skaevola

What board did you use?

If you're not already aware, there's Project Euler: https://projecteuler.net/

Samsung has a 14nm fab in Austin and GF has a 12nm (?) fab in New York.

Any resource recommendations to learn this skill?

The Garmin Watches don't have DRAM for power reasons. The processor is a memory constrained microcontroller without a hardware memory management unit. Without the MMU you don't get as powerful memory virtualization or process isolation.

Why can't I buy an American made toaster? This isn't a gotcha -- I actually tried a few weeks ago and all I found for my trouble was this website: https://buyingamericanblog.com/2017/05/29/quest-for-made-in-...

People with direct experience of the manufacturing sector in the US and abroad (including me) will certainly tell you that America's capabilities have deteriorated, at least relative to other countries. The machine tool industry is considered a good bellwether for industrial capacity and there's been some good research on this topic if you're interested: http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf

A big reason seems to be the difficulty of financing manufacturing operations in America.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/financing-advance...

I've looked at the financials of hearing aid companies before. And the short answer is that the money is not going to the hearing aid company. Of the $5k you spent on your hearing aid, the hearing aid company was probably paid $500, and the other $4.5k went to the audiologist.

The problem is that most consumers' revealed preference is for better performance rather than replaceability or device longevity (I know some people here will express a different preference, but you are a minority of consumers). Consumers don't factor device longevity into their purchase decisions, so companies don't prioritize it during the design process. And it needs to be prioritized because design decisions for longevity involve tradeoffs with other device performance metrics like size, weight, battery life (you can improve battery longevity by decreasing the depth of discharge of the battery before a recharge is required), processor performance, price.

Unfortunately this article clearly demonstrates the problems companies face when they try to improve longevity at the cost of performance. Apple implemented processor throttling based on measured battery condition to improve the longevity of their devices, but even in this article, seemingly focused on device longevity, they still receive criticism for this decision:

"But even consumers who hang onto their old iPhones for as long as possible learned in 2017 that Apple released a software update that slows down old phones to counteract aging lithium-ion battery problems."

I can't speak to the CC26xx series specifically, but normally deeply embedded cores running a ROM stack like that have some additional SRAM which can be loaded at boot for firmware patches.

It's so amazing how electronics have progressed. a startup called Octavio Systemsn is now selling a single package that can run a Linux system. I wouldn't count it as running Linux on a single chip, (power system, microprocessor, RAM) because I believe there are multiple dies within the package, but still, super impressive.

Here's a link: http://octavosystems.com/2016/05/09/osd3358-new-era-integrat...

OSH Park is very cheap and good for bare boards: https://oshpark.com/

If you want somebody to populate the boards for you, I love Macrofab: https://macrofab.com/

This video was very cool. Are there any IC's that can perform analog computing for neural networks on the market now? I'm picturing something like an FPGA but with a bunch of op amps that you can connect into summers or amplifiers.

If not, how would one practically implement an analog computer for neural network programming (without several tables full of op-amps?)

What are the advantages of analog computing for this application?

Advanced Circuits is not the cheapest American pcb manufacturer. OSH Park is much cheaper.

You're wrong

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/upshot/surprise-florida...

Don't worry about the political climate too much though. Plenty of Californians are moving here, many intent on advocating for the same policies here that caused them to flee their state in the first place.

This is actually not true, here's a quote from the link that I posted.

"Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent."

It's true that a lot of the money is donated to churches. But even when you ignore the money that is donated to churches, Republicans still donate a higher percentage of their income to secular charities than Democrats do, donate more blood, and volunteer more.

"many people from other forms of religion at war with government that wants to teach children science and evolution in schools and treat homeless people with medication, stable housing, and education rather than treating homeless people with prayer and preaching about Jesus."

I live in Texas, and I can tell you from first hand experience that this is a ridiculous and false stereotype.

"Republicans are less empathetic towards their fellow citizens"

Seriously?

It's well established that conservatives/republicans donate more to charity.

Here's Nicholas Kristoff's column on it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=...

Not only do Republicans donate more in absolute terms to charity, they also have lower average incomes, which means that the average giving as a portion of income is much higher. And it's not just donations to their church, Republicans are even more likely to donate blood than Democrats!

I'm not writing this because I want to claim the moral high ground for the Republicans, I see Republicans and Democrats as each having different takes on how best to help the poor. Neither side has a monopoly on empathy.

Freescale's fabs in the U.S. are all very old (like early 1990's old). AFAIK they only manufacture analog and MEMS type stuff there. I think TSMC manufactures their MCU, MPU's, and most other digital electronics. This is the 'fab-lite' model.

Really cool app, and a shame Apple rejected it. Using a spoon was a very clever idea.

Why did you choose to display weight in grams to 3 decimal points when the measurements are only accurate to within 3g? It would be better to not display the values after the decimal point, so you don't give your users a false sense of accuracy.

So the university goes through this process with all semiconductor companies that are developing processors, just to be sure that they're not infringing?

I'm curious how the university could discover that Apple was using its patent. The internal characteristics of the processor must be secret, right? Do they examine die photos and reconstruct the gate netlist?

I hadn't heard of the turtle head method before so I searched and found this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hcKERTnNi0

What an awful way to teach.

I'm not convinced that believing in something false is always bad. For example, there's a concept in psychology called an "internal locus of control", which basically means believing that you have control over aspects of your life. It turns out that having an internal locus of control is very negatively correlated with depression, so it might be that holding these beliefs actually help people's mental states. Another example would be people turning to religious beliefs to cope with tragedy.

Anyways, I'd like to believe that the belief isn't false. I do believe we do exert some substantial control over our own destinies.

Is it? I much prefer the interpretation about rugged individualism. It's not surprising to me that that's the interpretation that caught on in America.

This other interpretation seems so cynical. "Yeah, choices in life don't really matter because you always end up at the same place, but I tell people I picked the less obvious choice anyways!"

Sometimes it's actually good to believe in something, you know?

Is this statement parody?

If not, then you are incredibly ignorant about China.

I don't think that's a good idea.

Frankly, the secret to a magic trick has no value. It's always disappointing. What's entertaining is the effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCxPT7UUkkY

How do you deal with mosquitos?

The referenced Bolt blog post is a bit more substantial: https://medium.com/@BoltVC/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by-dre...

I stumbled upon one remnant of the Manhattan Project at my university's machine shop a couple of years ago. In the machine shop is a row of boxy modern lathes, with one beautiful curved older lathe at the end of the row. Without fail, when working with precise designs, the veteran machinist of the shop always used that older lathe.

When I asked him about this he explained to me that prior to WW2 most of the world's precision lathes had been made in Germany. Unfortunately, the large quantities of precisely machined components needed for the Manhattan Project came right when those lathes were no longer available! The company designed the lathe in an incredibly short amount of time to meet those needs. The school bought the lathe at a surplus auction after the war for cheaper than any of the other lathes, and even 70 years later it remains the best.

Here's what it looked like: http://www.galleryofmachines.com/gallery'sdigitalphotos/Lath...