Embedded Systems

📘 Spying Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi Zero Tutorial for Wi-Fi penetration checking, so we'll go over the features and how to use the Pi Zero correctly in various situations The Raspberry Pi Zero is a very versatile device that can offer a wide range of features for a Raspberry Pi at its low end. We'll look at how to integrate more features and what you get as a result. This isn't a "how to" tutorial for Wi-Fi penetration checking, so we'll go over the features and how to use the Pi Zero correctly in various situations. More information... #articles #raspberry #zero #wifi

🔌 The Dawn of Wireless Electricity Wireless electricity sounds like science fiction, but the technology is already realized and primed for a utility-scale case study. And in this first-of-its-kind pilot program, Powerco—New Zealand’s second-largest electricity distributor—will test Emrod technology in 2021. The companies plan to deploy the prototype wireless energy infrastructure across a 130-foot expanse. To make it possible, Emrod uses rectifying antennas, (“rectennas”), that pass microwaves of electricity from one waypoint to the next: a solution well-suited to New Zealand’s mountainous terrain. Specialized square elements are mounted on intervening poles to act as pass-through points that keep the electricity humming along, and a broader surface area “catches” the entire wave. By eliminating the need for long stretches of traditional copper wiring, it can bring power to these regions, which can’t afford the kind of infrastructure that supports the power grid. More information... #news #energy

🗜 Drill Depth Display with Gyro Sensor If you have to drill a certain depth for a project, you need a bench drill with depth display. See how simple it works in this project. Most bench drills have a ruler with an arrow for reading. The success of the drilling depends on how accurately you can read the desired position. In this Arduino project I present an alternative proposal: A drilling depth display with a gyro sensor and 7-segment display with Arduino support. More information... #projects #arduino #display #sensor

📷 2 Axis controllable platform for ESP32-CAM for streaming video In this project, we’ll attach the ESP32-CAM to a pan and tilt stand with two SG90 servo motors. With a pan and tilt camera stand, you can move the camera up, down, to the left, and the right— this is great for surveillance. The ESP32-CAM hosts a web server that shows video streaming and buttons to control the servo motors to move the camera. More information... #projects #camera #esp32 #control #IoT

🦾 Wireless Power Transfer Techniques in Neural Stimulators & Implantable Medtech Wireless power transfer technologies are being extensively studied and developed for use in implantable medical devices, the advantages of which include the early detection of diseases and the treatment of specific defective organs. This article will explore wireless power transfer in neural stimulators and outline the key benefits and design challenges. What are Neural Stimulators? Neural stimulators are miniature implantable medical devices (IMDs) that can influence the activities of the brain and nervous system. They can provide therapeutic support, sensory evaluation, and enhanced motor control using electrical stimulation. This enables the technology to treat diseases like epilepsy and reduce the shaking caused by Parkinson's disease. More information... #articles #electronics

😎 Augmented Reality glasses by STMicroelectronics ST introduced MEMS micromirror devices by leveraging its extensive experience in MEMS technologies to design, develop and manufacture micro-electro-mechanical devices and electronic control systems to accurately and precisely rotate reflective surfaces along rotational axes. MEMS micromirror solutions are typically used in laser beam scanning systems (LBS) to project visible images or infrared patterns. These solutions work by deflecting laser beams emitted from laser diodes to project images onto the required field of view. The beam deflection is generally performed using a combination of two mirrors rotating on perpendicular axes. This solution brings several benefits compared to its competitive technologies: ▫️ Extended depth of field ▫️ High persistency and low latency ▫️ High brightness, ideal for smart glasses ▫️ Scalable field of view ▫️ Compactness and power efficiency ▫️ Light weight for the overall optical light engine More information... #news

🗜 3D-printed Multi-Turn Potentiometer (Using Worm Gear Mechanism) We, tinkerers, have used potentiometers whether it is of a buck-boost converter or simple audio amplifier, and at some point, we struggled with controlling it precisely. We can get trim pots but setting those regularly is not so easy. Also, there are multi-turn potentiometers available in the market but they are generally expensive and only available in a limited range of values. You will learn how to make a simple mechanism that can be used to turn any potentiometer into a multi-turn potentiometer. More information... #projects #3d_modeling #electronics

