From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
Definitely a place to visit if you can. I traveled there in 1983 just as it was starting to erupt and visited a lot of places that are now under lava rock! In a later visit we were walking out to see one of the "peep holes" where you can see the lava down below and the rocks started getting slippery, except they weren't slippery it was our shoe soles melting, oops.
Random nerd note: The history is slightly wrong. Netscape had their own "interactive script" language at the time Sun started talking about Java and somehow got the front page of the Mercury news when they announced it in March of 1995. At the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt Germany everyone was talking about it and I was roped into giving a session on it during lunch break (which then had to be stopped because no one was going to the keynote by SGI :-)). Everyone one there was excited and saying "forget everything, this is the future." So, Netscape wanted to incorporate it into Netscape Navigator (their browser) but they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language. They wanted to call it JavaScript to ride the coattails of the Java excitement and Sun legal only agreed to let them do that if they would promise to ship Java in their browser when it hit 1.0 (which it did in September of that year).
So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.
So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.
I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun. Here's a picture of most of us at the time : http://mcmanis.com/chuck/original_java_team.html (this was originally in the HotJava distribution Sun gave out when the source was released.)
I was doing security, networking, crypto, and a bit of Solaris support along with others. Basically I was a 'systems' guy vs a 'language' guy like James, Arthur and Richard. We all participated in the integration with Navigator and had weekly meetings with Netscape while we were doing that.
The Bigelow stuff was very promising and showed that it could work. The larger units on extruded spokes was a viable path to a .5G space station. This would be doable with three (possibly 4) Starship launches[1].
[1] Caveat Starship has to reach its goal of transporting 100 tonnes to LEO
Ya I really like their airship to orbit concept. I asked AI about lift to drag (L/D) ratios in plasma at 10,000-17,5000 mph (5-8 km/s) and it suggested that lifting bodies achieve between about a 1:1 and 3:1 L/D ratio. If we assume the generous 3:1 L/D ratio, that would seem to make a single-stage to orbit space plane possible.
A bit off-topic, but an aerospike engine is half of a rocket nozzle, with a virtual half created by the supersonic shockwave. So we could envision a retractable nozzle half that moves through subsonic, transonic and supersonic modes to power the airship.
Also the SABRE engine uses (according to AI) 16,800 thin-walled tubes filled with liquid hydrogen to cool ambient air to -238 F (-150 C or 123 K) in 10 milliseconds so that it can be compressed up to 140 atmospheres and fed into a combined-cycle engine. That would allow it to be air-breathing up to mach 5.4 (3,600 mph or 1.6 km/s) and transition to liquid oxygen after leaving the atmosphere.
I also asked it about using something like titanium to withstand the heat of exiting the atmosphere (since the titanium SR-71 reached mach 3+) but it said that it can't withstand a high enough temperature. So an ablative coating might need to be applied between launches. Quite a bit of research was done for that through about the 1970s before NASA chose the space shuttle with its reusable tiles.
It seems like most of the hard work has already been done to achieve this. So I don't really understand why so many billions of dollars get devoted to other high-risk ventures like SpaceX. When for a comparatively smaller amount of money, a prototype spaceplane could be built. I'm guessing that the risk/reward value just wasn't proven yet. But really shouldn't VC money chase the biggest bet?
This is the kind of stuff that I went down rabbit holes for when I dreamed of winning the internet lottery. Now that AI is here, I can feel the opportunity for that slipping away. A more likely future is the democratization of problem solving, where everyone knows everything, but has little or no money and doesn't want to pay for anything. So really not much different from today. So maybe it's better to let these half-baked ideas go so that someone else can manifest them.
Aerospikes are hard because you cant control the external pressure. At altitude A you have X atmospheric pressure, but at altitude B, Y pressure, that pressure is what keeps the exhaust against the surfave and exerting force, you can only design an aerospike for a certain effecient operational altitude and outside of that its just not great.
