标签：#IoT

Gidi Littwin's new AI startup, Hemispheric, makes diagnostic brain scans for conditions like depression, PTSD, and Parkinson’s. He wants the technology to be as cheap and easy as a blood test.

The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences.

Look inside almost any modern connected device -- a smartphone, a smartwatch, a Wi-Fi thermostat, a battery-powered sensor node -- and you will find a processor core designed by ARM. It is one of the most successful engineering ideas in computing history. And here is the strange part: ARM has never manufactured a single one of those chips. It does not own a factory. It sells blueprints. A three-person project in Cambridge The story starts at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England, in the early 1980s. Acorn had built the BBC Micro, a hugely popular educational computer in the UK, and it needed a faster processor for its next machine. The commercial chips available at the time were disappointing, so a tiny team decided to design their own. The acronym everyone knows today originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine . Sophie Wilson designed the instruction set and wrote the simulator; Steve Furber led the physical chip design. RISC -- Reduced Instruction Set Computing -- was the key bet. Instead of piling on complex instructions, they kept the instruction set small and simple, which made the chip easier to build, cheaper, and remarkably power-efficient. The first silicon, the ARM1, was fabricated by VLSI Technology and delivered to Acorn on 26 April 1985. When the team powered it on, it simply worked -- first try. For anyone who has designed hardware, that is almost unheard of; new processors normally need several rounds of revisions to shake out design errors. A famous piece of Acorn lore is that the early ARM chips drew so little current they could keep running on leakage alone after the power was disconnected. From a British computer to the whole world Acorn the computer company faded, but the processor design did not. In 1990 the ARM team was spun out into a separate joint venture, and the acronym was quietly re-expanded to Advanced RISC Machines . The new company made a decision that defined its future: it would not build chips. It would license the designs and let oth

Ask most people to name the chip that started modern electronics and they will say the microprocessor. But there is a quieter hero inside almost everything you own that beeps, blinks, or connects to the internet: the microcontroller. And the first one you could actually buy shipped in 1974 as the Texas Instruments TMS1000. Microprocessor vs. microcontroller The distinction matters. A microprocessor, like Intel's famous 4004, is just the processing core. To build anything useful with it you still have to wire up separate memory chips, input/output controllers, and support logic on a circuit board. A microcontroller collapses all of that onto a single piece of silicon: the CPU, the ROM that holds your program, the RAM that holds your data, and the I/O pins that talk to the outside world, all in one package. That is exactly what the TMS1000 did. Designed by Texas Instruments engineers Gary Boone and Michael Cochran, it was a 4-bit device using a Harvard architecture, meaning it kept program memory and data memory in separate spaces so it could fetch an instruction and read data at the same time. One chip in, one chip out, and you had a complete tiny computer dedicated to a single job. Cheap enough to put in everything The genius of the TMS1000 was not raw power, it was economics. In 1974 you could buy the chips in volume for around two dollars each. By 1979, Texas Instruments was selling roughly 26 million of them every year. That price point changed what engineers could build. Suddenly it made sense to drop a small, programmable brain into products that never would have justified a full computer. You have almost certainly held one. The TMS1000 family ran the Speak & Spell, the Big Trak programmable toy vehicle, and the electronic memory game Simon, along with countless calculators, microwave ovens, and appliances. Each one was doing the same fundamental thing an IoT node does today: read some inputs, run a fixed program, drive some outputs. Why this still matters for

Researchers cobbled together funding and time to show how quantum computing could aid in the development of drugs to help underserved populations and combat rare diseases.

When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, his firm Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the venture outfit has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs's words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. "I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast," he said.

