All Things Tech

Addressable LEDs are a staple of homemade Christmas decorations in our community, as is microprocessor control of those LEDs. So at first sight [Glen Akins]’ LED decorated Christmas tree looks pretty enough, but isn’t particularly unusual. But after reading his write-up you’ll discover there’s far more to the project than meets the eye, and learn a lot about the technologies behind it that has relevance far beyond a festive light show. The decoration is powered exclusively from power-over-Ethernet, with a PIC microcontroller translating Art-Net DMX-over-Ethernet packets into commands for the LED string. The control board is designed from the ground up and includes all the PoE circuitry, and the write-up  gives a very thorough introduction to this power source that takes the reader way beyond regarding PoE as simply another off-the-shelf black box. Along the way we see all his code, as well as learn a few interesting tidbits such as the use of a pre-programmed EEPROM containing a...

If you’re the kind of person who hates this new generation of smartphone users and longs for a nostalgic past, you’re not far from the new target demographic for many commercial phone manufacturers. Major phone companies like Motorola and Huawei have been developing foldable versions of conventional smartphone designs, intended to be more versatile while maintaining the same functionality as their less flexible counterparts. It’s certainly gimmicky, but phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the Motorola Razr , and the Huawei MateX are elegant from an engineering perspective. Developing a seamless interface experience, maximizing surface area for functionality, and maintaining the same nostalgic flip phone aesthetic while making use of familiar smartphone features isn’t an easy design process. Motorola RAZR hinge shown by CNET’s Patrick Holland during a tour of their labs. For the Razr, a hinge system that takes up about a third of the phone’s internal space allows the OLED display...

Line scan cameras are advanced devices used for process inspection tasks in industrial applications. Used to monitor the quality of silicon wafers and other high-accuracy tasks, they’re often outfitted with top-quality optics that are highly specialised. [Peter] was able to get his hands on a lens for a line-scan camera, and decided to put it to work on some macro photography instead. Macro image taken with the hacked lens. Judging by the specs found online, this is a fairly serious piece of kit. It easily competes with top-shelf commercial optics, which is what piqued [Peter]’s interest in the part. Being such a specialised piece of hardware, you can’t just cruise over to eBay for an off-the-shelf adapter. Instead, a long chain of parts were used to affix this lens to a Sony AIII DSLR, converting from threaded fittings to a Nikon mount and then finally to Sony NEX mount. Further work involved fitting an aperture into the chain to get the lens as close as possible to telecentric....

If you’re going to fail, you might as well fail ambitiously. A complex project with a lot of subsystems has a greater chance of at least partial success, as well as providing valuable lessons in what not to do next time. At least that’s the lemonade [Josh Johnson] made from his lemon of a lost-cost vector network analyzer . For the uninitiated, a VNA is a versatile test instrument for RF work that allows you to measure both the amplitude and the phase of a signal, and it can be used for everything from antenna and filter design to characterizing transmission lines. [Josh] decided to port a lot of functionality for his low-cost VNA to a host computer and concentrate on the various RF stages of the design. Unfortunately, [Josh] found the performance of the completed VNA to be wanting, especially in the phase measurement department. He has a complete analysis of the failure modes in his thesis , but the short story is poor filtering of harmonics from the local oscillator, unexpected beha...

Researchers in China have improved the accuracy of detecting space junk in orbit around the earth. The goal of the project is to allow more effective plotting of safe routes for spacecraft maneuvers. The researchers say that after more than 50 years in space, there is all sorts of debris in orbit that spacecraft need to avoid for safety. So … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2thosFp

InsightFinder , a startup from North Carolina based on 15 years of academic research, wants to bring machine learning to system monitoring to automatically identify and fix common issues. Today, the company announced a $2 million seed round. ​ IDEA Fund Partners, a VC out of Durham, North Carolina,​ led the round with participation from ​Eight Roads Ventures​ and Acadia Woods Partners. The company was founded by North Carolina State professor Helen Gu, who spent 15 years researching this problem before launching the startup in 2015. Gu also announced that she had brought on former Distil Networks co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid to be Chief Operating Officer. Essaid, who sold his company earlier this year, says his new company focuses on taking a proactive approach to application and infrastructure monitoring. “We found that these problems happen to be repeatable, and the signals are there. We use artificial intelligence to predict and get out ahead of these issues,” he said. He add...