A nozzle engine doesnt have to account for this as much because the nozzle is keeping the pressure of the exhaust
Nozzle engines absolutely have to account for the external pressure. The optimal pressure as the exhaust leaves the bell should be as close as possible to ambient for full thrust.
If the pressure at exhaust is higher than ambient, the exhaust pushes outward against the ambient pressure and you get huge exhaust plumes, and lost efficiency.
Conversely, if the pressure at exhaust is lower, the ambient pressure pushes the exhaust inward into shock diamonds[1] and you, again, lose efficiency.
Engine bells specifically yield their max efficiency at one external pressure/altitude. The reason you see shock diamonds is most often from ground-level testing (or takeoff) of engines that perform best at altitude.
Airship To Orbit is JP Aerospace, not Bigelow. It seems like an utterly bonkers and fairly implausible concept and I'm definitely not equipped to analyze its merits. But the JP team have some legitimate accomplishments in the rockoon world, and appear to be honest, hardworking people. Definitely not grifters. I've been following their work on ATO since they first announced it at a Space Access conference in ... 2003, I think? Still can't figure out whether it's real or not.
Yeah, airship to orbit might still be a question mark, but there is a significant overlap in other useful areas.
You should be for example totally able to build an inflatable frame for a launch loop, making it possible to launch payloads from above most of the atmosphere.
Also for re-entry the more you lower the density of something, the less re-entry stresses there will be. So you could construct a giant low-pressure inflatable decelerator device and have it essentially float down all the way from orbit, incrementally shedding energy as it comes down over a longer period of time, taking care to balance the rate of descent, heating and internal/external pressures.
Congrats to the Blue Origin team! That's a heck of a milestone (landing it on the second attempt). It will compete more with Falcon Heavy than Starship[1] but it certainly could handle all of the current GEO satellite designs. I'm sure that the NRO will appreciate the larger payload volume as well. Really super glad to see they have hardware that has successfully done all the things. The first step to making it as reliable as other launch platforms. And having a choice for launch services is always a good thing for people buying said launch services.
Notably, from a US policy standpoint, if they successfully become 'lift capability #2' then it's going to be difficult to ULA to continue on.
[1] Although if Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change.
New Glenn significantly increases the capacity to Low Earth Orbit, which is what this first phase of the space race has always been about (for Golden Dome, and to a lesser extent commercial internet constellations). All eyes on Starship now.
Falcon Heavy does up to ~64 tons to LEO and has been available for a while. New Glenn isn't bringing any new capabilities to the table. It is still a very welcome alternative.
64 tons is if Falcon Heavy is fully expended (nothing recovered) configuration. Even with smaller payload, the center core is generally a lost cause. Falcony Heavy is extremely difficult to launch as I learned when I worked at SpaceX. It turned out that slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
I'll defer to your experience on this, however Falcon Heavy is the comparable platform so what you're saying is that New Glenn might be able to out compete Falcon Heavy given it was designed from the start for this space? (Not trying to put words in your mouth, just keeping my launch services portfolio up to date :-)).
> slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
True. But given the far-lower demand for the Heavy's payload capabilities (vs. Falcon 9), and the costs of the alternatives launch providers for such payloads - slapping a bunch of Falcons together looks like an excellent corporate engineering strategy choice.
The individual Falcon turn-around is slow (months of refurb), and the record half-month ones swapped some engines. B1067's 30-reuse is a ship of Theseus rebuilt over 4+ years.
Feh, swapping engine is not an option for the first few initial Mars trips, unless its payload also contains engines (can't imagine the scissor-lift payload either that needs to go with).
The head of SDI formed the Mars Society with Zubrin. He was originally going to run SpaceX as Chief Engineer (cite: Liftoff) but he instead got appointed NASA admin and directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX. This same SDI head then formed something called SDA in 2017 under Trump which is the platform for Golden Dome, or "the SDI 2.0".
This is a multi-trillion dollar program which only Musk has been awarded contracts (as of Nov 2025) and involves the total weaponization of space.
