Zuph

If you go to their cloud service page (https://cloud.internalpositioning.com/), it's trivially easy to get live location data for strangers by guessing names.

Their only distribution center, at that! They ship everything out of the Thief River Falls warehouse. They also run a great tour, if you're ever in the area.

Fun fact, they can take just about any combination of the 1million+ SKUs they stock from order reception to in a box waiting for a truck in under 15 minutes.

"The Muen Separation Kernel is the world’s first Open Source microkernel that has been formally proven to contain no runtime errors at the source code level."

This doesn't really jibe with seL4's claim: "The world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement is now open source." http://sel4.com/

You can already buy GaN FETs (although not the exact type being researched by MIT, as mentioned in the article):

- http://epc-co.com/epc/Products/eGaNFETs.aspx

- http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/power-management/gan-overview.page

You could have a pile of GaN FETs on your desk tomorrow morning, if you really wanted: http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?pv606=18&FV=fff4001...

Eh, depends on where you're coming from. These clearly aren't "production grade." Maybe not even "academically curious grade." Until you can at least get budgetary pricing without sending someone an email, it probably isn't even worth investigating unless you're just intensely curious.

Never mind that $240 for 8 fragile, difficult-to-work-with memristors is definitely not cheap.

HP has put the project on indefinite hiatus. It's probably dead forever.

A friend emailed them for small quantity pricing a while ago.

"Thank you for contacting us. Our 16 pin package is the newest offering in our Neuro-Bit line of memristor products. Single packages are $240.00 USD each. We are offering a 5% academic discount on all of your purchases. The 16 pin dip will be available for shipping late-May and we are taking pre-orders now."

Processing power is only one part of the equation, though. These Cortex processors are significantly more constrained in RAM and storage than computers of 1995. Run Python on a 100MHz Pentium with 192 KiB of RAM, I'll be impressed.

Location: Louisville, Kentucky

The company I work for, Techshot (http://techshot.com/), is currently looking to fill a couple of positions. We're a small contract engineering firm located just outside Louisville, in Greenville, Indiana. We focus on high-tech development, with most of our contracts coming from the government. We do a ton of work for NASA, DoD, NHS, and others, in addition to corporate and start-up clients.

We've been in business for 25 years, sent multiple payloads up on the Space Shuttle, built several new medical devices, and spun off a business making rugged LED lighting. We recently sent a payload up to the ISS, and we're under contract to deliver several more! With only 36 employees, it's a great work environment, with lots of schedule flexibility, and freedom to "go your own direction" with projects. We're currently looking to fill two positions: A Software Engineer and a Machinist.

Machinist Posting (http://techshot.com/documents/Machinist%20Posting%201_19_15....)

Looking for a general purpose machinist who can turn parts around rapidly when necessary. We shop out a lot of stuff, but sometimes we need to make things quick. If you have less experience than requested, but can demonstrate the ability to learn quickly, it's still worth applying.

Software Engineer Posting (http://techshot.com/documents/Software%20Engineer%203_13_15....)

Any software engineer would need to be reasonably comfortable with low-level interfacing with hardware. Embedded development experience a huge plus. Our software interacts with lower-level embedded device we've developed in-house, giving users a nice front-end interface, and offloading some of the heavy computational lifting.

I'm an Electrical Engineer here, and I can pretty confidently say that it's a great job for a technically curious engineer. There isn't a lot of opportunity to move "up the management chain" within the company, but the work environment is super-flexible, the projects are technically interesting and challenging, and the current team is intelligent and motivated.

If you have any questions about the company, job postings, or would like to submit your resume/cover letter, send me an email, bluyster@techshot.com.

That works once you've reached a certain level of understanding. Most AAA games have really good translations.

The trick is "comprehensible input." If you can provide a learner with input that is just a little beyond their level of comprehension, they will learn much, much faster. Dump someone into an ocean of complex grammar and vocabulary? It's a nightmare. I can see definite value in a game that starts very basic, and increases complexity as you acquire a language.

A game would also be good for reinforcing word-image links without translation. Sites like DuoLingo do a very good job at training people to be translators, but a poorer job of training people to become adequate speakers, writers, and listeners.

In general, Russian rockets don't have the same range safety mechanisms that American and European rockets do.

Although the Dragon is reusable, SpaceX's contract with NASA stipulates that new capsules be used for each resupply mission. Not sure if the contract allows SpaceX to refurbish the capsules for other commercial missions, but the other CRS Dragons are being used for showpieces at the moment.

Per Dave Jones (http://www.eevblog.com/), yes.

They've recently diversified into lighting, with "Big Ass Lights." The companies are organized under "Big Ass Solutions" http://www.bigasssolutions.com/

It's a product of a higher target altitude (650km for Orbcomm vs. 330km for an ISS resupply) and wanting to perform a single second-stage burn to achieve the target orbit.

Glad to hear it! I've been looking for a viable Pachube alternative since Pachube got gobbled up.

