2026-01-14 02:00:20
The electric vehicle revolution has created market forces to drive all sorts of innovations. Battery technology has progressed at a rapid pace, and engineers have developed ways to charge vehicles at ever more breakneck rates. Similarly, electric motors have become more powerful and more compact, delivering greater performance than ever before.
In the latter case, while modern EV motors are very capable things, they’re also reliant on materials that are increasingly hard to come by. Most specifically, it’s the rare earth materials that make their magnets so good. The vast majority of these minerals come from China, with trade woes and geopolitics making it difficult to get them at any sort of reasonable price. Thus has sprung up a new market force, pushing engineers to search for new ways to make their motors compact, efficient, and powerful.
Rare earth materials have become a hot button issue in recent decades, and they’ve also become a familiar part of our lives. If you remember playing with some curiously powerful magnets at some point, you’ve come across neodymium—a rare earth material of wide application. The element is alloyed with iron and boron to produce some of the strongest magnets readily available on the commercial market. You’ll find them in everything from hard drives to EV motors, and stuck to a great many fridges, where they’re quite hard to peel off. At times, neodymium is also alloyed with other rare earths, like terbium and dysprosium, which can help create powerful magnets that are able to resist higher temperatures without failure.
We come across these magnets all the time, so they might not feel particularly rare. Indeed, the rare earth elements—of which there are 17 in total—are actually fairly abundant in the Earth’s crust. The problem is that they are thinly spread, often only found as trace elements rather than in rich ore deposits that are economical to mine. Producing any useful amount of rare earth materials tends to require processing a great deal of raw material at significant cost. As it stands, China has gained somewhat of a monopoly on rare earths, controlling up to 92% of global processing capability and 60 to 70% of mining capacity. In happier times, this wouldn’t be such a problem. Sadly, with the extended battles being fought over global trade at the moment, it’s making access to rare earths both difficult and expensive.
This has become a particular problem for automotive manufacturers. It’s no good to design a wonderful motor that needs lots of fancy rare earth magnets, only to find out a year later that they’re no longer available and that production must shut down. Thus, there is a serious desire on the part of major automakers to produce high-performance motors that don’t require such fancy, hard-to-come-by materials. Even if they come with a small cost penalty in materials or manufacturing, they could save huge sums of money if they avoid a production shutdown at some point in the future. Large manufacturing operations are slow, lumbering things that need to run on long timescales to operate economically, and they can easily be derailed by supply disruptions. Securing a solid motor supply is thus key to companies looking to build EVs en masse in the immediate future.
BMW has, to a degree, solved the problem by making different kinds of motors. Rather than trying to find other ways to make powerful magnets, the German automaker put engineering efforts into developing highly-efficient motors that generate their own magnetic fields via electricity. Instead of using permanent magnets on the rotor, they use coils, which are electrically excited to generate a comparable magnetic field. Thus, rare earth magnets are replaced with coil windings, which are much easier to source. These motors are referred to as Electrically Excited Synchronous Motors (EESM), and are distinct from traditional induction motors as they are creating a magnetic field in the rotor via supplied electric current rather than via induction.
This method of construction does come with some trade offs, of course, such as heat generated by the rotor coils, and the need for slip rings or brushes to transfer power to the coils on the rotor. However, they manage to neatly sidestep the need for rare earth materials entirely. They are also more controllable. Since it’s possible to vary the magnetic field in the rotor as needed, this can be used to make efficiency gains in low-load situations. They’re also less susceptible to damage from overtemperature that could completely destroy the magnets in a permanent magnet motor.
BMW was inspired to take this route because of a spike in neodymium prices well over a decade ago. Today, that decision is bearing fruit—with the company less fearful of supply chain issues and production line stoppages due to some pesky magnets. You’ll find EESM motors in a range of BMW products, from the iX1 to the i7, and even the compact CE 02 scooter. The company’s next generation of electric models will largely use EESM motors for rear-wheel-drive models, while using asynchronous motors up front to add all-wheel-drive to select models. The German automaker is not the only player in this space, either. A range of third-party motor manufacturers have gotten on board the EESM train, as well as other automakers like Nissan and Renault.
Nissan has similarly gotten onboard with EESM technology. Note the contact surfaces for the brushes used to deliver electricity to the coils in the motor.
Don’t expect every automaker to rush into this technology overnight. Retooling production lines to make different types of motors takes time, to say nothing of the supporting engineering required to control the motors and integrate them into vehicle designs. Many automakers will persevere with permanent magnet motors, doing what they can to secure rare earth supplies and shore up their supply chains. However, if the rare earth crisis drags on much longer, expect to see ever more reliance on new motor designs that don’t need rare earth magnets at all.
