Engineering & Technology

Linus Åkesson (lftkryo on YouTube) makes 8-bit SID music on a Commodore 64 without any software apart from the built-in BASIC interpreter.

This involves poking numbers into memory and hardware registers and writing machine code in decimal.

Check it out in the video below and Linus’ website here.

TheaTTYr is a terminal theater for playing VT100 art and animations.

The VT100, introduced by DEC in 1978, was among the first video terminals to support ANSI escape codes.

The ANSI art scene used the VT100’s animation capabilities, made possible by codes that allowed cursor movement, deletion, and character updates to create animated effects.

Usually, they represent a long hand-crafted process done by a single person to tell a story. Some of these files may date back to the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Orhun Parmaksız developed this tool over a series of livestreams, which you can check out here.

You can see demonstrations and code on GitHub.

drew’s dev blog posts on everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill

So what makes this release different, and why should you care about it?

In short, there are two big changes being made to how Python runs at a core level which have the potential to radically change the performance profile of Python code in the future.

Those changes are:

• A “free-threaded” version of CPython which allows you to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), and
• Support for experimental Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation.

Python 3.13 is a big release in introducing some exciting new concepts and features to the runtime. It’s unlikely to make any immediate different to how you write and run your Python, but it’s likely that over the next few months and years as both free-threading and JIT become more mature and well established, they’ll begin to have more and more of an impact on the performance profile of Python code, particularly for CPU-bound tasks.

Check out the details in the post here.

This video from Vox details how Kodak transformed the photography landscape. With its introduction of the Brownie point and shoot, which was originally marketed to children, amateur photography completely took off. Kodak dominated the market for a little over a century. Watch the full video here.

Kodak gave way to pocket digitals and eventually the iPhone but amateur photography is still going strong. It’s very much alive in the DIY circuit and we stock a bunch of cool cameras in the Adafruit shop. Here are some of our current faves:

• Raspberry Pi High Quality HQ Camera – 12MP

• Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 – 12MP 120 Degree Wide Angle Lens

• TTL Serial JPEG Camera with NTSC Video

• Zero Spy Camera for Raspberry Pi Zero

• Ultra Tiny USB Camera with GC0307 Sensor

What do music teachers talk about when they talk about the future? Find out in this report from the annual Missouri state music teachers conference! Here’s more from Music Matters:

Our opening session titled “Innovating for the Future” included a panel with renowned leaders in the field of music education – Dr. Jennifer Snow, CEO and Executive Director of the Frances Clark Center; Dr. Courtney Crappell, long-time columnist for the American Music Teacher magazine and Dean of UMKC; Andrea Miller, founder of Music Studio Startup; Dr. Curtis Pavey, UMKC Assistant Professor and Manager of Online Publications for the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy; Dr. Sara Ernst, Associate Professor at University of Oklahoma and Director of Teacher Engagement and programming for the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy; and Dr. Christopher Madden, UMKC Assistant Professor and co-author of the Technique through Repertoire books. They were tasked with finishing the statement, “I believe in a future that…” I appreciated hearing the vision each of them shared for the future of music teaching as a profession and was challenged with a number of questions to consider for myself, my studio, and our community. Very thought-provoking!

See and hear more!

 

Michal Necasek for the OS/2 Museum that there is remarkably little detailed original information from the early days if the IBM PC (the original 5150).

A major problem hindering research is that there are no mentions of the IBM PC 5150 in the IBM announcements archive prior to 1983. The announcement letters are usually a very reliable source of information as to what IBM released when, but for about the first year and a half of the IBM PC’s life, there’s just nothing.

Sure, there’s a list of IBM PC models on Wikipedia… but the table doesn’t even always match the provided references, and the references are woefully incomplete anyway because, again, there’s apparently no official data from the 1981-1982 period.

Check out Michal’s research on the model numbers in the post here.

CCTV Video News Agency shared this video on Youtube. The dazzling display involving over 10,000 drones was staged at Shenzhen Bay Park on 09/26!

Shenzhen City in south China celebrated the upcoming Chinese National Day, which falls on Oct 1, with a mesmerizing drone-performing light show, featuring a majestic tapestry made by over 10,000 drones against the dazzling skyline.
https://www.cctvplus.com/news/2024092

https://cdn-blog.adafruit.com/uploads/2024/09/x.mp4

Aoyama_PROD@STEAM Tokyo on X (@AoyamaProd) writes:

Super easy CircuitPython installation to (a) ESP32-S3 board! Playing gif-anim on LILYGO T-Display S3 Pro.

#circuitpython #adafruit #STEAMTokyo

Check it out here.

Adafruit is celebrating during the month of October (starting tomorrow!) as ShackToberFest.

What is ShackToberFest? It’s our celebration of all things classic Radio Shack and Tandy!

We’ll be doing blog posts and perhaps demonstrations on Show and Tell on the merchandise and publications from Radio Shack and Tandy – parts, gear, Realistic, Tandy computers, Tandy Leather even. Anything associated with Radio Shack & Tandy is fair game.