The US space industry isn't that big. The same people are all over the place and many have been in the industry for many, many decades and had many positions. And many of the people interested in Mars are also interested in space in general and in military space in general, this isn't surprising.
When SpaceX got started, clearly with the focus on Mars he tried to pick up well known experts. Griffin among them, again this isn't surprising. And when SpaceX did that it was not at all clear that Griffin would be able to be NASA Administrator. And because Griffin as a very opinionated person he didn't get along super well with Musk and instead went to In-Q-Tel. But he knew that SpaceX was serious and Musk had the financed to put more money into SpaceX then most other companies.
Also you will see the Griffin was also at Orbital Sciences as CEO. So he had some links to both competitors in the COTS competition and likely knew or worked with many others over his career.
And if you do the research on COTS instead of just saying 'directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX' is just a major oversimplification. COTS started by other people inside NASA who were sick of the old practices.
The first round of COTS were selected May 2006. SpaceX launched the first Falcon 1 in March 24, 2006. So during COTS SpaceX was not some 'nobody' company, NASA was aware of them and while today 'private company close to launching Orbital rocket' isn't impressive anymore, back then it was very much so. SpaceX had done more already then many other companies in the competition.
Also, if you know anything about NASA processes, the Administrator can not just 'pick' whoever he wants. There is process that is guided by lots of requirements and so on. Unless you have any actual evidence that this process was somehow corrupt and that Griffin conspired to give money to SpaceX above everybody, then you better show some evidence for that. And 'worked for few month with Musk' isn't evidence. And in fact SpaceX was selected because many of the NASA people who did the selection were impressed with SpaceX as many have talked about in interviews over the years.
Given that SpaceX was selected and was successful, its hard to argue that NASA made the wrong choice. NASA selected 3, SpaceX, Kistler and Orbital, and 2 of those were successful. So it seems the program wasn't run by idiots.
Literally the whole 'evidence' for 'theory' is Mike Griffin likes missile defense and he has been in the Space industry for many, many decades and knows everybody. That's it, that's your evidence. Griffin and others like him never made secret of what they wanted. That doesn't mean that when he worked at NASA missile defense was the only thing he ever thought about and that all his actions at NASA were only with the singular goal of missile defense.
If you want to make the argument that orbital missile defense is a bad idea, that's fine, you don't need need to make up a bunch of conspiracy theory where non exists. You just make yourself look silly.
Actually I recall their were a number of anomalies with Griffin's contracts at NASA. It was widely reported he was chasing away the bigger companies from the COTS program he formed. Saying himself that he assigned the decision-making to Doc Horowitz... Mike Griffin, Doc Horowitz and Elon Musk were close friends and the most prominent founding members of the Mars Society other than Zubrin. In the end all the money went to Griffin's own small company Orbital and Musk's newfound SpaceX.
It was well known in those circles that Mars Society leadership was from Team B and Citizens' Advisory Council (which were the two groups that originally conceived Reagan's SDI, the Golden Dome predecessor). Max Hunter was the force behind reusable rockets with the DC-X. As mentioned, Griffin was effectively SpaceX's early chief engineer leading the guys he poached from the nearby McDonald Douglass Huntington Beach DC-X site (Chris Thompson, Tim Buzza, John Garvey, etc..) The other half of the DC-X team went to Blue Origin of course.
Funny how well the Mars mania took hold and people forget this basic history. It's the only way to make heads or tails of what's going on with Elon these days. He truly believes in SDI, but God help us all if he's in charge of it. It was recently reported he wanted to make Golden Dome a subscription service!
One question for you since your worked at SpaceX. Starship v4 is supposed to be able to bring 200 metric tons to LEO vs 35 metric tons for v2. Do you have any guesses on the finally amount that New Glenn will be able to bring up when it reaches its version/block 4?
