Technology Archives - Page 11 of 77

Jozef Bogin Boots an IBM PC From an Unusual Medium: A Vinyl Record

December 12, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Taking advantage of the IBM PC’s cassette deck interface and a vinyl cutter Bogin may now own the only IBM compatible to boot from a record.

Engineer Jozef Bogin has taken on an unusual challenge: Getting a computer to boot from a vinyl record, played at 45 revolutions per minute.

Today, most computer systems use magnetic or solid-state media for their storage — hard drives or solid state drives. In the early days of computing, though, cassette tapes were not uncommon — storing the digital data as audible beeps and boops which could be played back on any standard cassette deck. That link between audio and digital data gave rise to programs distributed on the flip-side of cassette albums, and in a few unusual cases programs which could be played back on the B side of vinyl records.

Nemeio Puts a Keyboard Over an ePaper Screen for Maximum Customization and Flexibility

December 11, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Peripherals startup Nemeio has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a keyboard with a difference: Each key is a configurable ePaper display, allowing for unlimited customization.

“Nemeio is completely customizable because of its built-in wide ePaper screen,” explains project founder Laurent Villemonte de la Clergerie. “Whether you choose an existing keyboard layout or design your own, Nemeio will display your own personalized keyboard – just the way you like it!”

New Flexible Battery Is 10 Times More Powerful Than Standard Lithium Batteries

December 10, 2020 by CrackedConsole

More powerful and easier to manufacture than commercial standards, this battery is ideal for wearables and soft robotics.

A team made up of researchers from the University of California San Diego and California-based company ZPower recently developed a flexible, rechargeable silver oxide-zinc battery with a five to 10 times greater areal energy density than standard batteries. Not only does it perform better than most commercial flexible batteries, but it’s also easy to manufacture. Most flexible batteries require sterile conditions, under vacuum for manufacturing. This new battery can be printed in normal lab conditions, making it ideal for use in electronic wearables and soft robotics.

This battery’s areal capacity is 50 milliamps per square centimeter at room temperature, which is 10 to 20 times greater than the areal capacity of your standard Lithium-ion battery. Due to its lower impedance or the resistance of an electric circuit or device to alternative current, the battery has a higher capacity than current flexible batteries.

Using an Intel NUC to Build a Miniature iMac G4 “Lamp” That Actually Runs macOS

December 10, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Apple has put out some unusual designs over the years, starting with the original Macintosh — the Apple II was fairly conventional in appearance — and carrying on all the way up to the current “cheese grater” Mac Pro. But few of them stood out on store shelves as much as the iMac G4. It was released in 2002 and had an LCD, which was unusual for the time, attached to the top of a dome that housed the rest of the components. The design was most often compared to a Pixar-style lamp, and is remembered fondly by enthusiasts today. GregO29 managed to replicate the iMac G4 in miniature form using an Intel NUC.

Quantum device performs 2.6 billion years of computation in 4 minutes

December 9, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Photons explore quantum maze faster than possible for any classical computer.

I am a great believer in solving problems with lasers. Are you suffering from a severely polarized society and a fast-growing population living below the poverty line? Well, I have the laser to solve all your problems.

OK, maybe not. But when it comes to quantum computing, I believe that lasers are the future. I suspect that the current architectures are akin to the Colossus or the ENIAC: they are breakthroughs in their own right, but they are not the future. My admittedly biased opinion is that the future is optical. A new paper provides my opinion some support, demonstrating solutions to a mind-boggling 10³⁰ problem space using a quantum optical system. Unfortunately, the support is a little more limited than I’d like, as it is a rather limited breakthrough.

Andy Geppert’s Core 64 Interactive Core Memory Boards Get a Final Design and 3D-Printed Weaving Jig

December 3, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Designed to bring back a classic from the early days of computing in interactive form, the new Core 64 boards will form a stack eight deep.

Andy Geppert has unveiled the latest entry in the Core 64 family, a range of badge boards designed to bring back a classic of early computing: hand-woven magnetic core memory.

While modern computers and microcontrollers run from dynamic RAM, static RAM, flash RAM, or most commonly a combination thereof, that technology wasn’t always available. Early computers had to rely on other forms of random access memory, with one of the most widespread being magnetic core — toroidal magnets suspending in a hand-woven grid of copper wire.

Easy & Powerful Arduino Alternative? #4 Pyboard (MicroPython) Beginner’s Guide

December 1, 2020 by CrackedConsole

In this video we will be having a closer look at the Pyboard in order to find out whether it is a good Arduino alternative. Along the way we will discover all of the features the board comes with and learn quite a bit of MicroPython programming. Let’s get started!

TinyML on Arduino and STM32: CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) example

November 30, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Painless TinyML Convolutional Neural Network on your Arduino and STM32 boards: the MNIST dataset example!
Are you fascinated by TinyML and Tensorflow for microcontrollers?
Do you want to run a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) on your Arduino and STM32 boards?
Do you want to do it without pain?

EloquentTinyML is the library for you!

Google Releases Objectron Dataset to Help Improve 3D Object Understanding in Computer Vision

November 29, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Google’s AI division has announced the release of the Objectron dataset, a corpus of short video clips designed to capture common objects from various angles — and each coming with augmented reality session data with sparse point-clouds and manually-annotated 3D bounding boxes.

“Understanding objects in 3D remains a challenging task due to the lack of large real-world datasets compared to 2D tasks (e.g., ImageNet, COCO, and Open Images),” explain Google Research software engineers Adel Ahmadyan and Liangkai Zhang. “To empower the research community for continued advancement in 3D object understanding, there is a strong need for the release of object-centric video datasets, which capture more of the 3D structure of an object, while matching the data format used for many vision tasks (i.e., video or camera streams), to aid in the training and benchmarking of machine learning models.”

Jeff Geerling Squeezes 4.15Gb/s From a RaspberryPi Compute Module 4 Using a PCIe Network Card

November 28, 2020 by CrackedConsole

Jeff Geerling has succeeded in pulling over 4Gb/s of data from a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, by hooking up a four-port Ethernet card to its PCI Express bus — and the same may well be possible on a modified Raspberry Pi 4, too.

Launched last month, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 takes the core technology found in the popular Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and brings it to a system-on-module (SoM) form factor. The biggest shift from the original design, though, comes with making the USB 3.0 ports optional and replacing them with a fully-functional PCI Express Gen. 2 lane — suitable for all manner of add-on boards, providing you can find suitable drivers for the Arm architecture.