We have our swag and our memories, let’s celebrate together! Post your thoughts and pictures using #ShackToberFest in social media.

We look forward to seeing your memories, memorabilia and gear!

Brown snakes are some of the most common and diverse reptiles in the world. They come in a variety of sizes and levels of venomous potency, making them a group of wild snakes that’s both interesting and important to study.

During the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, it's common to hear people wish each other "Shana Tova!" What does this phrase mean?

OK, this week, we did get a couple of designs worked on. First up, last week we chatted about bq25185, this week we designed two boards – an everyday lipo charger and a variant of that 3.3V buck output design from last week. Then, we finally got our corrected HSTX to DVI converter boards for our RP2350 Feather and tested them successfully, so PCBs have been booked.

Then, poking around some old PCBs, we noticed that we had an LPS28 we featured on EYE ON NPI breakout we never finished because the chip price was 300% inflated.

Finally, we have a project where we need to communicate with two UART devices at once; looking for dual-UART USB chips, we found the CP2105 at a good price!

And on The Great Search: looking at Ultra-thin RG-174 Coax.

Video below:

The New Testament is full of tense exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees, who often tried to trip him up in legalistic debates. But who were the Pharisees really and what did they believe?

Bull snakes (Pituophis catenifer sayi), sometimes generalized as gopher snakes, are among the largest and most powerful nonvenomous snakes in North America. The heavy-bodied bull snake is often mistaken for a rattlesnake due to its size and defensive behaviors, but it's completely harmless to humans.

Anyone who’s ever been on a video chat knows the feeling of needing to quickly go dark and sometimes that can be a rattling experience. WOOF! This PyRuler Video Conference Panic Buttons project was inspired by Simon Prickett’s Zoom Panic Button, which allows a user to both mute and cut video at the push of an arcade switch embedded in a Starbucks cup. Read more!

This week, we received a request for how to find ultra-thin RG-174 cable, such as the one we used to stock.

“Hi, I’m looking for the thinnest possible coax wire and found that you used to have this listed at 1.2mm diameter. All the other RG-174 cable I’ve found online is 2.8mm diameter. Just curious where you found it and if you would ever stock it again. Or any other info that would help me search for this 1.2mm version.”

Note that this isn’t stranded or solid core wire; it’s a 2-conductor coax, as thin as 16 AWG wire. We no longer carry this cabling, but DigiKey does! Let’s take a look at how to find RF coax wiring at any length and width.

See the video below and the chosen parts on DigiKey here.

The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit NeoPXL8 FeatherWing for Feather M4 – 8 x DMA NeoPixels!

Since we first started carrying NeoPixels back in 2012, the chainable RGB LEDs have taken over the world. And a big part of that success is due to the simplicity of their wiring – just one data wire, no matter how many pixels you’ve got. So no surprise they’re everywhere, blinking away in art exhibits, maker faire demos, DJ booths, decorations, and costumes.

But, at some point, every NeoPixel’er bumps into the constraints of that single-data-wire: the timing is very picky and often time your code has to stop completely so that it can burst out the data without any interruptions. This requirement makes it tough to create fast-update lighting effects, and limits the number of pixels you can drive before other hardware peripherals get attention.

Resident pixel-pro Paint Your Dragon (who coined the name NeoPixel dont-cha-know!) took on this challenge and has succeeded gloriously. By carefully examining the ATSAMD51 datasheet he noticed you could use the Timer 0 in ‘waveform’ mode, and create 8 unique waveforms over DMA that would handle all the pixel-pushing for you.

Thus were born the NeoPXL8 Arduino library and NeoPXL8 FeatherWing! The library runs on our Feather M4 and handles all the NeoPixeling for you, up to 8 strands of concurrent DMA output each one can be 1750 RGB pixels long for a total of 8 x 1750 = 14000 pixels. That leaves you some RAM for your code to run in as well. Even though you could connect that many pixels, what we think this ‘Wing does best is take advantage of DMA + the SAMD51’s blazingly-fast 120MHz processor to manage animations for hundreds of pixels with ease

If you have a SAMD21 Feather, check out the sister product – NeoPXL8 FeatherWing for M0 boards.

To make connection easy, this FeatherWing does the level-shifting and pin arrangements for you. All 8 strands have a level shifter that converts the 3.3V logic level to 5V logic, there’s a little switch-cap converter that generates the clean 5V power supply for you. Then a 100 ohm resistor in line after the buffer reduces ringing on long wiring runs.

You get two options for connecting NeoPixels:

• 2 x 8 Header with ground and 5V-logic signal, in pairs
• 2 x RJ-45 ‘Ethernet’ Jacks, with ground and 5V-logic signal per twisted pair. This matches the same wiring as the OctWS2811

USE

The Adafruit NeoPXL8 FeatherWing and Library Guide provides details and use examples.

Projects

Would you like to see this FeatherWing in action? Check out the projects below:

• OOZE MASTER 3000: NeoPixel Simulated Liquid Physics
• Holiday Icicle Lights with Flair

Video:

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