If you have ever wired a sensor to a Raspberry Pi or run your first Python script on one, you have used a device whose name hides two small jokes and one very deliberate design decision. Why is it called the Raspberry Pi? The short answer: "Raspberry" is a nod to a decades-old tradition of naming computers after fruit, and "Pi" is short for Python, the programming language the board was originally built to run. Both halves say something about where the machine came from, and why it went on to become a staple of IoT and embedded development. The fruit tradition behind "Raspberry" The "Raspberry" is not random. In the early decades of personal computing, a surprising number of companies named themselves after fruit. Apple is the obvious one, but there was also Acorn Computers (the British firm whose ARM architecture now sits inside nearly every phone and microcontroller on Earth), Apricot Computers, and Tangerine. When Eben Upton and his collaborators at the University of Cambridge set out to build a cheap computer to teach kids to code, choosing a fruit name placed the project squarely in that lineage. Upton has also cheerfully admitted the name is a bit of a pun, a wink at "blowing a raspberry" and at raspberry pie the dessert. Why "Pi" stands for Python The "Pi" is the part that reveals the machine's original purpose. As Upton has explained in interviews, the plan was to produce a computer that could really only run one thing well: Python. So the "Pi" in the name is a compressed reference to Python . It doubles neatly as a nerdy nod to the mathematical constant, but Python was the driving idea. That original intent matters because it explains the board's whole philosophy. The Raspberry Pi was never meant to be a powerhouse. It was meant to be cheap enough that a student could own one, simple enough that a beginner could learn on it, and open enough that it ran a full Linux operating system with Python ready to go. During development the design grew more capable tha

Pull a hot steel bolt out of a furnace and quench it in oil, and a fair question is: does the bolt cool from the outside in, with a sharp temperature difference between its skin and its core, or does the whole thing drop in temperature more or less together? The answer is not obvious from the part itself. A thin copper washer and a thick ceramic block behave very differently in the same bath, even at the same starting temperature. The Biot number is the small calculation that settles this question before you commit to any heavy analysis. It tells you, in a single dimensionless figure, whether an object can be treated as having one uniform temperature or whether you must resolve a temperature gradient inside it. That distinction changes the math from a one-line exponential decay to a partial differential equation. Why this calculation matters Transient heating and cooling problems show up everywhere: heat-treating metal parts, quenching forgings, cooling electronics, baking or chilling food, warming up an engine block. In every one of these, the engineer wants to know how the temperature changes over time. The hard version of that question requires solving the heat conduction equation across the body, with position and time as variables. The easy version is the lumped-capacitance model, which treats the whole object as a single point at one temperature. It reduces the problem to a simple first-order exponential. The catch is that the lumped model is only valid when internal conduction is fast compared with surface convection. The Biot number is exactly the check that tells you whether that condition holds. Skip the check and apply the lumped model where it does not belong, and you can badly mispredict cooling times, residual stresses, and the risk of cracking from thermal gradients. The core formula The Biot number compares two thermal resistances. One is the resistance to conducting heat through the inside of the solid. The other is the resistance to carrying heat a

Every camera-equipped connected device you build today, from a smart doorbell to an ESP32-CAM streaming frames over Wi-Fi to a factory machine-vision rig, is a descendant of one clunky, toaster-sized prototype: the first digital camera , built at Eastman Kodak in December 1975. It weighed about 8 pounds, took 23 seconds to capture a single 0.01-megapixel black-and-white image, and recorded that image to a cassette tape. It looked like a science-fair project, but it proved a radical idea that underpins the entire IoT sensing industry: an image could be captured, digitized, and stored as data with no film at all. An engineer, a side project, and a CCD The camera was built by a 24-year-old Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson . His manager had handed him a loose assignment: could the newly invented charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor be used to build a camera with no moving film? The CCD, developed at Bell Labs in 1969, converts light falling on an array of tiny capacitors into electrical charge, pixel by pixel. Sasson took a Fairchild 100-by-100-pixel CCD, bolted it to a lens from a Super 8 movie camera, added a digitizer, and wired the output to a portable cassette recorder. The result captured just 0.01 megapixels, a grid of 10,000 pixels. To view a photo, Sasson's team built a custom playback rig that read the tape and painted the image onto a television screen. That first image, a Kodak lab technician, took 23 seconds to write to tape and several more to display. Crude, yes, but it was the first fully electronic, filmless photograph. Why Kodak shelved the future Here is the twist that every embedded engineer should remember. Kodak owned the patent on the first digital camera, but the company made its money selling film, chemicals, and photo paper. Executives saw a filmless camera as a threat to that business, so the project was quietly set aside. Kodak did file the patent in 1978 and collected licensing revenue for decades, but it never led the digital transiti

Ties van der Meer doesn’t know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic in the Netherlands using sperm provided by an anonymous donor. After the Netherlands banned anonymous donation in 2004, the doctor who ran the clinic destroyed records that might have identified those donors, he says. He…