🔋 Fusion Power Plant for Generation of Net Electricity The scientists from DIII-D have designed a full “compact nuclear fusion plant” concept and detailed the plans in a new paper in Nuclear Fusion. In simulations, their 8-meter-wide pressurized plasma fusion concept is powerful enough to generate 200 megawatts (MW) of net electricity after the energy cost of the fusion itself. This would be the very first fusion power plant to generate net electricity. The current best ratio is an output of 67 percent of the total energy required to power the reactor. The researchers are careful to emphasize their paper is still very abstract. They want it to serve as a guide for the near future of pressurized plasma research, a sort of road map to whatever the next steps are. And while a traditional tokamak reactor that produces net power is still at least 9 to 14 years away, a pressurized tokamak is almost definitely even further out. More information... #news #articles #electronics #energy

🎙 Google releases the source code for Lyra low bitrate speech codec Google has now released the Lyra source code, written in C++ for optimal speed, efficiency, and interoperability and relying on both the Bazel build framework and the GoogleTest framework Whereas traditional codecs are based on digital signal processing (DSP) techniques, the key advantage for Lyra comes from the ability of the generative model to reconstruct a high-quality voice signal. More information... #news #software #machine_learning

📰 As Chips Scale Down, Leakage Current Goes Up. How Are Developers Responding? As chips scale down, leakage current—and specifically subthreshold leakage—become a prominent source of power consumption in ICs. When developers scale down transistors, they also tend to scale down supply voltages to minimize dynamic power consumption. However, scaling down supply voltage negatively affects circuit performance with respect to speed. A common way to overcome this is to lower the threshold voltage accordingly. As designers lower the threshold voltage, they decrease the subthreshold region—the result being more subthreshold leakage at more frequent intervals. This is why developers have mostly stopped scaling down supply voltages: at a certain point, the increase in subthreshold leakage is not worth the decrease in dynamic power consumption. More information... #news #articles #electronics

📟 ECG Display With Arduino This ECG (Electrocardiogram) unit has an integrated display. The display can show individual heart beats in a large format, the train of heart beats in a small format and a Poincaré plot. It is battery powered and can be worn round your neck on a lanyard. It is built from an AD8232 module (£7 with leads), an Arduino Nano (£3) and a 2.8" TFT display (£6) plus a few resistors, a pushbutton and so on - the sort of things you already have. For power, you can use 4 AA cells or a single Lithium cell. More information... #projects #arduino #display

💻 Shrinking the Arduino code One of the foundations of C++ is zero-overhead abstractions, yet the Arduino core has a very significant overhead. The Arduino basic blink example compiles to almost 1kB, with most of that space taken up by code that is never used. Rewriting the AVR core is a task I'm not ready to tackle, but after writing picoCore, I realized I could use many of the same optimization techniques in an Arduino library. The result is ArduinoShrink, a library that can dramatically reduce the compiled size of Arduino projects. More information... #articles #arduino #programming #libraries

🎛 AI Accelerators And How Engineers Can Utilise Them Understanding the role of AI accelerators in artificial intelligence gives an insight into its benefits in the world of electronics and computing AI accelerators are hardware chips specifically designed to accelerate and facilitate machine learning computations. In the bid to utilising artificial intelligence to its full potential at minimal power requirements, AI accelerators can be incorporated in machines to improve basic machine computations, enhance system performance, etc. To achieve this, AI accelerators have been utilised to accelerate the analysis of large linear algebra computations and parallelised them into smaller, often identical parts, some of which operate simultaneously. Some applications of artificial intelligence include the Internet of Things, algorithms for guiding robotic decision-making, and other data-intensive tasks. More information... #articles #machine_learning #artificial_intelligence

🧠 Simple Neural Network in Matlab for Predicting Scientific Data A neural network is essentially a highly variable function for mapping almost any kind of linear and nonlinear data. It can be used to recognize and analyze trends, recognize images, data relationships, etc. In this instructable we will be creating a very simple three layer neural network in Matlab. We will use it to recognize and predict trends in medical data. Our sample dataset that we will be using is fertility diagnosis data from UCI's Machine Learning Library. More information... #projects #programming #software #matlab #machine_learning #artificial_intelligence

