Lifeboat Foundation

The movements are driven by a chemical reaction that consumes molecular energy for this purpose.

Often, we need to power a 5V-craving project of ours on the go. So did [Burgduino], and, unhappy with solutions available, designed their own 5V UPS! It takes a cheap powerbank design and augments it with a few parts vital for its UPS purposes.

You might be tempted to reach for a powerbank when facing such a problem, but most of them have a fatal flaw, and you can’t easily tell a flawed one apart from a functioning one before you buy it. This flaw is lack of load sharing – ability to continue powering the output when a charger is inserted. Most store-bought powerbanks just shut the output off, which precludes a project running 24/7 without powering it down, and can cause adverse consequences when something like a Raspberry Pi is involved.

Understandably, [Burgduino] wasn’t okay with that. Their UPS is based on the TP5400, a combined LiIon charging and boost chip, used a lot in simple powerbanks, but not capable of load sharing. For that, an extra LM66100 chip – an “ideal diode” controller is used. You might scoff at it being a Texas Instruments part, but it does seem to be widely available and only a tad more expensive than the TP5400 itself! The design is open hardware, with PCB files available on EasyEDA and the BOM clearly laid out for easy LCSC ordering.

Cam & Dowel Jig is a collection of preset jigs and various tools that are designed to help guide users through designing and constructing their own bespoke furniture.

If you didn’t pick up woodworking as a hobby during the quarantine, chances are you at least tried. In a perfect world, we’d have the know-how to pick up some tools, some pieces of wood, and design our living rooms with our own collection of bespoke furniture. Alas, this is no perfect world so we’ll need some shortcuts. Luckily, David Needham of Kingfisher Design Studio has us covered with an intuitive tool kit designed to streamline bespoke, DIY furniture-building projects.

Elon Musk announced that Tesla is going to be shifting its product development to make Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot also known as Optimus, a priority in 2022.

This is quite a surprising change of strategy.

When Tesla Bot was announced, Musk presented the project as something Tesla could do by leveraging existing work and parts from the development of self-driving technology, and if they don’t do it, someone else will, and they might not do it as well or as safely as Tesla can.

Elon Musk recently said that Tesla’s humanoid robo t project is the “most important product development we’re doing this year.”

On Wednesday, during Tesla’s earnings call, Musk said Tesla’s humanoid robot has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time’ and it is the most important product development they are doing in 2022. Musk introduced the concept of Tesla’s humanoid robot back in August, 2021 during Tesla’s AI event.

Tesla’s humanoid robot aka Tesla Bot is a 5-foot-8-inch and 125-pounds robot aims to do the dangerous, repetitive, physical tasks in the future. Elon Musk joked that Tesla Bot will be friendly and also mentioned that it will be built from lightweight materials.

Apple has officially deprecated Python 2.7 in macOS Monterey 12.3. The company is advising its developers to use an alternative programming language instead, such as Python 3, which, however, does not come preinstalled on macOS.

At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference today, the company made a major shift in their embrace of virtual reality with several new VR announcements during the event’s opening keynote.

Though well loved, Apple’s computer lineup got somewhat left in the dust at the launch of the Rift and Vive, both of which had hardware requirements that exceeded what Apple had on offer. To that end, the company largely steered clear of talking about VR publicly.

Today marks a major shift in Apple’s public support for virtual reality. VR was a recurrent theme throughout the keynote today, highlighting their belief in the importance of the medium. Here’s an overview of everything they announced:

Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?

[Tim] hooked up his oscilloscope to the LED strings to find out how they worked, detailing the results in a comprehensive blog post. As it turns out, the controller briefly shorts the LED strip’s supply voltage to generate data bits, similar to the way old pulse-dialing phones worked. A tiny chip integrated into each LED picks up these pulses, but retains its internal state thanks to a capacitor that keeps the chip powered when the supply line goes low.

After reverse-engineering the protocol, [Tim] went on to implement a similar design using an ATMega328P as a controller and an ATtiny10 as the LED driver. With just a few lines of code and a 100 nF buffer capacitor across the ATtiny’s power pins, [Tim] was able to turn an LED on and off by sending pulses through the supply lines. Some work still needs to be done to fully implement a protocol as used in the LED strings, but as a proof-of-concept it shows that this kind of power-line communication is possible with standard components.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yn5wdQac7Xg

There’s an old joke about the Thermos bottle that keeps things hot and cold, so someone loaded it with soup and ice cream. That joke is a little close to home when it comes to FDM 3D printers.

You want to melt plastic, of course, or things won’t print, so you need heat. But if the plastic filament gets hot too early, it will get soft, expand, and jam. Heat crawling up the hot end like this is known as heat creep and there are a variety of ways that hot ends try to cope with the need to be hot and cold at the same time. Most hotends today are air-cooled with a small fan. But water-cooled hotends have been around for a while and are showing up more and more. Is it a gimmick? Are you using, planning to use, or have used (and abandoned) water cooling on your hot end?