Kritik sah

If you didn’t live through it, it is hard to understand how excited the general public was about the race for the moon. You can capture some of it by watching “Lunar Bridgehead,” a film about JPL monitoring the Ranger spacecraft as it hit, rather hard, on the lunar surface. The Ranger program had been plagued with problems. The first five didn’t make it to the moon. Ranger 6 hit the moon, but failed to start its cameras. Ranger 7 was the first successful mission. There would be two more successful missions before the end of the program. Honestly, given the state of technology and computers in those days, it is a miracle they could do it at all. Even more sobering to think that a scant five years later, Neil Armstrong would set foot on the lunar surface. In fact, Ranger 8 would land in the Sea of Tranquility, just like Armstrong’s Eagle. The video has a lot of cool shots of old tech: magnetic tape drives, teletypes, paper tape readers, and giant dish an...

Bad news for anyone who was hoping for some relief from the memory shortage — Digitimes is reporting that the production capacity of major players such as Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix has already been booked for 2027 due to record demand. Their industry sources indicate that what we’re experiencing currently is just a prelude to when things get really ugly, which is why customers are paying a premium to lock in their orders so far out. Although there’s been no official word from either side of the transaction, the Digitimes article further points out that these sort of agreements are usually 3 to 5 year contracts. If that’s the case, and nothing changes in supply and demand equation, we could be in for a very rough ride. There’s a potential opportunity here for other manufacturers to step in and start producing DRAM, possibly even focusing on lower-performance offerings intended for the consumer market, but setting up those production lines isn’t...

Sometimes you see a project just staring at you with proverbial puppy dog eyes and you just cannot look away. In the case of a once rather nice Sony TV it was the smooth 32″ Trinitron CRT that gave [Happychoice] that look when he came across it along the side of the road. Naturally he had to beg the owner of the junkyard to please let him adopt the pupp^Wjunked TV and attempted an ill-advised repair . Some later sleuthing revealed that this poor TV had been sitting on the side of that road for at least six years, exposed to the worst that the Italian weather and local fauna could do to it, so it was no surprise that all he got out of it even after cleaning and some repairs was a sad triple-blink of the power LED. This indicated that something on the control board was very unhappy about the status of the power supply. Over the course of a few months this project went correspondingly from careful optimism down to the depths of depression, through the fields of bargaining and into ...

For whatever reason, [Jeremy] wants to photograph bees in flight. This is one of those things that doesn’t seem that hard until you try to do it. He’s got the mechanical part that can move the camera as fast as the bee flies. But you still have to point the camera correctly. He considered quite a few methods of acquiring and tracking the bee, but he finally settled on a stereo camera . His requirements also made the camera design challenging. In particular, the bees move fast enough that things like USB transmission times become significant. You can see his solution in the video below. [Jeremy] does a great job explaining all the tradeoffs between frame rate, resolution, focal length, and other optical issues. Of course, he also wanted a global shutter sensor. Rolling shutter cameras scan row-by-row, creating the well-known “jello effect”. Global shutters capture all pixels at once. That also removes any uncertainty as to “when” the shutter fired. ...

Paper as a substrate for electronic circuits is not very common, but promising for flexible circuits with low cost and easy recyclability. That said, paper is not an easy material to work with when printing traces, as the cellulose material is both absorbent and irregular, limiting the resolution and accuracy of so-called papertronics. Even when using higher-quality paper with wax-based masks this resulted in poor resolution issues, so [Zahra Rafiee] et al. opted to approach the problem from the other direction , by using hydrophobic parchment paper as the base combined with a laser. The nice thing about the inks used with papertronics that they aren’t just traces, but can also be functional elements like resistors, which is also demonstrated in the paper. The channels for the inks are created using a 50 Watt CO 2 laser, which etches away the silicone coating on the parchment paper. The achieved resolution in the article is around 250 µm for line widths and 300 µm line spacing, ...

Avian Visitors is a lovely project by [Teddy Warner] that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your home, and creates a colorful illustration of recent visitors on top of it all. It reports on a web interface of its own making, but what really takes things to a new level is an optional, stylish E-Ink panel that shows the last 24 hours’ worth of visitors at a glance in a collage. The key to identification is BirdNET (GitHub here ), a deep learning classifier from Cornell that can reliably identify and classify more than 11,000 species worldwide based on sound alone. Based on that information, the system pulls bird images from a reference set for the region and creates a collage representing the breadth and frequency of visitors in a single image. The larger the image of a bird, the more frequently it was heard. That’s a cool project, but [Teddy] took things one step further by setting up a color E-Ink display to show a runni...