Shipfix , a relatively new startup aiming to drag the dry cargo shipping industry into the digital age, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Idinvest Partners, with participation from Kima Ventures, The Family, Bpifrance and strategic business angels. The company was founded in December 2018 by Serge Alleyne (CEO) and Antoine Grisay (COO), and launched just two months ago. “We’re trying to fix the email overload for everybody involved in the process of fixing a dry cargo ship by providing a comprehensive market monitor,” Alleyne tells TechCrunch. “We’re also producing data-driven insights that are profoundly missing in the bulk/break-bulk space. Actually the last revolution of the dry cargo industry was email, and so far people still rely on indices based on a panel of brokers while all the data is available in emails”. To solve this, Alleyne says that Shipfix connects to its clients’ email to extract and anonymously aggregate “billions of data points using...

Here at GigaOm we’re looking at how leading-edge technologies impact the enterprise, and what organizations can do to gear up for the future. Here’s a take from several of our analysts about what to watch for in enterprise IT and beyond, this coming year and in years to come.   From Kubernetesization to workforce automation, data center shrink and the rise of the architect, read on. Andrew Brust, Big Data & Analytics “Kubernetesization” and Containerization of the Data Analytics Stack — both open source and commercial. To a large extent, this is one’s obvious. But it’s giving rise to something less so: a tendency to spin up clusters (be they for big data, data warehousing or machine learning) on a task-by-task basis. Call it extreme ephemeralism, if you’d like. It’s enabling a mentality of serverless everything. This architecture underlies the revamped Cloudera Data Platform, and it’s also being leveraged by Google for Spark on K8s on Cloud Data Proc. Ultimately, it’s ena...

Anyone who has ever been in a rural area and ended up stuck behind a tractor driving down the road has wished that tractors could go the speed limit. The tractor makers over at JCB have a tractor that you won’t want to see behind you. The tractor is called the JCB Fastrac Two that holds the Guinness World Record … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2MKo4Gn

The problem with smartglasses that have been put on the market so far is in several aspects. Many smartglasses didn’t look like something that people would be willing to wear all-day. The other issue was one of power with the glasses not having the battery life for all-day use. Bosch thinks it has solved the all-day smartglasses issue for the … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2QbT5VF

[Bwack] had some scanned pictures of an old Commodore card and wanted to recreate PC boards from it. It’s true that he could have just manually redrawn everything in a CAD package, but that’s tedious. Instead, he used SprintLayout 6.0 which allows you to import pictures and use them as a guide for recreating a PCB layout. You can see the entire process including straightening the original scans. There are tools that make it very easy to place new structures over the original scanned images. One might think the process could be more automated, but it looks as though every piece needs to be touched at least once, but it is still easier than just trying to eyeball everything together. Most of the video is sped up, which makes it look as though he’s really fast. Your speed will be less, but it is still fairly quick to go from a scan to a reasonable layout. The software is not free, but you can do something somewhat similar in KiCAD. The trick is to get the image scaled perfectly and ...

LG may very well soon be the king of innovative accessories and addons. It was the first to have a flip cover case with a “quick window” and was the first to put the modular smartphone idea to the test. This year, it tried to offer an alternative solution to the foldable phone problem with cases that act as a … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2tZUC8G

By now most readers will be familiar with the Miniware TS100 and TS80 soldering irons, compact and lightweight temperature controlled soldering tools that have set a new standard at the lower-priced end of the decent soldering iron market. We know they have an STM32 processor, a USB interface, and an OLED display, and that there have been a variety of alternative firmwares produced for them. Take a close look at the TS80, and you’ll find the element connector is rather familiar. It’s a 3.5 mm jack plug, something we’re more used to as an audio connector. Surely audio from a soldering iron would be crazy? Not if you are [Joric], who has created a music player firmware for the little USB-C iron. It’s hardly a tour de force of musical entertainment and it won’t pull away the audiophiles from their reference DACs, but it does at least produce a recognisable We Wish You A Merry Christmas as you’ll see from the video below the break. Since the TS100 arrived a couple of years ago we’ve ...