^ Be aware that a large number of accounts in this thread are throwaway sockpuppets which are obviously linked. It's a problem that they're pretending to be a crowd of unrelated people; it's an inauthentic attack trying (I don't know why) to manipulate HN sentiment.
It's the new age of propaganda. It's not just on HN; it's just slightly easier to spot here because we can easily look at history. Bots are everywhere, trying to drive the narrative in the direction their owners desire. They're playing a really long game here and we don't even know who the players are.
The pro-Musk propaganda on X is truly staggering as of late. Pretty sure talking about his Golden Dome connections, which have been widely reported by Reuters, WSJ, etc.. is at least the opposite of that.
I figure evolution will solve that. The kind of people who don’t have kids while living in prosperity will die out. The ones who reproduce will stick around.
We’ll build mirror life to assist us so we keep not needing children before evolution has a chance to fix anything. I postulate it is coming this century.
This is only a problem when you look at the micro level of cultures or individual states. Sure, some culture may die out, but that's been happening forever.
There's 8 billion humans on this planet, and we're still fucking like we always have been. The human race will be safe from prosperity.
Humans will number 10 to 11 billion before the curve starts pointing downward. Even China, the supposed basket case of population collapse will "collapse" to their level of a few decades ago. The current population was supposed to be catastrophically overpopulated.
I don't agree with them but there are significant numbers of people who think 10 or 11 billion is way beyond sustainability.
Population decline is predicted or currently happening in some poor countries too. It's not a prosperity driven effect. Children don't die young anymore even in poor countries. There's just generally less pressure to spawn your own gang of supporters. Elon excepted I guess.
"Prosperity" implies that the problem is folks smart enough to not have children beyond the means to raise them into a similar or better lifestyle.
I prefer "Precarity" induced fertility collapse. Down here in the mud I guess I have a different view with my 1 child and wife with a heart condition who would likely die from a 2nd pregnancy.
Literally Dr. Strangelove (Edward Teller). This whole thing is a decades-old Heritage Foundation scheme to beat MAD game theory so they can start and win a nuclear war.
Really? They knew about Project 2025 when they started development and were 100% certain that Trump would return and green light such a project in 20205?
The "dream" of such a system was there for a long time, waiting for the proper tools to build it. Even without that plan though, once you have a hammer you'll find plenty of nails. Putting heavy stuff in space was always going to catch the eye of the deep-pocketed military.
I agree on ULA. It will be hard for them to compete on price. And if the US military has two reliable launch-providers, there won't be room for a third heavy-lift vehicle.
But it will probably take a while for the "steamroller" to get going. For the next year or two it will seem to ULA as if everything is fine. And then they'll get flattened.
tl;dr: a strategic military recognition that relying exclusively on full-custom, military-spec weapon systems is unaffordable (on either a dollar or time-to-develop basis), when your competitor is a vertically-integrated Chinese civilian+military procurement system
The "production" lift capacity included some assumptions apparently about how much they could get out of Raptor and what they expected the assembly to weigh. Engineering constraints requiring more structure, the heat shield being inadequate, and the inability to raise the chamber pressure on Raptor to get the promised ISP have all impacted what the "expected" lift to LEO/GEO will actually be. Don't misunderstand, I am impressed as heck with SpaceX's engineering team and they are definitely getting closer to the point where they will have the design space fully mapped out and can make better estimates. The NASA documents are a better source of news on how Starship is going (as it's slated to be part of the Artemis program) than SpaceX marketing (one is engineering based, one is sales based). AND New Glenn isn't "fully" re-usable, its another 'upper stage gets consumed' platform (like Falcon). That is definitely an advantage with Starship if they make that work. For history, the shuttle has a similar history of shooting high and then finding that the engineering doesn't work.
The first version was supposed to launch 150 tons to LEO. In reality it was something like 15 tons. Even the new V3 (significantly taller) only aims for 100 tons, and whether they achieve it is still an open question.