When you first step into the world of embedded systems, one of the earliest and most consequential decisions you will face is choosing a programming language. Two names come up more than any others: Python and C++. Both are powerful, both have passionate communities, and both are genuinely useful — but for very different reasons and in very different contexts. This article is not about declaring a winner. It is about understanding why each language exists in this space, what trade-offs you are actually making, and how to make a confident, informed decision for your next project. Understanding the Fundamental Difference Before comparing features, it helps to understand why these two languages feel so different at a deeper level. C++ is a compiled, statically-typed, systems-level language . When you write C++, you are writing code that gets translated directly into machine instructions. You manage memory manually. You control exactly when objects are created and destroyed. The hardware does precisely what you tell it to, nothing more and nothing less. This directness is both its superpower and its source of complexity. Python, by contrast, is an interpreted, dynamically-typed, high-level language . A Python runtime sits between your code and the hardware, managing memory automatically through garbage collection, resolving types at runtime, and handling a lot of bookkeeping so you don't have to. This makes Python wonderfully expressive and fast to write, but it introduces overhead that matters enormously on constrained hardware. The mental model to hold onto is this: C++ gives you control, Python gives you speed of development . Both are valuable. The question is which one your project needs more. Where C++ Shines in Embedded Systems 1. Bare-Metal and Resource-Constrained Environments If you are programming a microcontroller like an STM32, an AVR ATmega, or an ESP32 running its native SDK, C++ is almost always your primary language. These devices often have kilobytes —

tags: hardware, iot, opensource, electronics As software developers, many of us reach a point where writing code inside a virtual environment isn't quite enough—we want to manipulate the physical world. Whether it's blinking an LED via an ESP32, visualizing audio frequencies on a desk display, or building custom bench tools, hardware hacking is easily one of the most rewarding rabbit holes to fall down. At NextPCB , we’ve spent the past few years supporting the open-source hardware community by sponsoring independent creators, makers, and embedded engineers to help turn their digital schematics into real, physical circuit boards. If you’re looking for inspiration for your next weekend project, here are four curated roundups of real-world projects featuring open-source files, schematics, and design breakdowns. 1. Retro Tech & Nostalgic Geek Culture Builds 🎮 There’s something uniquely satisfying about recreating classic tech using modern hardware components. From custom hand-held arcade consoles to retro synth modules and glowing mechanical displays, retro builds combine aesthetic nostalgia with serious embedded engineering. These projects aren't just for show—they showcase clever power management, compact multi-layer PCB routing, and custom display interfaces. 👉 Check out the project breakdowns & schematics: 8 Retro Geek Culture PCB Projects: Open-Source Gerbers & Schematics 2. Smart Audio & Interactive Visual Displays 🎵 Audio reactive electronics bridge the gap between digital signal processing (DSP) and hardware UI/UX. Think custom spectrum analyzers, RGB LED matrix drivers, and tactile smart knobs that update in real-time. Building custom audio hardware requires paying extra attention to noise isolation, clean power delivery, and signal integrity—making these projects fantastic learning material for intermediate hardware devs. 👉 Explore the audio & display designs: Smart Audio & Interactive Display PCBs: Open-Source Design Guide 3. DIY Power & Precision Lab Equipm

The first message ever sent across the network that became the internet was not a grand declaration. It was two letters: "LO" . Not a word anyone chose, not a slogan, just the first half of a login command that never finished because the system crashed. More than fifty years later, that accidental fragment is one of the best origin stories in computing, and it still has something to teach anyone building connected devices today. The night of 29 October 1969 At around 10:30 in the evening on 29 October 1969, a student programmer named Charley Kline sat at a computer in Leonard Kleinrock's lab at UCLA. His job was to log in to a second machine roughly 350 miles away at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. The two computers were among the first nodes of ARPANET, the U.S. Defense Department research network that would eventually grow into the internet. Kline started typing the command LOGIN . To make sure the letters were arriving, he had a colleague at SRI on the phone confirming each keystroke. He typed L , and Stanford confirmed the L. He typed O , and Stanford confirmed the O. Then he typed G , and the SRI machine crashed. So the very first message transmitted over ARPANET was the truncated, unintentional "LO" . Kleinrock has enjoyed pointing out for decades that they could not have scripted anything better: the first word on the internet was "lo," as in "lo and behold." A little over an hour later, after the bug was fixed, Kline completed a full login, but the accidental version is the one history remembers. Why a crash matters more than a clean success It is tempting to treat "LO" as a cute footnote, but the crash is the useful part. ARPANET was not built to be reliable on day one. It was built to discover how to be reliable. Everything we now take for granted about networking, error handling, retransmission, acknowledgements, graceful recovery, exists because early links failed constantly and engineers had to design around failure rath

