All Things Tech

The tin can phone is a staple of longitudinal wave demonstrations wherein a human voice vibrates the bottom of a soup can, and compression waves travel along a string to reproduce the speaker in another can at the other end. All the parts in this  electrical  demonstration are different, but the concept is the same. Speakers are sound transducers that turn electrical impulses into air vibrations, but they generate electricity when their coil vibrates. Copper wires carry those impulses from one cup to another. We haven’t heard of anyone making a tin can phone amplifier, but the strictly passive route wasn’t working, so an op-amp does some messy boosting. The link and video demonstrate the parts and purposes inside these sound transducers in an approachable way. Each component is constructed in sequence so you can understand what is happening and make sense of the results. Can someone make a tin can amplifier transformer? We’d like to see that . In another twist of dual-purp...

Isn’t this the cutest little synth you ever saw? The matching sparkly half-stack amp really makes it, visually speaking. But the most interesting part? There’s not a wire in sight, ’cause [Blitz City DIY]’s futuristic rig sends the bleep boops over Bluetooth LE . Hardware-wise, both the synth and the amp are fairly simple. Underneath each of those cute little printed keys is one of those clicky momentaries that usually come with bright button caps in primary colors — the keys themselves just press-fit over the tops. All twelve ebonies and ivories are connected up to an Adafruit Feather, which communicates over Bluetooth LE to a CircuitPlayground Bluefruit (CPB) in the amp. Each time a note is played on the synth, its corresponding color circles comet-like around the CPB’s NeoPixels, which shine through the amp’s speaker grille. The super interesting part is that all the hard work is happening in the code. Both boards have the same array of colors in rainbow order, and the CPB has an ...

[Tony] posted an interesting video where he looks at the Atari 2600 and the way many companies tried to convert it into a real home computer. This reminded us of the ColecoVision, which started out as a video game but could expand to a pretty reasonable computer. It might seem silly to convert a relatively anemic Atari video game into a computer, but keep in mind that computers were pretty expensive in those days. Not to mention, the Atari itself was a fair investment back then, too. There were four options [Tony] found, although none of them seemed to be very popular. One looked like a cassette player that plugged into your cartridge port and a keyboard port for a cheap-looking keyboard. [Tony] thinks it, along with the “piggy back,” never actually made it to market. Atari also got into the act with the Graduate. For $79 you got 8K of RAM and a membrane keyboard. There was a big public relations push including a very period TV commercial you can see in the video. Apparently a di...

This week, we read a very short story, The Great Silence , as we start to head toward the end of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection. This story asks questions about how we connect with nature, and also how to think about innovation and where new ideas come from. We will finish the remaining two stories in the collection in the coming week, and then it will be time (sadly!) to change books. I’ll announce the next book in the book club hopefully shortly. Some further quick notes: Want to join the conversation? Feel free to email me your thoughts at bookclub@techcrunch.com (we got a real email address!) or join some of the discussions on Reddit or Twitter (hashtag TCBookClub) Follow these informal book club articles here: https://techcrunch.com/book-review/ . That page also has a built-in RSS feed for posts exclusively in the Book Review category, which is very low volume. Feel free to add your comments in our TechCrunch comments section below this post. Reading The Great Sile...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today that it would allow new diagnostics technologies to be used to test for the novel coronavirus , COVID-19, at elite academic hospitals and healthcare facilities around the country. The agency’s new initiative comes as critics have assailed various U.S. government agencies for being woefully underprepared to effectively address the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country despite being aware of the potential risks the virus posed since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China in early December. As the first diagnosed cases of the new virus appeared in the country, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had conducted only 459 tests . Meanwhile, China had five commercial tests for the coronavirus on the market one month ago and can now conduct up to 1.6 million tests per week. South Korea has tested another 65,00 people so far, according to a report in Science Magazine . Initial tests in the U.S. were hampered by the d...

