Bonnie J. Dunbar #ALD26 @findingada

Bonnie Jeanne Dunbar is an American engineer and retired NASA astronaut who flew on five Space Shuttle missions between 1985 and 1998. University of Washington Magazine shared her story.

It was only fitting that Dunbar flew on the space shuttle. As an undergraduate at the UW, she helped Ceramic Engineering Professor James I. Mueller develop the special ceramic tiles that NASA would use to coat the space shuttle to make it able to withstand re-entry into the atmosphere.

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today, in honor of Ada Lovelace, help celebrate all of the accomplishments of women in science, art, design, technology, engineering, and math. Today we will be sharing the stories of women that we think are modern day “Adas” alongside historical women that have made impacts in science and math.

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Shall we play a game? Agent vs. Agent

Pierre, writing at ICT en Onderwijs BLOG, rebuilt an agent-to-agent demo he saw in a Better Stack video. The original pitted GPT-6 Luna against Claude Haiku 5.5 in a game of Battleship. Pierre wanted the same three-part setup, a referee agent plus two player agents, but running on open source models, so he wouldn’t be paying for tokens. He picked tic-tac-toe instead, a game that ends in a draw when both sides play correctly.

The referee ran ornith-1.5:35b on the NOLAI server, one player ran qwen3.8 there, and the second player ran locally in LM Studio on a desktop with 64GB RAM and an RTX 2060 with 8GB VRAM. Getting that far took work. The NOLAI API documentation was thin, and newer Docker Desktop plugin versions did not accept the new syntax. Claude Code (Opus 5.5) did the debugging.

Small local models struggled. qwen3.5-9b moved fast but played badly with thinking off, and produced tokens but no move with thinking on. google/gemma-4-e4b (Q4_K_M) worked. Over five games against qwen3.8, it lost three, won one, and drew one.

See  more at ictoblog.nl and content on GitHub.

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A brief history of the Bloomberg Terminal

Allison Marsh traces the history of the Bloomberg Terminal in IEEE Spectrum. Michael Bloomberg cofounded Innovative Market Systems in 1981 after being fired from Salomon Brothers, with a $10 million payout and three former colleagues. The company built the Market Master terminal: a monochrome CRT, a custom keyboard, and a controller unit tied to a private network. At launch it covered only U.S. government bond prices and bond calculations.

Merrill Lynch was the first client, investing $30 million for a 30 percent stake and five years of exclusive rights. The first 22 terminals shipped in 1982. IMS became Bloomberg LP in 1986, and the Market Master became the Bloomberg Terminal.

The keyboard carried color-coded, finance-specific function keys. The hand-assembled original was nicknamed “the Chiclet.” A trackball arrived in 1990, a speaker with phone, headphone, and microphone jacks in 1992, and a fingerprint reader in the early 2000s. A subscription cost $1,600 per month in 1999 and runs above $32,000 a year today. Bloomberg stopped leasing dedicated terminals in 2000. The Smithsonian holds the keyboard Bill Gross used, with his login and password taped to the front.

See more at spectrum.ieee.org.

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The Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: subscribe for free

The Python for Microcontrollers Newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).

This ad-free, spam-free weekly email is filled with CircuitPython, MicroPython, and Python information that you may have missed, all in one place!

You get a summary of all the software, events, projects, and the latest hardware worldwide once a week, no ads! You can cancel anytime.

It arrives about 11 am Monday (US Eastern time) with all the week’s happenings.

And please tell your friends, colleagues, students, etc.

Please sign up > > >

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60 Hz “hello” on Metro RP2350

Wiring diagram combined with recorded output from the Metro RP2350. This clip is encoded at 30 fps; the board outputs video at 60 Hz.

Trying a new circuit design tool + a quick demo of Apple’s handwritten “hello” on a Metro RP2350. Wiring diagram and recorded output together… video elements in diagrams could show what the connected display… displays.

The drawing comes from a nre circuit designer tool, browser-based, for making circuit diagrams with Adafruit stuff. I combined the diagram and the recorded video for this clip. Adding video elements directly to the tool could let a project diagram show the wiring and the screen’s behavior in one place… so, an animation, a sensor readout, or what happens when you press a button.

The hardware here is a Metro RP2350 with PSRAM, running CircuitPython 11 and sending 640×480 video out at 60 Hz. The drawing shows the 22-pin HSTX connection feeding an HSTX-to-DVI adapter for an HDMI display or capture dongle, I record these in QuickTime from the board.

The Apple lettering comes via npwitk’s Macintosh Skeletal Filled font conversion… demo built from that geometry.

related

• NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit Metro RP2350 with PSRAM
• HSTX to DVI adapter board for RP2350
• Text mode HSTX DVI output on the Fruit Jam

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NASA’s PRIMA Spacecraft

Artist’s Concept of NASA’s PRIMA Spacecraft, image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

A couple of weeks ago, NASA announced the development of PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics, the first space telescope in a new class of missions called Probe Explorers. Launch is set for 2033, which is actually a pretty quick turnaround for NASA.  Design work for the James Webb Space Telescope began in 1996 and wasn’t launched until 2021. Teams are hard at work designing and planning PRIMA, you can see the image above for an artists concept.

 

With a 5.9-foot telescope, PRIMA will conduct deep, sensitive surveys of the universe in far-infrared light, helping bridge the gap between existing infrared observatories, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and radio telescopes. By studying radiant energy that only emerges in the far-infrared, PRIMA will address a wide range of questions about the universe. This includes the origins of planets outside our solar system, how galaxies and their black holes have grown and evolved over cosmic history, and how dust and heavy elements have built up in the universe over time – all helping paint a better picture of why the universe looks the way it does today.

From NASA:

NASA Selects Far-Infrared Telescope as First in New Mission Class
NASA Establishes New Class of Astrophysics Missions, Selects Studies

and more reading from arsTechnica: With PRIMA, NASA will try to build a billion-dollar space telescope in record time

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PyPortal Flyover Viewer

image via Bob Hammell, Hackster.io

 

Bob Hammell made a visualization for PyPortal that shows aerial imagery capture between two locations:

The view out the window of an airplane will always be captivating. Over the course of a long flight, the landscape below can shift from cities, to mountains, to farmlands and coastlines.

Each glance out the window shows a different scene from the one before, offering a quiet, endless opportunity to catch unique landmarks or casually watch the changing terrain.

The PyPortal Flyover Viewer was designed to bring this viewing experience from the sky down to the desktop.

Read Bob Hammell’s write up on Hackster.io

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