Unfortunately, Xively is neither free, nor open source.

They were using Lua, but found some of the features of the language to be non-condusive to microcontroller use.

If you want something similar that can be programmed bare-metal, check out the spark core: https://www.spark.io/

The cruising altitude of Google Loon's is well above the cruising altitude of any commercial jet. This accident was caused by a balloon coming down, a much rarer occurrence.

I don't expect to hear a postmortem from Google, but I'd be astonished if this wasn't a malfunction of some sort-- These balloons almost certainly have an emergency cut-down device of some sort capable of safely and rapidly returning the payload to Earth.

Nope, I don't see these being sold in Radio Shack. The world of electronics distribution reaches way beyond Radio Shack.

I mean: Before the Raspberry Pi, there were Linux-capable ARM Dev Boards, but the vast majority of them were niche items, over $150, and you had to call up the manufacturer and convince them to sell you one. (oh, and don't you dare use this in production without securing a larger purchase agreement!) Now, there's a proliferation of sub-$100 Linux-capable boards being sold by all the distribution houses, in large quantities, with no or limited restrictions on use in production.

I hope this move from the Raspberry Pi foundation does the same thing for OEM SOMs. Right now, there are only a handful of SOMs on Digikey/Mouser, most with fewer than 100 units in stock, all (that I can find) over $100, with zero community of support. Most of the companies with strong reputations in the market require a phone call before they'll even agree to sell you units for sampling.

I'll be interested to see how this progresses. With any luck, it'll open up a market of cheap, well-distributed SOMs, similar to the Pi opening up a market for cheap, well-distributed ARM/Linux Dev Boards.

The situation's surprisingly similar: Powerful ARM Dev boards existed before the Pi, but the price was steep, they couldn't be found in traditional distribution channels, and the OS/Driver support was poor at best. This is, more or less, the place we're at with embedded SOMs.

I would love to see something like this for embedded Linux applications (Platforms like BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi), without the overhead of X11, rather than just Android/Tizen/et al.

The problem with that was that the short line from Louisville to Indianapolis hasn't been seriously updated in over 50 years. The speed limit on the entire section of track is something like 30 mph. Of course folks aren't going to go by train when it's over twice as long as driving.

There's been some talk of a Louisville-Lexington-Nashville line, but nothing particularly likely to happen.

Building a toaster oven reflow soldering controller.

Have they ever flown a quadcopter before? If not, I strongly suggest they start with something cheap like the Syma X1 ($35 on Amazon). It's an amazing value, and incredibly fun to fly. Very forgiving, and mildly hackable.

The biggest benefit is that it lets you build your piloting chops without a huge financial risk. An acquaintance of mine is working to get drones into the hands of professionals who aren't interested in becoming drone experts (Realtors, etc), and he uses the Syma X1 to train folks before giving them the keys to larger, more dangerous and expensive drones.

Even if those two devices have radically different architectures?

I come from an Electrical Engineering/Low-level embedded background. I only just learned of Docker/Vagrant/et al., and although I can understand the utility in some contexts, I can't possibly understand the utility of running Docker on a Raspberry Pi (except as a toy exercise). What am I missing?

The "any new project" generality is getting closer to an absolute truth every day. Many Cortex chips use much less power than an AtMega or AtTiny in sleep modes, and use very little power in active modes. All are fast enough that they can spend the majority of their time in deep sleep modes. NXP is making significant inroads in producing low pin-count devices, and there are many chips available for under $2.50 in single quantities.

I mean, at the end of the day, the tool you know is the tool you should use, but it's more difficult to quibble about the technicalities of it all the time.

I would argue that the biggest barrier to Cortex M0/M3/M4 adoption in the hobbyist/maker/startup community is the lack of coherent open tool chains. Many of the cheap programmers will only program a subset of chips, many pre-canned compilers don't include various features (Many lack support for the M0+, or the FPU on the M4F chips), it's almost impossible to get code working on a chip without delving into a vicious hellscape of linker scripts, and many manufacturers license their peripheral libraries under onerous non-free/non-open licenses.

I could program an AVR with one hand tied behind my back using an entirely open toolchain. Until I can do that with even a single manufacturer's Cortex Mx offerings, the AtTinys and AtMegas will be sticking around. I want to work on my project damn it, not debugging my toolchain.

Told to me by one of my engineering mathematics professors: "Anyone can design a bridge that doesn't fall down. It takes an engineer to build one that only barely doesn't fall down."

I had been fighting with Makefiles for a very long time, and I never really got beyond finding a boilerplate makefile, and changing it to just barely accomplish what I wanted to do.

A while ago, I found Tup thanks to HN: http://gittup.org/tup/ In under an hour of documentation reading, I was writing tupfiles that were more functional than any makefile I had written in years. Also really neat: since tup can monitor the file system, you can set up a monitor to auotmatically rebuild the project every time you change something. Super handy and super easy with tup.