Ask a room full of engineers to name the most popular integrated circuit ever made and you will hear guesses about famous microprocessors or memory chips. The real answer is far humbler: an eight-pin timer chip designed in 1971 that is still manufactured by the billion every single year. It is the 555 timer , and more than half a century after its debut it remains one of the first chips a student wires up and one of the last a veteran gives up on. A chip designed by one engineer The 555 was designed by Swiss-born engineer Hans Camenzind , working under contract to Signetics , and it reached the market in 1972. What made it remarkable was not raw speed or complexity but flexibility. Inside its tiny package sit a couple of dozen transistors, a handful of resistors, and two voltage comparators arranged around a simple voltage divider. Feed it a supply voltage, add one or two external resistors and a capacitor, and it will generate precise time delays and oscillations without any software at all. That analog-first design philosophy is exactly why it endured. By some estimates the 555 has been produced at a rate of around a billion units a year for decades, which comfortably earns it the title of probably the most popular IC ever made. It has flown on spacecraft, blinked in toys, and sat quietly on countless hobbyist breadboards. What the 555 actually does The 555 has three classic operating modes, and understanding them covers most of what you will ever need: Monostable — one stable state. A trigger produces a single output pulse of a fixed length set by an external resistor and capacitor. Think of a debounced button press or a timed relay. Astable — no stable state. The output oscillates continuously between high and low, producing a square wave. This is your blinking LED, your simple tone generator, or a rough clock source. Bistable — a basic flip-flop that latches between two states, useful as a simple set/reset memory element. None of this requires firmware, a cryst

One of the most important ideas in modern wireless communication did not come out of a corporate research lab or a defense contractor. It was patented in 1942 by one of the most famous movie stars of the era, working alongside an avant-garde composer. The actress was Hedy Lamarr, and the technique she helped invent, frequency hopping , is a direct ancestor of the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS signals your devices rely on every day. The patent Hollywood forgot At the height of her Hollywood fame, Hedy Lamarr was also a self-taught inventor who tinkered between film shoots. Early in World War II she became fixed on a hard problem: radio-controlled torpedoes were easy to jam, because an enemy who found the single control frequency could simply drown it in noise and send the weapon off course. Working with composer George Antheil, she designed a system where the transmitter and receiver would rapidly and secretly switch together across many different frequencies. Antheil, who had once synchronized sixteen player pianos for a concert piece, suggested using a slotted paper roll like a player piano to keep both ends hopping in step across 88 frequencies , the same number as the keys on a piano. On August 11, 1942, they received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 for a "Secret Communication System." The U.S. Navy filed the idea away and did not use it during the war. For decades the patent sat largely forgotten, and Lamarr received no money and little recognition for it in her lifetime. She was finally inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, years after her death. What frequency hopping actually does The core insight is deceptively simple. Instead of putting a signal on one fixed frequency, you spread it across many frequencies in a pattern that only the sender and receiver know. Both ends "hop" in perfect synchronization, dwelling on each frequency for only a fraction of a second before jumping to the next. This buys you two enormous advantages. It is very hard to jam, b

