Chris Staecker on YouTube presents the Digi-Comp I, a plastic mechanical computer from 1963.
This educational toy used logic rods and tubes to simulate binary computation, offering a tangible introduction to programming for kids during the space race era.
More resources:
See the video below:
xssfox in Australia, while taking some rubbish down, spotted a Cricut Maker in e-waste. A quick look at it revealed that the it was in fairly good cosmetic condition with the exception of the rollers being perished.
I knew that Cricut were pretty aggressive with disabling/locking machines, but I gathered it would still be worth playing around for some fun. As it turns out this machine was locked, which was pretty expected. However with some hacking I was able to return it to having full functionality.
I fired up wireshark to capture USB messages between the Cricut and my machine. It uses USB CDC for communication and very quickly I found the packets responsible for sending the serial number. There didn’t appear to be any checksumming or crypto. So I borrowed a RPi RP2040 (Adafruit Feather RP2040 with USB Type A Host) which was able to act as both USB Host and USB Client.
Using the TinyUSB Arduino examples for USB Host and CDC simple echo, I was able to cobble together a simple proxy/rewriting device. With the rewriting device replacing out the serial number at a hardware level the software is none the wiser. The unit shows up in my account.
See more in the post here. Via Hackaday.
Shared by TheGadge on MakerWorld:
I wanted something to hold the Arduino Uno R3 (in my case, an Elegoo one) along with a breadboard – standard size.
The breadboard I buy have a sticky back which makes a permanent fixture, or you could just hot glue etc.I’ve designed this to be printed without supports. X1C handles it just fine.
This is my first upload of my own designs,
Download the files and learn more
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
sektor7_studios shares:
A pumpkin like no other — the classic pumpkin shape with an entire body made of skulls. One-piece 3D print, ready to go. Highly detailed skull texture for a chilling effect. Looks amazing in black, grey, or glow-in-the-dark filament. Perfect Halloween centerpiece. By Sektor 7 Studios
download the files on: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1857657-skeleton-head-pumpkin-halloween-decor
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
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Level 2 Jeff shared this video on Youtube!
Raspberry Pi sent me a little piece of a Pi Factory—a CM5 Programming Jig!
You can buy one too; they’re $600. Not that many people watching this will ever need one, especially considering CM5 pricing lately due to DRAM price shenanigans
It’s interesting nonetheless, so watch as I try using it with a couple of my CM5s!
There’s been a lot of talk about the vuln-pocalypse, to which Dan Luu doesn’t have much to add because Dan isn’t not a security person. But there hasn’t been much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmark-pocalypse.
While it’s become easier than ever to make serious performance gains, it’s also become easier than ever to reward hack a benchmark and make fake performance gains. The former is probably happening quietly across many different companies, but the latter is something I see at least once a week nowadays. Someone will claim they optimized X and got some huge performance improvement over existing software, but, when you look at it, what they did was make some optimization that improves benchmark performance without actually improving real-world performance. This is often some kind of “we rewrote X in Rust” project or a new startup that’s looking to either fundraise or sell something, but it happens on other kinds of projects as well.
Of course, people have always trumpeted unrepresentative microbenchmarks to show that their pet project is great. It’s always been easy to fake up an unrepresentative microbenchmark and that’s never going to change. What’s changed is that it used to take a lot of work to game a large benchmark suite, but an LLM and loop can just do it. There are quite a few famous examples of gaming large benchmark suites from back when this was hard. For example, way back when people cared about SPECint / SPECfp as proxies for workstation performance, CPU vendors would try to find compiler “optimizations” that would speed up the calculation in the benchmark, such as Sun finding a way to improve 179.art by 12x in SPECfp2000. Skilled engineers spent a lot of time trying to find benchmark hacks like that. LLMs not only make this trivial, they do it by default, making formerly trustworthy benchmarks meaningless unless you audit the result or trust someone who did.
Rather than point to someone’s bad claim, I’ll point to FRE, this regex engine I had an agent build, which I could claim is the world’s fastest regex engine because it beats the Rust regex crate at the fairly comprehensive rebar regex benchmark suite. But this was created by putting an agent in a loop for a month with instructions to not overfit to the benchmark but no real supervision. For the most part, getting an LLM to give you a good benchmark score is fairly easy, and this case was no different; it took a couple weeks to roughly match Rust regex crate performance and then another couple weeks to get to 1.4x faster on rebar. But agents are wont to reward hack and overfit unless you put serious guardrails in place to avoid that, which I didn’t do in this case as an experiment.
See more on danluu.com. Via Hacker News.
A new paper in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities entitled Data Center Waste Heat as an Emerging Urban Thermal Hazard: First Field Measurements of Neighborhood-Scale Air Temperature Impacts by David J. Sailor, Soroush Samareh Abolhassani, Eli P. Martin:
Data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of concentrated anthropogenic heat in urban environments. Despite heat flux densities that exceed peak solar irradiance by a factor of 2–6, their thermal impacts on adjacent communities have never been directly measured or reported in the peer-reviewed literature. This short communication addresses that gap by presenting the first vehicle-based traverse measurements of air temperature in residential neighborhoods downwind of operational data centers.
This communication presents the first field evidence that operational data centers produce measurable warming in adjacent residential neighborhoods, with the downwind warming effect as large as 2.2 °C and average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than upwind temperatures, extending more than 250 m downwind. These impacts arise from heat flux densities of 2000–6000 W/m2, magnitudes 2–6 times peak solar irradiance, equivalent to the heat emitted by thousands of residential buildings concentrated on a single site.
See the full paper (not currently locked by publisher) here.
Chris Staecker on YouTube presents the Digi-Comp I, a plastic mechanical computer from 1963. This educational toy used logic rods and tube...
