Tesla came from behind in autonomous vehicle operation by analyzing telemetry from their cars. Since 2014 their Model S received an increasing number of sensors that all report their data over …read more
HDMI Extender Reverse Engineered
[danman] has been playing around with various HDMI video streaming options, and he’s hit on a great low-cost solution. A $40 “HDMI extender” turns out to actually be an HDMI-to-RTP converter under the hood.
He’d done work previously on a similar extender that turned out to use a quirky method to send the video, which he naturally reversed and made to do his bidding. But non-standard formats are a pain. So when he was given a newer version of the same device, and started peeking into the packets with Wireshark, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the output was …read more
gcc: Some Assembly Required
There was a time when you pretty much had to be an assembly language programmer to work with embedded systems. Yes, there have always been high-level languages available, but it took improvements in tools and processors for that to make sense for anything but the simplest projects. Today, though, high-quality compilers are readily available for a lot of languages and even an inexpensive CPU is likely to outperform even desktop computers that many of us have used.
So assembly language is dead, right? Not exactly. There are several reasons people still want to use assembly. First, sometimes you need to …read more
High Voltage Please, But don’t Forget the Current
In high voltage applications involving tens of thousands of volts, too often people think about the high voltage needed but don’t consider the current. This is especially so when part of the circuit that the charge travels through is an air gap, and the charge is in the form of ions. That’s a far cry from electrons flowing in copper wire or moving through resistors.
Consider the lifter. The lifter is a fun, lightweight flying machine. It consists of a thin wire and an aluminum foil skirt separated by an air gap. Apply 25kV volts across that air gap and …read more
One Man’s Awesome Collection Of Projects Done Over A Lifetime
[Robert Glaser] kept all his projects, all of them, from the 1960s to now. What results is a collection so pure we feel an historian should stop by his house, if anything, to investigate the long-term effects of the knack.
He starts with an opaque projector he built in the third grade, which puts it at 1963. Next is an, “idiot box,” which looks suspiciously like “the Internet”, but is actually a few relaxation oscillators lighting up neon bulbs. After that, the condition really sets in, but luckily he’s gone as far as to catalog them all chronologically.
We especially …read more