2026-01-14 00:30:31
A joy of covering the world of the European hackerspace community is that it offers the chance for train travel across the continent using the ever-good-value Interrail pass. For a British traveler such a journey inevitably starts with a Eurostar train that whisks you in comfort through the Channel Tunnel, so a report of an AI vulnerability on the Eurostar website from [Ross Donald] particularly caught our eye. What it reveals goes beyond the train company, and tells us some interesting tidbits about how safeguards in AI chatbots can be circumvented.
The bot sits on the Eurostar website, and is a simple HTML and JavaScript client that talks to the LLM back-end itself through an API. The API queries contain the whole conversation, because as AI toy manufacturers whose products have been persuaded to spout adult context will tell you, large language models (LLM)s as commonly implemented do not have a context memory for the conversation in hand.
The Eurostar developers had not made a bot without guardrails, but the vulnerability lay in those guardrails only being applied to the most recent message. Thus an innocuous or empty message could be sent, with a payload concealed in a previous message in the conversation. He demonstrates the bot returning system information about itself, and embedding injected HTML and JavaScript in its responses.
He notes that the target of the resulting output could only be himself and that he was unable to access any data from other customers, so perhaps in this case the train operator was fortunately spared the risk of a breach. From his description though, we agree they could have responded to the disclosure in a better manner.
Header image: Eriksw, CC BY-SA 4.0.
2026-01-13 23:00:12
I’m not proud. When many of us were kids, we were unabashedly excited when trash day came around because sometimes you’d find an old radio or — jackpot — an old TV out by the curb. Then, depending on its size, you rescued it, or you had your friends help, or, in extreme cases, you had to ask your dad. In those days, people were frugal, so the chances of what you found being fixable were slim to none. If it was worth fixing, the people would have probably fixed it.
While TVs and radios were the favorites, you might have found other old stuff, but in those days, no one was throwing out a computer (at least not in a neighborhood), and white goods like refrigerators and washing machines had very little electronics. Maybe a mechanical timer or a relay, but that’s about it.
Didn’t matter. Even a refrigerator had a power cord. Just about anything was fair game for collection in a budding junk box for a future, unspecified project. But today, unrepairable trash is likely to stay on the curb until it heads for the landfill.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Even though people are more likely to throw away nearly good stuff these days, a lot has changed. Consumer electronics have tiny SMD components, and a lot of the cool stuff will be custom and inscrutable to an electronics hobbyist.
But some of it is just supply and demand. In 1970, if you needed, say, a relay, and you didn’t live in a major city, you’d have to find what you wanted in a catalog. Then you’d place an order with a written check or a money order. Don’t forget, in those days, there was probably a steep minimum order, too. So one $3 relay wasn’t going to cost $3. It would probably have to be part of a minimum order and cost more in shipping. While a $100 minimum sounds big, in the 1970s, for most of us, it might as well have been $100,000.
Then the check had to clear, and two or three weeks later, the postman might bring your relay. After a month or more, you might not even remember why you wanted it. Today, you click a few buttons, and sometimes the next day the component mysteriously appears on your doorstep.
Do you still strip old components? I’ll admit, it has only been a few years since I stopped habitually cutting power cords off anything heading for the trash. I finally threw out or donated old computer cases, small monitors, and the like.
Computers becoming junk made things a little more complicated. Before 3D printers, getting your hands on things like stepper motors, bearings, and belts was a little challenging. But now, these are a click away like everything else.
If I do strip any components today, it might be strange things that are hard to find now: air variable capacitors, inductors, and maybe floppy drives. Unless, of course, the gear is super old, but in general, things that are real antiques tend not to show up in the trash heap.
On the other hand, people are more likely to throw away perfectly good gear these days. Well, perfectly good if you have even moderate repair skills. We’ve picked up laser printers, TVs, and a very nice pro audio mixing board just by paying attention to the dumpster in the parking lot. As I said, I’m not proud.
Do you collect junk parts? Why? Why not? Do you think kids should even bother now? Do they? What’s your dream dumpster find? We sometimes get jealous of people who, apparently, have better dumpsters than we do.
2026-01-13 20:00:01
If you’ve wiring up a microcontroller and need some kind of storage, it’s likely you’ll reach for an SD card. Compared to other ways of holding data on your project, SD cards are just so much cheaper, resilient to physical and magnetic shocks, and simpler to work with from both a hardware and software perspective. On the other hand, it might seem silly to put a SD card slot on a board that’s never going to see a replacement card. [DIY GUY Chris] wants to advertise a solution for that: a cardless SD card chip by XTX that can act as a drop-in replacement for your projects.
