Boost Battery Life with the New Qwiic Power Switch
Hello everyone and welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! We hope all of you had a happy and safe Halloween last night! Today, we are going to take a look at two of our newest products, and they are both Qwiic capable! First, we look at the SparkFun Qwiic Power Switch, a recent addition from SparkX that will help with your Qwiic project's power management needs as well as featuring I2C Bus Isolation and GPIO Control. Following that, we have a new flexible Qwiic cable fearuting a 4-pin, female jumper connection! Alright, let's jump in...
Life and Death of an Algorithm – 33,782 dice tapestry
Continuig their exploration of fate and chance using dice in their works, Life and Death of an Algorithm 2024 (33,782 White dice, evolutionary algorithm) by Troika is the latest (and largest) itteration of the work they produced–currently on display at Langen Foundation as apart of PINK...
Halloween Hacking
What's the scariest thing you can think of? Spiders? Nope. Snakes? Not that either. Me? It's GLOOM HANDS. I don't generally shriek in terror but the first time I saw these things in Tears of the Kingdom, I ran away screaming. Both in the game AND in real life. Giant hands that you can't outrun that grab you and suck the life out of you? Biggest. Nope. EVER.
So what do we do when Halloween comes around? We share the scare.
It started with a question about whether or not one of our SparkX guys had ever cast anything in silicone and...
SparkFun Spooktacular
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=Hvajvgj16dg;border=0
Happy Halloween! In honor of today's holiday, we thought we'd do a roundup of a few spooky (or just downright strange) things in science, math and technology. From freaky weather to mysterious numbers, hold on to your hats because it's about to get weird.
1. Ball Lightning
Ball lightning is a natural phenomenon that has people scratching their heads. It usually shows up during thunderstorms as these glowing, spherical orbs that can range from the size of a baseball to something much larger. They seem to float or dart around in the air, often appearing right after a lightning strike. While many...
Neural Network Visualization
Going along with implementing a very size optimized neural network on a 3 cent microcontroller I created an interactive simulation of a similar network.
You can draw figures on a 8×8 pixel grid and view how the activations propagate through the multi-layer perception network to classify the image into 4 or 10 different numbers. You can find the visualizer online here.
Amazingly, the accuracy is still quite acceptable, even though this network (2 hidden layers with 10 neurons) is even simpler than the one implemented in the 3 cent MCU (3 hidden layers with 16 neurons). One change that led to...
How Many ROMs Are There? Funny You Should Ask…
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=L79d-Rn9vnw;border=0
SparkFun recently finished up a series of short videos called Funny You Should Ask that covers acronyms and electronics concepts in under 1 minute. Since producing a bunch of boards that offer EEPROM, such as the SparkFun Qwiic EEPROM Breakout we figured it would be smart to explain just what EEPROM is. But to explain EEPROM, you need to understand EPROM, PROM, and ROM. So we might as well explain all 4 within the series.
Dryw started us out with what is ROM. What even is ROM? It stands for Read-Only Memory and is a type of non-volatile memory that permanently stores...
Name that Ware, October 2024
The Ware for October 2024 is shown below.
This one should be a smidge easier to guess than last month’s ware. The main reason I liked this ware is actually the board shown below with the prominent star-routing. It’s such traditional hand-routing work, I love craftsmanship like this.
For completeness, this is the top side of the board shown above:
Thanks to spida for sharing this ware!
Also, just in time for Halloween, this spooky ware made its way to my desk:
This is the “fuse box” that was connecting my flat to the power mains. I live in one of the oldest buildings in...
Winner, Name that Ware September 2024
Last month’s Ware was a Cue COVID test reader. It uses LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) to perform a fast and sensitive detection of nucleic acid sequences. Thanks again to Curtis Galloway for contributing this ware for me to take apart and photograph!
Nobody had guessed the ware exactly, but “microfluidic lab on a chip” is a pretty fair generic description of a LAMP reader, so I’ll give the prize to Jimmy. Congrats and email me for your prize!
I had perhaps gotten a bit overzealous with the image redaction, but here is the connector on the PCB that I had blurred out...
Asahi Linux – Run Linux on a M1 Mac
I generally consider MacBooks and Apple products overpriced ‘luxury’ pieces which eventually get slowed down with update over the years. However, I am genuinely impressed by the development and innovation made by the hardware team at Apple, specially with the silicon chips they have developed for their ARM laptops. The new MacBooks give extraordinary battery […]
Prevent Linux Kernel updates on Ubuntu with this trick
Updating your PC on a regular basis is really important if you care about your security, as with newer software you get various bug fixes as well as security fixes. However, sometimes you may want to hold on to those updates, as they might introduce bugs or cause any dependency hell. This is why some […]