🎛 Top 5 most powerful Arm SBCs & Devkits in 2021 While companies like Hardkernel, Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, and FriendlyArm offers affordable, great little Arm Linux development boards that are suitable for many projects, in some cases, your requirements may lead you to spend a bit more for either extra CPU power, more memory, AI processing power, faster I/Os and so on. ▫️ Snapdragon 888 Mobile Hardware Development Kit Equipped with Snapdragon 888 octa-core processor (1x Cortex-X1 core, 3x Cortex-A78 cores, and 4x Cortex-A55 cores), the board also boasts 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and 256GB of UFS storage, HDMI 2.0 & DisplayPort 1.4 video outputs, support for up to six cameras, and much more. ▫️ Jetson AGX Xavier for AI & Robotics Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit is the most powerful of the lot with an 8-core ARM v8.2 processor, a 512-core Volta GPU, and AI accelerators that deliver up to 32TOPS of processing power for AI workloads. The kit also integrates 32GB RAM, 32GB eMMC flash expandable with a UFS card, HDMI 2.0 and MIPI DSI video interface, up to 16x 2-lane CSI camera interface, and more. ▫️ Qualcomm RB5 Robotics Platform The board is equipped with Qualcomm QRB5165 octa-core Kryo 858 (Cortex-A77) CPU @ up to 2.84 GHz, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 128 GB of UFS3.0 storage, 15 TOPS of AI processing power, supports 3D depth cameras and offers plenty of expansion I/Os. The platform can run Linux, Ubuntu, and Robot Operating System (ROS) 2.0, and supports OpenCL and OpenGL ES APIs, as well as OpenCV for computer vision applications. ▫️ HoneyComb LX2K SBC SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K Arm SBC features an NXP LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex-A72 processor, supports up to 64GB RAM, offers high-speed networking thanks to up to 4x SFP+ 10GbE cages and a Gigabit Ethernet port, as well as four SATA ports, a PCIe x8 slot, M.2 SSD slot and more. ▫️ Khadas VIM3 Pro SBC Khadas VIM3 Pro SBC may seem out of place in this list with an hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 Amlogic A311D processor, coupled with a paltry 4GB of RAM and a 32GB eMMC flash, but that’s still a powerful platform, for instance, compared to Raspberry Pi 4 8GB, and it also includes of 5 TOPS NPU, offers good networking with Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11ac Wi-Fi 5 with RSDB support, and higher capacity and faster storage is possible via an M.2 NVMe SSD. More information... #articles #hardware #boards #cortex

🖐🏻 Finger Bend sensor made of piezoresistive fabric Finger Bend is a sensor created to find a way of making finger bends inside of a glove, control light and sound. The construction of the sensor is simple, using piezoresistive fabric which changes its resistance when deformed. By sewing this into a sheath that can be placed on the finger, and wiring it up with conductive threads, it can be used to detect the flexion of the wearer’s digits by sampling the resistance with an analog to digital converter on any garden variety microcontroller. The idea behind this glove is to then connect it to a body suit with other eTextile sensors for Immersive Audiovisual Performances. More information... #projects #sensors

💻 Crystal Language That Aims at C Performance with Ruby Syntax Releases 1.0 Crystal, a new object-oriented, compiled systems programming language that aims to blend the conciseness and friendliness of Ruby with the efficiency of C, recently released its first major version. Crystal 1.0 has a syntax close to Ruby’s and features statically inferred types, C bindings, and macros. Crystal may attract developers with a Ruby/Rails, Elixir/Phoenix background. The Crystal team explained the rationale behind the new language as follows: ▫️ We love Ruby’s efficiency for writing code. ▫️ We love C’s efficiency for running code. ▫️ We want the best of both worlds. ▫️ We want the compiler to understand what we mean without having to specify types everywhere. ▫️ We want full OOP. ▫️ Oh, and we don’t want to write C code to make the code run faster. More information: News page Official website Github page #news #programming #crystal

📰 The Scientific Instruments of the Mars Perseverance Rover Perseverance is equipped with seven scientific instruments that are specially engineered state-of-the-art sensor modules designed for use on Mars with the goal of testing, sampling and analyzing the geology and atmosphere of the planet and any potential biological signatures. ▫️ Mastcam-Z - is a mast-mounted camera system tasked with the job of taking panoramic and stereoscopic photographs of the surface of Mars. ▫️ MEDA is a meteorological system created to take measurements of the Martian weather, atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity but also the wind speed and direction. ▫️ PIXL is the rover’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry. It’s a module that houses an x-ray spectrometer that can identify chemical elements at a very small scale. ▫️ RIMFAX - the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment - is the first radar wave tool sent to the surface of Mars on a NASA mission. More information... #articles #robots