These days capitalism and democracy seem to mean that it’s never too early to take advantage of the misery of others, and the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is the latest proof point. On Saturday the Washington Post reported that an agency within the State Department had compiled a report of two million tweets, which peddled conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Among the hoaxes compiled in the report and reported by the Post included the suggestion that the virus had been created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or was the result of a bioweapon developed by the Chinese government. In all, these tweets represent about 7 percent of the total tweets surveyed by the government, according to the Post’s reporting. Critically, the report indicated that some of the misinformation spread online appeared to be the result of “inauthentic and coordinated activity,” the Post reported the document saying. The report mirrors warnings from cybersecu...

The Logitech SqueezeBox was a device you hooked up to your stereo so you could stream music from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box or your desktop computer over the network. That might not sound very exciting now, but when [Aaron Ciuffo] bought it back in 2006, it was a pretty big deal. The little gadget has been chugging all these years, but the cracks are starting to form. Before it finally heads to that great electronics recycling center in the sky, he’s decided to start work on its replacement . Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, building a little device to stream digital audio from a NAS is easy these days. But a Pi hooked up to a USB speaker isn’t necessarily a great fit for the living room. [Aaron] didn’t necessarily want his replacement player to actually look like the SqueezeBox, but he wanted it to be presentable. While most of us probably would have tried to make something that looked like a traditional piece of audio gear, he took his design is a somewhat more homey direction...

[Editor’s note: Welcome to our weekly review of news that startups can use from across TechCrunch and Extra Crunch. If you want this post by email, just subscribe here .]  Why some fintech startups aren’t blinking at customer acquisition costs Distribution channels are getting saturated across the internet and beyond, and in many tech sectors the cost of acquiring new customers is crimping profitability. But so far, so good in the “great credit card craze,” as Alex digs into this week for Extra Crunch . It turns out that the remaining revenue possibilities combined with the current revenues from interchange fees mean costs are staying relatively flat — or so say a few well-placed execs. “If anything, our customer numbers are massively accelerating despite cutting back on marketing spend,” explains Brian Barnes of M1 Finance. “And I do think that gets into how we positioned ourselves [as] a firm and what drives at the capital efficiency of how we’ve gotten to where we’ve gotten.”...

[Carl] wanted to prototype his circuits quickly using printed circuit boards. He picked up a Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Mill and made a video about the results . His first attempt wasn’t perfect, as you could notice under the microscope. A few adjustments, though, and the result was pretty good. Be warned, this mill is pretty expensive — anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000. The company claims it is a better choice than a conventional cheap mill because it uses a 26,000 RPM spindle and has high-resolution steppers. Because of its low backlash and high accuracy and repeatability, the company claims it can easily mill boards with 6 mil traces. Of course, the mill can do things other than PCBs. [Carl] was impressed with the speed of the system, too. The boards he tries in the video are pretty small, but they took a few minutes each. Of course, like most homemade PCBs, there are no plated-through holes or solder mask or plating. Of course, you could add all of those things using additional ste...

I’m sure that you’ve heard about the Sonos speaker debacle. (If not, read about it on Hackaday .) Basically, a company that sells a premium Internet-connected speaker wanted to retire an older product line, and offered a 30% discount to people who would “trade in” their old speakers for new ones. The catch: they weren’t really trading them in, but instead flashing a “self-destruct” firmware and then taking it to the recycling. Naturally, Sonos’ most loyal customers weren’t happy about intentionally bricking their faithful devices, a hubbub ensued, and eventually the CEO ended up reversing course and eating crow . Hackaday’s own Gerrit Coetzee wrote up our coverage and mentioned that maybe Sonos just couldn’t afford to support the service for the old products any more, and didn’t want them to remain in the wild. So much so, that it’s worth 30% of the cost of their current product to get out from under the implicit contract. By buying one of these IoT devices, you’re paying more money ...

