Study compares Rust and C languages for embedded firmware development

There’s a lot of hype around the Rust programming language, and I’m seeing it being adopted by various projects, not least the Linux kernel. However, so far it was unclear to me whether it was suitable for embedded firmware development since the hardware resources are limited on microcontrollers. A low memory and storage footprint is required, and optimal performance may also be important, for example, to lower the power consumption of battery-powered devices. A Cornell Universty’s study entitled “Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case with Ariel OS” attempts to answer this question using embedded C and Rust, and the...

Cutting Steel Gears with Homemade EDM

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=vZhCjU2zuyg

Electrostatic discharge machining (EDM) may be slower than alternatives like laser cutting, water jets, or a milling machine, but for some applications there’s no alternative: it can cut through any conductive material, no matter how hard, and it leaves no mechanical or thermal stress in the workpiece. Best of all, they’re relatively accessible for a resourceful hacker, such as [Inofid], who recently built the second iteration of his desktop wire EDM.

The EDM’s motion system comes from a cheap desktop CNC router, which had a water tank mounted in its workspace and had the spindle replaced with a wire-management mechanism. The...

Using NFC to Power Devices Instead of Qi

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=9q71xzwV4zQ

It shouldn’t be any surprise that NFC and similar RFID implementations are capable of providing power to a receiver, since this is after all how RFID tags can work without a battery. The question is more whether you can do more with NFC than just briefly power some low-power circuitry to spit out some data. This is the topic of a recent [Denki Otaku] video.

Although both Qi and NFC use electromagnetic induction, they differ in the frequency and correspondingly the maximum power that they can deliver to a receiver. For NFC this is around a Watt, with the used NFC...

How Giant Tanks Of Fluid Could Help Support The Power Grid

If you’ve been paying any attention to the renewable energy space, you’ll know that generation isn’t really the problem anymore. Solar panels are cheap, and wind turbines are everywhere. The problem is matching generation with demand—sometimes there’s too much wind and sun, and sometimes there’s not enough. Ideally, you could store that energy somewhere, and deploy it when you need it.

The answer everyone keeps reaching for is lithium-ion batteries, and they work just fine. However, there’s a competing technology that’s been quietly scaling up in the background—the vanadium flow battery. It has some unique advantages that could see it rise...

A Digital Audio Recorder For TOSLink

Every now and then in our travels we come upon a project with such an obvious need that it’s almost a surprise nobody has thought of doing it before. So it is with [Elehobica]’s project, an audio recorder for S/PDIF audio streams. It’s the device you could have used, years ago!

S/PDIF, or its optical fiber cousin TOSLINK, is the digital output you’ll find on the back of Hi-Fi equipment, it’s a serial encoding of an uncompressed digital audio data stream dating from the era when CDs were new. Its relative simplicity may be what’s given it longevity — it’s easy...

LightInk, a Solar Powered ESP32 Smartwatch

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=qBj7sOVVzNI

There’s something about the ESP32 family of microcontrollers and timekeeping. We probably see it in clocks as often as we do anything else; we also probably see more clocks with one as the beating heart than any of the many other possible timekeeping options.

[Daniel Ansorregui]’s LightInk watch is no different in that regard — but it is very different in one important detail, because like any other smartwatch, you won’t have to worry about battery life. Outside of gloomiest Gotham, its built-in solar panel should be able to keep it charged.

That’s for a few reasons. The obvious one is the...

Renesas RZ/V2H Robotics Development Kit handles AI vision, motor control, and power management with a single board

Renesas WS125-V2HRDKREFZ is a Robotics Development Kit (RDK) powered by Renesas RZ/V2H Arm Cortex-A55/R8/M33 microprocessor and designed for high‑performance AI vision applications leveraging the MPU’s built-in 80 TOPS (sparse) AI accelerator. The kit ships with 16GB LPDDR4, 64MB QSPI flash, a 64GB microSD card, and appears to be partially inspired by the Raspberry Pi 5 with a 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header, a 16-pin PCIe Gen3 FFC connector, two MIPI CSI connectors, and a micro HDMI port. Other features include a Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.2 ports, two CAN-FD interfaces, and a 12-24V DC input voltage range. Renesas WS125-V2HRDKREFZ...

E-paper Dashboard Reimagines Smart Home’s Connection with Technology

When [Joel] and his partner got married, they had a goal to create a home with a healthy relationship to technology, which largely means avoiding smartphone use. Smartphones aren’t without their benefits, though, like being clocks and calendars, so [Joel] started looking for other options to replace these capabilities. At first he went with a “magic mirror” solution, but quickly pivoted to a wall-mounted e-paper solution he calls Timeframe which has evolved into a respectable overview for his home and life.

E-paper has a number of advantages over LCD and LED displays, one of which being that its resemblance to real...

Camera Slider: Build Instead of Buy Goes Awry

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=AiuP5UIWeO4

[TheHyperFix] had a problem. He’d spied a brilliant camera slider, but didn’t want to lay out big money to acquire it. The natural solution? Build one! Only, life is seldom so straightforward.

The plan was straightforward – take an old broken 3D printer, and repurpose its parts to make a camera slider instead. The build started with a aluminium extrusion, some V-slot wheels, and a 3D printed platform to hold the camera. Moving the platform was done via a belt drive, using the stepper motors and some software to tell the original printer controller what to do.

Unfortunately, the early experiments failed...

Congatec conga-TC300 COM Express module features up to Intel Core 7 350 Wildcat Lake processor

congatec conga-TC300 is an entry-level edge AI COM Express Type-6 Compact module powered by 15W Intel Core Series 3 “Wildcat Lake” SoCs up to the Core 7 350 hexa-core processor. The module supports up to 64GB DDR5 SO-DIMM memory and features optional on-board UFS 3.1 storage, an Intel i226 2.5GbE controller, and two standard 220-pin board-to-board connectors exposing I/Os such as SATA, DDI and LVDS or eDP display interfaces, USB4, USB 3.2, USB 2.0, PCIe Gen4/Gen3, and more. congatec conga-TC300 specifications: Wildcat Lake SoC (one or the other) Intel Core 3 305 6-core CPU – 2x P-cores @ 1.5/4.3 GHz...