Falcon Heavy has been successfully flown 11 times. Falcon Heavy can lift 67 tons to orbit. Starship has only lifted a fraction of that. SpaceX claims the price per kilogram to orbit for Falcon Heavy is even less than Falcon 9.
Every attempt at building products that are better faster cheaper more capable than your own existing successful products is extremely difficult.
Vaporware is "late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled" [1].
Starship is late, so you're pedantically correct. But so is New Glenn, and it started being developed when Falcon 9 made its first trip to the ISS. (2012.)
And Blue Origin was incorporated a few years prior to SpaceX. They’ve been working on this problem significantly longer than SpaceX, so they were more confident in their approach.
"a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"
It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available, but only thing it'll share with original announced product is a name. Nowhere close on the cost/features/scale/etc.
Only things that were shown so far are prototypes that are many iterations away from being anywhere close to a product.
New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps.
> It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available
Did you miss Falcon 9 and Heavy? (New Glenn competes with them, not Starship. Falcon Heavy can launch more mass than New Glenn, currently, for cheaper.)
> New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps
This is literally the first time they've successfully recovered New Glenn. Recovered. No reuse. It's the second time they've every flown the damn thing. It's impressive. But it's not "just going through final validation."
I have a background in aerospace engineering, specifically astronautics. It's wild to see armchair engineers shoot shit at major accomplishments like this.
I'm reading this thread and there are a few things that come to mind.
My sense is that SpaceX's goals with Starship are significantly more ambitious than what is being tried with New Glenn. I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of what Blue is facing with New Glenn, but if we take that "rapid reusability" goal seriously the problem set seems significantly larger and not so "been there, done that". This makes the development programs much more difficult to compare.... certainly on the surface of the public optics at the very least.
While it's one thing to talk about rockets, it's another altogether to look and the engineering and practices going into the manufacture process of those rockets. I'm not an engineer, but I do work in manufacturing and, at least looking from the outside, SpaceX seems to be dedicating some significant amount of effort into building a scalable manufacturing process. Many other efforts have always appeared to be more about "bespoke" production even if the designs of each unit produced are constant. I could be wrong and maybe it's just SpaceX is a lot more transparent (willingly or otherwise)... but looking in from the outside, they seem to be developing a very mass-production oriented rocket factory.
And if New Glenn is just finalizing things and Starship is just vaporware... well New Glenn still has to land a couple more boosters and re-fly one (or two?) to catch up to those vaporware numbers. :-) Sure, New Glenn has now flown a paying customer... but I think we'll see Starlink launches on Starship pretty soon... well before it gets to "final validation".
> yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things
You're wrong, but I'm curious for the sources that lead you to think this.
> Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes
"Following the launch, New Glenn’s first stage attempted a landing on the recovery vessel Jacklyn, also known as Landing Platform Vessel 1, which was positioned 620 km downrange from LC-36. However, controllers lost telemetry from the stage sometime after the entry burn started and Blue Origin confirmed that the booster was lost" [1].
Yeah, the SS just don't make a lot of sense at this point. The mail slot design was always dubious, and that orange stain was really uninspiring as well.
> nothing even remotely reassembling what was advertised to the public (and sold to the government) as Starship
If it can get its mass into orbit, it delivers what it sold. I'd currently put my money on a successful orbital launch of Starship before New Glenn re-flies a booster for a paying customer.
US government didn't pay for getting its mass into orbit.
Getting Starship to the orbit means that they have something called Starship in the orbit. It doesn't mean product that they sold isn't vaporware - what was sold with a name of Starship included much more things than getting stage 2 into orbit.
None of them were cancelled. But none of them exist in any form or shape remotely reassembling the product - therefore - vaporware. It's that simple.
But also, since you're telling me there had been no material impacts to the customers timelines, sorry, I don't think you're arguing in good faith, so I'm not going to engage here anymore.