If you have ever wired up a cellular modem, a WiFi module, or a Bluetooth radio and typed something like AT+CGMR into a serial terminal, you have used a command language that is older than most of the engineers using it. The humble AT command set that still configures a huge share of today's connected hardware was born in 1981 , with a device called the Hayes Smartmodem. Four decades and billions of devices later, it refuses to die, and that longevity has a lesson in it for anyone building embedded systems. What AT actually stands for When Dennis Hayes and his company released the Hayes Smartmodem 300 in 1981, they faced a small but real design problem: how does a computer tell a modem the difference between a command to the modem and data to be sent down the phone line ? Their answer was an attention sequence. Every command line began with the two letters AT , short for attention , which told the modem to wake up and listen to what followed. ATD dialled a number, ATH hung up, and so on. It was readable, it was easy to implement on the microcontrollers of the day, and crucially you could type it by hand to debug a link. That simplicity is exactly why it spread. Competing modem makers cloned the Hayes command set to stay compatible, it became a de facto industry standard, and later it was formally captured in telecom standards. A convention that started as one company's pragmatic shortcut turned into the lingua franca of getting a device onto a network. From phone lines to the Internet of Things Here is the part that surprises people. The AT command set never retired when dial-up modems did. It quietly migrated into the components that make modern IoT possible. Cellular modules that put a device on a 4G or LTE network, from vendors like Quectel, SIMCom, and u-blox, are almost universally driven by AT commands. Classic Bluetooth and many WiFi modules expose an AT interface too. Even the ESP8266 and ESP32, the microcontrollers behind an enormous number of hobby and com

Every business that has ever typed a web address into a browser owes a small debt to a company most people have never heard of. On March 15, 1985, a computer maker called Symbolics registered Symbolics.com and, in doing so, became the first ever holder of a .com domain name. More than forty years later that address is still registered and still resolves - making it the oldest .com domain on the internet. Who was Symbolics? Symbolics Inc. was a Massachusetts company that built specialized computers called Lisp machines - workstations designed from the silicon up to run the Lisp programming language, then the darling of artificial intelligence research. These were serious, expensive machines aimed at labs and universities, and the company sat right at the cutting edge of 1980s computing. So it was fitting, if a little accidental, that they were first in line when commercial domains became available. The domain name system itself was brand new. DNS had only been introduced in 1983 to replace the unwieldy HOSTS.TXT file that every machine on the early internet had to keep in sync. The now-familiar top-level domains - .com , .org , .net , .edu , .gov - were defined in 1984. When registration opened, .com was meant for commercial entities, and Symbolics grabbed theirs before anyone else did. A slow start for the web's most valuable real estate What is striking today is how little demand there was. In the whole of 1985, only a handful of .com domains were registered - names like BBN, Think, and a few other technology companies trickled in over the following months. There was no gold rush, because there was no web yet. Tim Berners-Lee would not propose the World Wide Web until 1989, and the first website would not appear until 1991. A domain name in 1985 was a technical convenience for reaching a machine, not a brand or a piece of property. That makes Symbolics.com a kind of time capsule. It was registered before the web, before browsers, before e-commerce, and before anyon

It’s not easy to transplant a whole human eye. The surgery is difficult. And the eyes themselves start to degenerate as soon as they’ve left the body. When surgeons attempted it a few years ago, the newly-transplanted eye wasn’t able to see. But researchers believe they might have a solution: a device that maintains and…

As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school. The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking. That was not the prevailing sentiment when I was young.…

The days of simply sitting in a plastic seat, eating a lukewarm hot dog, and watching a game with nothing but a physical scoreboard for context are officially over. Today, the sports world is undergoing a massive, tech-driven paradigm shift. Stadiums are no longer just concrete arenas; they are hyper-connected, edge-computing data centers . At the same time, live broadcasting is shifting from a passive, one-way viewing experience to an interactive, gamified reality. By combining next-generation stadium infrastructure with real-time, algorithmic micro-betting, the sports industry has figured out how to extract attention—and revenue—from fans every single second of a match. Here is a deep dive into the tech stack and engineering principles turning modern sports into a live-action video game. 1. The Smart Stadium Tech Stack: Infrastructure at Scale To engage tens of thousands of fans simultaneously in a single physical location, stadiums require enterprise-grade infrastructure capable of handling massive spikes in data throughput. When a touchdown is scored or a goal is disallowed, thousands of devices instantly pull video replays, refresh betting odds, and upload content. High-Density Wi-Fi 6E/7 and Private 5G Networks Traditional cellular networks quickly collapse under the density of 70,000+ fans. Modern venues like SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles or Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas solve this using localized high-density networks: Wi-Fi 6E/7: Operating in the 6 GHz spectrum, these routers utilize wider channels (up to 320 MHz) and MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) to beam dedicated streams to thousands of individual devices simultaneously without interference. CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) & Private 5G: Teams deploy private 5G networks using millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology. This provides ultra-low latency (< 10ms) and massive bandwidth, reserving dedicated lanes for stadium operations, point-of-sale systems, and premium fan applications.