United Airlines, the third largest airline in the world, is officially the first US airline to suspend some flights to Asia out of coronavirus concerns. This is bad news for travelers who want to risk trips to outbreak regions — United offers more service to Asia than any other US airline, potentially forcing customers to seek flights with other services. … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2vtZl3z

The basis of the classic James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” is an evil media mogul who instigates war between the U.K. and China because it will be great for TV ratings. There’s been a wake-up call recently that our most popular social networks have been indirectly designed to divide populations into enemy camps and reward sensational content, but without the personal responsibility of Bond’s nemesis because they’re algorithmically driven. (This is part five of a seven-part series about virtual worlds .) The rise of “multiverse” virtual words as the next social frontier offers hope to one of the biggest crises facing democratic societies right now. Because the dominant social media platforms (in Western countries at least) monetize through advertising, these platforms reward sensational content that results in the most clicks and shares. Oversimplified, exaggerated claims intended to shock users scrolling past are best practices for individuals, media brands and marketing depart...

Last year’s Hackaday Superconference badge was an electronic tour de force, packing an ECP5 FPGA shoehorned into a Game Boy-like form factor and shipping with a RISC-V core installed that together gave an almost infinite badge hacking potential. It did not however run Linux, and that’s something [Greg Davill] has addressed, as he’s not only running Linux on his badge, but also a framebuffer that allows him to use the badge screen as the Linux terminal screen . Finally you can watch Linux boot on your Superconference badge itself, rather than over its serial port. He’s achieved this by changing essentially everything: from the new VexRiscv CPU core, to new video drivers and a VGA terminal courtesy of Frank Buss, now part of the LiteVideo project . It’s not quite a fully fledged Linux powerhouse yet, but you can find it in a GitHub repository should you have a mind to try it yourself. Paging back through his Twitter feed reveals the effort he’s put into this work over the last few mo...

As expected, the public sparring between OTT streaming service YouTube TV and Sinclair Broadcast Group has resulted in renewed talks that will prevent the loss of FOX Regional Sports Networks. The announcement was made by YouTube TV in a tweet on Friday, but there’s a catch: the two companies haven’t worked out a new deal. Rather, YouTube says that it … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/3ccpCUC

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a  record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis. This week, we’ll look at the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on the App Store, China’s demand for App Store removals — and soon-to-be-removals, it seems. We’re also talking about Facebook’s lawsuit over a data-grabbing SDK, Tind...

NASA has announced that SpaceX will launch its Psyche mission on its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The mission isn’t scheduled to launch for a couple of years, according to NASA, which explains that it is targeting an asteroid named Psyche that is full of metals, primarily nickel-iron. This same launch will also include two other payloads. … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2I2HR0W

A visit to the hardware hacking area of the recent Hacker Hotel hacker camp in the Netherlands would bring plenty of interesting pieces of hardware to delight the eye. Among them though was one to delight the ear, and on hearing it we asked whether its creator could put it online so we could share it with you. [XDr4g0nX]’s bass guitar is 3D printed , and while it still contains some non-3D-printed parts it’s still a very effective musical instrument. This is not the first model he’s produced, he told us, an earlier guitar was entirely 3D-printed but proved not to be rigid enough. Tuning such an instrument merely resulted in its bowing out of shape and becoming unplayable as well as out of tune. This one has hefty steel bars for rigidity, though it uses a Yamaha neck rather than 3D-printing the whole instrument.  The main body of the instrument has to be printed in multiple parts and epoxied together, which he’s done without some of the ugly seams that sometimes disfigure prints of...

Folding phones are officially here. Anyone longing for that throwback feeling of flipping your phone out to answer a call and snapping it back to hang up has not just one, but two vertical folding phones to choose from. These are the Motorola Razr, which launched at the end 2019, and the brand-new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip earlier this month. … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2vqJ9jG

A useful add-on for any computer is a plug-in macro keyboard, a little peripheral that adds those extra useful buttons to automate tasks. [ Sayantan Pal] has made one, a handy board with nine programmable keys and a USB connector, but the surprise is that at its heart lies only the ubiquitous ATmega328 that you might find in an Arduino Uno. This isn’t a USB HID keyboard, instead it uses a USB-to-serial chip and appears to the host computer as a serial device. The keys themselves are simple momentary action switches, perhaps a deluxe version could use key switches from the likes of Cherry or similar. The clever part of this build comes on the host computer, which runs some Python code using the PyAutoGui library. This allows control of the keyboard and mouse, and provides an “in” for the script to link serial and input devices. Full configurability is assured through the Python code, and while that might preclude a non-technical user from gaining its full benefit it’s fair to say that ...