In this thread your pedantic definition of vaporware seems to hinge on a compatibility between spec and delivery that has not existed once in the history of frontier engineering, so I'm not sure good faith is in high supply here in any case.
wow, given the recent starship milestones that were reached, this is a really strange comment (well, they are behind schedule, but that's Elon Musk way of working).
FWIW, the last time I tried ventoy (early 2025) some ISOs would screw up the USB stick if you tried to boot them (and by that I mean the USB stick would no longer boot anything).
Fun stuff. You kids don't know how lucky you are to have really capable MCU's for just a few bucks. :-)
It is kind of the ultimate "not a TOE[1]" example yet.
[1] TOE or TCP Offload Engine was a dedicated peripheral card that implements both the layer 1 (MAC), layer 2 (Ethernet), and layer 3 (IP) functions as a co-processing element to relieve the 'main' CPU the burden of doing all that.
And of course the counterfeit problem has very little to do with what node is used to produce the chips; it's a question of how effective your society's institutions are at keeping fraud under control.
There's the clearly labeled and advertised GD32F103 style clone which is pin-compatible, supports higher clock speeds than the original STM32F103, but takes much longer to power on and has different analog characteristics, maybe some worse; not a problem.
There's the potential case where somebody sells you a GD32 telling you it's an STM32, either with the proper markings, with the markings sanded off, or with actually fake markings. This still might cause no problems, or might result in a problem that takes you a long time to track down. (Maybe you're unknowingly relying on, say, the hypothetical lower power consumption of a clone, so when you fab a
batch with real STM32s, the product's battery life goes to shit.) You can detect this in firmware and may be able to come up with workarounds. Or, if your vendor is FTDI, they may sneak malware into their Microsoft Windows driver and brick your products months or years after you've sold them. They've done it twice.
There's the case where the clone is designed to act as much like the original as possible, so maybe you can't detect the substitution in firmware and can't work around whatever problems the counterfeit is causing.
Then there's the case where you ordered 10,000 STM32s in a QFN-32 and got 10,000 QFN-32s that say "STM32" on them but are actually PICs with a totally different pinout, or SRAM, or something else. These will not probably still work.
This depends on the PIO in the RP2040/RP2350. As far as I know, that is an innovation exclusive to the Raspberry Pi company, so it would not be possible to do this on another microcontroller:
The microcontroller has additional cores called state machines in the PIOs that are specifically designed for bit banging and have their own custom ISA that reportedly only has 9 instructions.
Yes, it does, although it's almost like horizontal microcode; it can do several things in a clock cycle other than the instruction itself. I didn't mean to imply that you could bitbang 100BaseT with a Padauk PFS150 or a PY32.
The Padauk FPPA chips are probably a bit better at bitbanging strange protocols than any ARM, but not in the same class as the Pi's PIO.
After consulting the datasheet, I think the most things you can do in a single pioasm instruction would be a conditional decrementing JMP with side-set, wrap, and delay:
• decrement the X or Y register;
• conditionally jump to a specified target address if it was nonzero;
• otherwise, jump (by "wrapping") to some other specified target address, usually an outer infinite loop;
• change the state of four or less GPIO pins to immediate constants;
• delay 1–15 clock cycles.
Arguably IN can compete here, replacing the first two items with:
• set one or more GPIO pins from bits shifted out of a shift register;
• conditionally "autopull" a 32-bit word from an input FIFO if the shift register is empty;
• conditionally stall the pioasm program if the FIFO is empty;
• conditionally initiate a DMA request to refill the FIFO if it's not full.
The OUT instruction has similar "autopush" capabilities.
Most of these are somewhat independent choices, but if you don't pull from the FIFO you won't have the other effects, and several of the options are state-machine-wide.
>Fun stuff. You kids don't know how lucky you are to have really capable MCU's for just a few bucks. :-)
Any suggestions for people not used to tinkering with hardware? I would like to play I think, but I have a lack of imagination regarding potential projects/goals.