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, is ready to take on Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart. Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio, two subsidiaries of Ambani’s Reliance Industries, said they have soft launched JioMart , their e-commerce venture, in parts of the state of Maharashtra — Mumbai, Kalyan and Thane. The e-commerce venture, which is being marketed as “Desh Ki Nayi Dukaan” (Hindi for new sore for the country), currently offers a catalog of 50,000 grocery items and promises “free and express delivery.” In an email to employees, accessed by TechCrunch, the two subsidiaries that are working together on the e-commerce venture, said they plan to scale the service to many parts of India in coming months. A Reliance spokesperson declined to comment. The soft launch this week comes months after Ambani, who runs Reliance Industries — India’s largest industrial house — had said at a conference that he wants to service tens of millions of retailers and store owners across the country. If ther...

In any normal situation, if you’d read an article that about building your own quantum computer, a fully understandable and natural reaction would be to call it clickbaity poppycock. But an event like the Chaos Communication Congress is anything but a normal situation, and you never know who will show up and what background they will come from. A case in point: security veteran [Yann Allain] who is in fact building his own quantum computer in his garage . Starting with an introduction to quantum computing itself, and what makes it so powerful also in the context of security, [Yann] continues to tell about his journey of building a quantum computer on his own. His goal was to build a stable computer he could “easily” create by himself in his garage, which will work at room temperature, using trapped ion technology. After a few iterations, he eventually created a prototype with KiCad that he cut into an empty ceramic chip carrier with a hobbyist CNC router, which will survive when plac...

Postmates and Uber have filed a complaint in California federal district court, alleging that a bill limiting how companies can label workers as independent contractors is unconstitutional. The complaint, which includes two gig workers as co-plaintiffs, was filed in U.S. District Court on Monday, days before Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) is due to go into effect on Jan. 1. It asks for a preliminary injunction against AB-5 while the lawsuit is under consideration. The complaint argues that AB-5 violates several clauses in the U.S. and California constitutions, including equal protection because of how it classifies gig workers for ride-sharing and on-demand delivery companies compared to the exemptions it grants to workers who do “substantively identical work” in more than twenty other industries. AB-5 was authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat representing the 80th Assembly District in southern California and signed into law in September by Governor Gavin Newsom. It is int...

That there are new consoles coming is hardly a secret, especially with Microsoft’s big reveal of the Xbox Series X. Much of the details about these consoles, however, are still shrouded in mystery. Now thanks to a series of leaks over the Internet and sleuthing by gaming sites, some of those details pertaining to the graphics capabilities of both the … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2F5r1Nl

With the Galaxy S11 (or Galaxy S20) and Galaxy Fold 2 announcements expected to happen in mid-February, one might presume that Samsung’s CES 2020 presence will be low-key. That, however, might be highly unlikely. Even disregarding the oddities to come from its C-Lab incubation programs, the company is expected to announce the Galaxy S10 Lite and Galaxy Note 10 Lite … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/35ajdEH

Most of these stories start with a cat standing on someone’s chest, begging for food at some obscene hour of the morning. But not this one. Chaz the cat is diabetic, and he needs to get his insulin with breakfast. The problem is that Chaz likes to eat overnight, which ruins his breakfast appetite and his chances at properly metabolizing the insulin. [Becky] tried putting the bowl away before bed, but let’s face it — it’s more fun to solve a problem once than to solve the same problem every night. [Becky]’s solution was to design and print a bowl holder with a lid, and to cover the bowl when the cat diner is closed using a small servo and a NodeMCU. It looks good, and it gets the job done with few components . Chaz gets his insulin, [Becky] gets peace of mind, and everybody’s happy. This isn’t going to work for all cats, because security is pretty lax. But Chaz is a senior kitty and therefore disinterested in pawing at the lid to see what happens. Claw your way past the break to see [B...