[Michael Pick] calls himself the casual engineer, though we don’t know whether he is referring to his work clothes or his laid back attitude. However, he does like to show quick and easy projects. His latest? A little portable Tetris game for $9 worth of parts. There is an Arduino Pro Mini and a tiny display along with a few switches and things on a prototyping PC board. [Michael] claims it is a one day build, and we imagine it wouldn’t even be that much. Our only complaint is that there isn’t a clear bill of material or the code. However, we think you could figure out the parts pretty easy and there are bound to be plenty of games including Tetris that you could adapt to the hardware. The display looks suspiciously like an SSD1306 display which is commonly cloned. so that answers one question. These are just less than an inch of screen, but if you buy them from China that eats up almost half of the $9 budget. The Arduino is probably another $3. The other parts are cheap, but it is...

As anticipated, the 2020 Game Developers Conference (GDC) has been canceled…or, more specifically, it has been postponed until sometime later this year, though a new date hasn’t yet been revealed. The decision was due to concerns about the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, which has spread into multiple countries and caused multiple other events to be canceled. GDC 2020 was originally scheduled … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2TnUUzf

AI and Deep Learning for computer vision projects has come to the masses. This can be attributed partly to the  community projects that help ease the pain for newbies. [Abhishek] contributes one such project called Monk AI which comes with a GUI for transfer learning . Monk AI is essentially a wrapper for Computer Vision and deep learning experiments. It facilitates users to finetune deep neural networks using transfer learning and is written in Python. Out of the box, it supports Keras and Pytorch and it comes with a few lines of code; you can get started with your very first AI experiment. [Abhishek] also has an Object Detection wrapper (GitHub) that has some useful examples as well as a Monk GUI (GitHub) tool that looks similar to the tools available in commercial packages for running, training and inference experiments. The documentation is a work in progress though it seems like an excellent concept to build on. We need more tools like these to help more people getting sta...

If you’ve attempted to play Fortnite‘s Team Rumble mode at any point today, you’ve likely had to deal with an annoying, confusing bug. Players are reporting that teammate arrows aren’t appearing properly in the game mode, making it impossible to tell whether they’re near one of their own teammates or an opponent. Epic has acknowledged the bug and is working … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/3cjYnaX

Well, after what I’m sure was a hectic few days for the folks planning the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the team announced today that they have officially decided to cancel the event happening this March, saying in a blog post that they hoped they would be able to reschedule an event for “later in the summer.” In recent days, nearly all of the event’s top corporate sponsors announced that they would not be sending employees to the event due to concerns surrounding coronavirus. Microsoft, Unity, Epic, Amazon, Facebook and Sony had all bowed out of the event. GDC’s statement did not reference the virus. The company behind GDC detailed that they will be refunding conference and expo attendees in full, though a blog post details that the group hopes to host a GDC event later in the summer, noting, “We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks.” GDC is just the latest tech conference to b...

Getting by without falling under the gaze of surveillance cameras doesn’t seem possible nowadays – from malls to street corners, it’s getting more common for organizations to use surveillance cameras to keep patrons in check. While the freedom of assembly is considered a basic human right in documents such as the US Condition and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is not a right that is respected everywhere in the world. Often times, governments enforcing order will identify individuals using image recognition programs, preventing them from assembling or demonstrating against their government. Freedom Shield built by engineer [Nick Bild] is an attempt at breaking away from the status quo and giving people a choice on whether they want to be seen or not. The spectrum of radiation visible to humans maxes out around 740nm, allowing the IR waves to remain undetected by normal observers. The project uses 940nm infrared (IR) LEDs embedded in clothes to overwhelm photo diodes in...