One of my friends got a Pimoroni InkyFrame and was trying to figure out what to do with it. Ended up learning a substantial amount about how dithering works to convert images into the 7 colors the eInk display can produce. It just sits there playing the original Shrek at 1 minute per frame over and over again XD.
When he messed up the color conversion "Green Farquaad" was a recurring meme in our group chat.
I can recommend a 'Hacker Boxes'[1] subscription. It's $44/month currently, every month you'll get all the parts to build some gizmo or project and a full list of instructions. The prerequisites are that you know how to solder and have a soldering iron, and have a computer you can run the Arduino IDE on (even a Raspberry Pi can do that these days).
If you don't know how to solder the Hacker Boxes folks have a soldering workshop kit that includes an iron[2], but many maker spaces will do soldering clinics. Soldering irons are available as cheap[3] and more expensive[4] (and ludicrous[5]). The Arduino IDE runs on pretty much anything (Linux, MacOS, Windows).
I'd like to hook up a rain sensor to a skylight to close it when it rains (needs a little motor, too), and then also hook it up to weather forecasts.
I currently have to switch on my TV, surround set and a laptop, and then push multiple buttons to switch to/from a firestick. I'd like to automate that, so I can just switch it on/off and switch the source easily. Also if the system is in an unknown state (tv on, but using the incorrect HDMI input and the surround set if switched off, etc.), which is what the naive solution using a "fingerbot" and a IR blaster hooked up to godawful tuya stuff doesn't do.
Build a GPS-synchronized flip clock.
Add remote control door opening without destroying my flat's intercom system.
Mostly kinda boring home automation stuff, but would be worth it for tinkering.
As someone who is only mildly bullish about AI, my hope is that such ultra custom HA will be more common, and no longer limited fo the 0.1% and software engineers.
you can program it with the USB and the Arduino IDE
most dev boards (that means the MCU is put onto a PCB and you can do stuff with its pins) already have a LED on it so you can blink that without any soldering
they also usually have two tiny buttons one of which doesn't do anything/much and you can use those as input
ESP32 also has built in Wifi and you can make it host a supertiny webserver, or even be its own AP. It also has Bluetooth but I haven't tried that yet.
You can do all these things by asking ChatGPT for the code and instructions :-)
It can do a lot more than this though, but it might inspire you to try other things.
Oh one more very cool thing if you're just getting started is that the ESP32 has 10 pins which are "capacitive touch" sensors and attach a wire to that pin and if you touch the wire, your program gets a signal. This works very well and makes that you can do interactive stuff without even having to solder buttons on anything.
I can't get my head around it sometimes. I know most end up doing duties that a PIC-chip could do but the fact you can get a WiFi enabled microcontroller few a few bucks blows my mind.
The IO co-processing on the Pico is so powerful, I hope they expand on this.
It's also not really clear that using some of the more powerful chips for simple things is really a "waste" in any reasonable sense of the word. The packaging of a PIC/CH32 is probably the majority of its cost and environmental "footprint".
An RP2040 is not much more physical material.
An ESP8266/ESP32 is rather bit more material, but still not egregious.
The big waste is battery power, which for many hobby things is not that important. For comparison, RP2040 quiescent current is like 400μA, FRAM MSP430 is approximately 0.1μA in interruptible sleep.
Sometimes it goes the other direction. PCI SSL accelerator cards were a thing for a long time before CPUs got faster, got various crypto acceleration opcodes, web servers rewrote SSL logic in ASM, etc.
The fancy Mellanox NVIDIA Connect-X cards have kTLS support which offloads encryption to the NIC, Netflix has blogged about how they use it to send 100 Gbps encrypted traffic of a single box (Their OpenConnect infrastructure is really cool).
Nice, page 13 has the 'standard' chemical labels which happened to also be the contents of a 'standard' chemistry set (minus a couple for me, like no concentrated sulphuric acid and only dilute nitric acid.)
One of the things that has always impressed me was mid 20th century laboratory equipment, lots of clever ways to achieve the required accuracy.
This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
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