Huawei reported resilient revenue for 2019 on Tuesday as the embattled Chinese technology group continues to grow despite prolonged American campaign against its business, but cautioned that growth next year could prove more challenging. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, wrote in a New Year’s message to employees that the company’s revenue has topped 850 billion Chinese yuan ($122 billion), a new record high for the Chinese group and an 18% increase over the previous year. Xu said Huawei, one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, sold 240 million handsets this year, also up 17% since 2018. “These figures are lower than our initial projections, yet business remains solid and we stand strong in the face of adversity,” he wrote. He acknowledged that Huawei is confronting a “strategic and long-term” campaign against it by the U.S. government. If the campaign persists for long, it would create a challenging environment for Huawei to “survive and thrive,” he said. Survival would...

As much as we’d love to keep holding to consumers electronics as much as we could, there are times when they just can’t move forward any longer. Usually, that takes years of regular use but some manufacturers often give people reasons to upgrade to a new model sooner rather than later. And what better way to do that than by … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2SADMaS

It sometimes takes a crystal ball to properly divine the thinking that goes behind branding changes. The next big one in the mobile industry will allegedly come from Samsung when it skips nine digits and launch the Galaxy S11 as the Galaxy S20. Apparently, it won’t be a simple naming change either as the trio that will launch early 2020 … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2MHxthU

Funding for tech startups has been on an inevitable upswing for years, a result of a virtuous circle where wildly successful tech companies on the public markets whet the appetites of investors and investors’ backers to find more diamonds, a push met by a pull from the rush of talent with entrepreneurial aspirations out to put that money to work. 2019 has felt a bumper year in that longer trend, with 9-figure rounds ($100 million or more) and “unicorn” statuses so prevalent that the numbers have started to cease to be news items in themselves. With 2020 now just days away, a look at the 50 biggest funding rounds for start-ups in the past year draw out some trends. We’re pulling out the top five below for a closer look, but it’s interesting too to see some of the other trends emerging across the rest of the pack. Automotive remains a huge pull when it comes to raising big bucks: part of the reason is because the space is capital intensive, as it straddles both software and hardware (t...

SIM cards are all around us, and with the continuing growth of the Internet of Things, spawning technologies like NB-IoT, this might as well be very literal soon. But what do we really know about them, their internal structure, and their communication protocols? And by extension, their security? To shine some light on these questions, open source and mobile device titan [LaForge] gave an introductory talk about SIM card technologies at the 36C3 in Leipzig, Germany. Starting with a brief history lesson on the early days of cellular networks based on the German C-Netz, and the origin of the SIM card itself, [LaForge] goes through the main specification and technology parts of each following generation from 2G to 5G. Covering the physical basics, I/O interfaces, communication protocols, and the file system located on the SIM card, you’ll get the answer to “what on Earth is PIN2 for?” along the way. Of course, a talk like this, on a CCC event, wouldn’t be complete without a deep and cri...

Seemingly cursed movie Uncharted based on the video game with the same name has lost yet another director, according to a new report. The loss is allegedly due to movie star Tom Holland’s Spider-Man 3 shooting schedule, meaning there’s another delay in the pipeline. Assuming the leak is correct, fans should no longer expect the Uncharted movie to arrive in … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2FaPrFa

A new post on the Fortnite Competitive subreddit has shed light on how the Storm generates its future circles, specifically where players can anticipate new circles to form. The post has gained traction from players who report noticing a similar pattern, making it possible for serious players to improve their game plan and make decisions about where to head in … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2ZEePwG

Assembly lines for electronics products are complicated beasts, often composed of many custom tools and fixtures. Typically a microcontroller must be programmed with firmware, and the circuit board tested before assembly into the enclosure, followed by functional testing afterwards before putting it in a box. These test platforms can be very expensive, easily into the tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, this project uses a set of 12 Raspberry Pi Zero Ws in parallel to program, test, and configure up to 12 units at once before moving on to the next stage in assembly. Fixing Fixture Bottlenecks The company where I work, Propeller Health , develops IoT products that are assembled in a way similar to many other companies; there is a circuit board and a plastic enclosure. The bare PCBs go through SMT twice (components on the front and back), then they go through ICT (In-Circuit Test) where they are programmed and pogo pins on each of the test points verify all components on the circui...