The XTXD0*G series are NAND flash chips of precisely the sort you’d find in an SD card, except without the SD card. That means you can use your usual SD card access libraries to speed prototyping, but skip the BOM cost of an actual card reader. In his Instructable and the video embedded below [Chris] shows how he used the 4 GB version, the XTSD04GLGEAG to make a custom SD-compatible breakout board that is equally happy in your laptop’s card reader or on a breadboard.
To get it plugged into the breadboard, [Chris] is using the standard 2.54 mm headers you can get anywhere; to get it plugged into a card reader, he’s just relying on the PCB being cut to shape. [Chris] notes that you’ll want to have the board built at 0.6 mm thickness if you’re going to plug it in like a micro SD card.
Of course once you’ve gotten used to the little NAND chips, there’s no need to put them on breakouts but this looks like a fun way to test ’em out. You don’t need to keep your flash chip on an SD-card sized PCB, either; we saw something similar used to make modern game cartridges. If you insist on using a standard SD card and don’t want to buy a slot, you can certainly DIY that instead.
2026-01-13 17:00:23
The exciting part about repairing consumer electronics is that you are never quite sure what you are going to find. In a recent video by [Mick] of Buy it Fix it on YouTube the subject is a KS Jive radio that throws a few curve balls along the way. After initially seeing the unit not power on with either batteries or external power, opening it up revealed a few loose wires that gave the false hope that it would be an easy fix.
As is typical, the cause of the unit failing appears to have been a power surge that burned out a trace and obliterated the 3.3V LDO and ST TDA7266P amplifier. While the trace was easily fixed, and AMS1117 LDOs are cheap and plentiful, the amplifier chip turned out to be the real challenge on account of being an EOL chip.
The typical response here is to waddle over to purveyors of scrap hardware, like AliExpress sellers. Here [Mick] bought a ‘new’ TDA7266P, but upon receiving his order, he got suspicious after comparing it with the busted original. As can be seen in the top image, the markings, logo and even typeface are wildly different. Thus [Mick] did what any reasonable person does and x-rayed both chips to compare their internals.
On the left you can see the dead original amplifier, with what looks like a big mark on the die where the power event destroyed part of it. What’s also apparent from this and the other x-ray shots is that neither the die size, bond wires, nor the physical package’s pins match up. The unusual connections of the fake IC led [Mick] to conclude that it was likely an ST VNQ5E050AK-E quad-channel high-side driver, or at least something very similar to it.
After taking a CNC milling machine to the real and fake chips for additional comparison and a crude decapping, he was still left in a bind, as finding a replacement IC turned out to be basically impossible. Almost, that is, as Mouser turned out to still have the TDA7266P13TR, tape-reel version in stock, with a few left.
This is apparently the same IC, but the cut-reel variety. Interestingly, when tossing this replacement in the x-ray machine, it showed to have a bigger die than the dead ST amplifier IC, which could be due to having been produced with a different process node or so. Regardless, with the original part the radio sprung right back to life, but it shows once again how many chips are being remarked by AliExpress sellers to be something that they are definitely not. Caveat emptor, once more.
2026-01-13 14:00:28
[State of Electronics] have released their latest video about ARCTURUS, the 14th video in their series The Computer History of Australia.
ARCTURUS was a research computer system developed on a shoestring budget at Sydney University in the 1960s, and was in service until 1975. Particularly the system was developed by [David Wong] as a part of his PhD thesis: The design and construction of the digital computers snocom, nimbus and arcturus (PDF). [David] worked in collaboration with [Kevin R. Rosolen] who is interviewed in the video.
The machine is described as a fixed-point, binary, parallel, single address, general-purpose digital computer using packaged diode-transistor circuits. Ferrite-core memory was used instead of drum memory because drum memory was too slow and performance was a high priority feature. For the same reason parallel features were implemented where serial might have been done more simply, if it hadn’t been so slow. In addition to the ferrite-core there were paper-tape peripherals and control panels.
The machine supported 32 distinct instructions and had a 13-bit address space allowing it to directly address 8,192 words, each word comprising 20-bits. Those word bits were one sign bit and nineteen magnitude bits for fixed-point two’s complement binary numbers.
We covered The Computer History of Australia by [State of Electronics] back when they released their 5th video in the series, Australia’s Silliac Computer, if you’re interested in more history of computing in Australia.