A year ago, Lyft submitted a report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that summed up its 2018 autonomous vehicle testing activity in a single, short paragraph. “Lyft Inc. did not operate any vehicles in autonomous mode on California public roads during the reporting period,” the letter read. “As such, Lyft Inc. has no autonomous mode disengagements to report.” The 2019 data tells a different story. Lyft had 19 autonomous vehicles testing on public roads in California in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the CA DMV. Those 19 vehicles, which operated during the reporting period of December 2018 to November 2019, drove nearly 43,000 miles in autonomous mode. The report is the latest sign that Lyft is trying to ramp up its self-driving vehicle program known as Level 5.  The CA DMV, the agency that regulates autonomous vehicle testing on public roads in the state, requires companies to submit an annual report that includes data such as total AV mi...

The Geneva Motor Show 2020 has been canceled, less than a week ahead of the annual auto event, after Switzerland recorded its first case of coronavirus. The Swiss government has banned any event with more than 1,000 people, set to take place until March 15, 2020. The car show was set to open to media in three days time. After … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/3a5qtom

The Geneva Motor Show is the latest trade show to cancel over fears of the coronavirus. The Swiss auto show is one of the largest car shows in the world and is usually the venue where high-end and exotic auto makers roll out new models and wild concepts. The show, like most auto shows, is more than a trade show as its doors are open to the public. The Geneva Motor Show joins other major canceled events such as GSMA’s Mobile World Congress and Facebook’s F8 conference. So far, the associations behind the upcoming New York International Auto Show have yet to announce its closure. The NYIAS runs from April 10-19 in New York City. These auto shows are more than just an open exhibit for the public. Auto makers dump millions into massive installations and announcements. Years of work go into crafting the right message for each show and without the shows, auto makers will need to shift strategies to announce their latest models and trends. Up until now, the Geneva Motor Show was advising ...

MWC 2020 may not be happening but smartphone makers are proceeding as normal with their own announcements and launches. Some have even taken the rather unorthodox strategy of spilling nearly all the beans over on social media. That has been OPPO’s strategy so far and now Xiaomi sub-brand Black Shark is following suit, teasing some of the upcoming Black Shark … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/32A3KOx

You know a franchise has become big when it has its own convention with dozens if not hundreds of attendees. Minecon, or MINECON as fans would shout from the top of their lungs, has been going on eight years. 2017 saw it move from a real-world gathering to what some might view as a less exciting live stream. This year, … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2PzbbjP

Since the dawn of the infinity craze, we’ve seen all kinds of projects — mirrors, smart mirrors, coffee tables, clocks, you name it. Unfortunately all of these cool projects sit at home, unappreciated by the public. Well, not anymore. [nolandoktor] is taking infinity to the streets with this beautiful and functional vortex watch . Though this project is pretty darned advanced, it’s all open source and completely within reach for anyone who has the tools and the time. The watch is based around an ATmega32u4 and uses a DS3231 real-time clock to keep accurate time on the WS2812 LEDs that represent the numbers. The time is displayed using R, G, and B assigned to hour, minute, and second. Actually reading the time is bit tricky until you understand how the colors work together, but something this lovely deserves to maintain a slight air of mystery. The watch’s case parts are all printed — metal for the bezel, and SLA for the white inner ring that lets a bit of light leak out the side in o...

Tetris may have first arrived in the West on machines such as the PC and Amiga, but its genesis at the hands of [Alexey Pajitnov] was on an Electronika 60, a Soviet clone of an early-1970s DEC PDP-11. Thus those tumbling blocks are hardly demanding in terms of processor power, and a game can be implemented on the humblest of hardware. Relatively modern silicon such as the Atmega328 in [c0pperdragon]’s Arduino Nano Tetris console should then have no problems, but to make that assumption is to miss the quality of the achievement. In a typical home or desktop computer of the 1980s the processor would have been assisted by plenty of dedicated hardware, but since the Arduino has none of that the feat of creating the game with a 288p video signal having four gray scales and with four-channel music is an extremely impressive one. Beside the Nano there are only a few passive components, there are no CRT controllers or sound chips to be seen. The entire device is packaged within a clone of ...