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.
2026-01-13 11:00:15
It turns out, that mold is everywhere. The problem is when it becomes too much, as mold infestations can have serious health effects on both humans and animals. Remediation is extremely expensive, too. So there are plenty of benefits to finding mold early. Now, German researchers are proposing an electronic “nose” that uses UV-activated tin oxide nanowires that change resistance in the presence of certain chemicals, and they say it can detect two common indoor mold species.
The nanowire sensors can detect Staachybotrys chartarum and Chaetominum globosum. The real work, though, is in the math used to determine positive versus negative results.
Traditional methods take some sort of physical sample that is sent to a lab and require days to process. However, trained dogs can also smell mold, but as you might expect, there aren’t many dogs trained to find mold. Besides, the training is expensive, you have to maintain the dog all the time, and if the dog knows what kind of mold it is, it can’t say. So an electronic nose that can give fast, specific results is quite attractive.
Even if you don’t care about mold, the data crunching to classify the sensor data has application to many types of sensors. They used training to build multiple models, then they combine the outputs using a regression algorithm to predict the true output. Finally, they use a majority voting technique to combine the results of the model and the regression output.
Could you make a sensor like this? Reading section 4.2 of the paper, it looks like you need a pretty stout set of lab gear to play. But the math ideas are certainly something you could replicate or use as a starting point for your own sensor fusion projects.
Want a deep dive into sensor fusion? You should have been at the Hackaday Superconference a few years ago. Luckily, you can still watch [Christal’s] talk about fusing multiple streams of sensor data.
2026-01-13 08:00:50
You’ve heard of wind tunnels– get some airflow going over a thingy, put some some smoke on, and voila! Flow visualization. How hard could it be? Well, as always, the devil is in the details and [toast] is down in there with him with this Hot-Wheels sized wind tunnel video.
To get good, laminar flow inside of a wind tunnel, there are important ratios to be followed– the inlet and outlet diameters must relate to the interior size to get the correct slope on the contraction and exhaust cones. You need a flow straightener on both ends. All of it can be easily 3D printed, as [toast] shows, but you have to know those design rules and pay attention to, which [toast] does… this time. One of his “don’t do this” examples in this video is previous build of his where he did not follow all the rules, and the difference is clear.
Now, unless you’re hooked on flow visualizations —guilty— or are a Hot-Wheels aficionado, since that’s what this wind tunnel is sized for, you probably won’t rush to gumroad to buy [toast]’s STLs. On the other hand, if you pay attention to the lessons [toast] has learned in this video you can apply them to wind tunnels of whatever size and construction technique you need, be it cardboard or junk box plastic and get a more stable result.
2026-01-13 05:00:18
Over the decades the number of Linux distributions has effectively exploded, from a handful in the late ’90s to quite literally hundreds today, not counting minor variations. There lately seems to be a counter-movement brewing in response to this fragmentation, with Project Bluefin’s Distroless project being the latest addition here. Also notable are KDE’s efforts, with KDE Linux as its own top-down KDE-based distro, but now with a switch to BuildStream from Arch likely as a distroless move.
It should be clear that there is no obvious course here yet, and that opinions are very much divided. The idea of ‘Linux’ becoming a more singular OS appeals to some, while to others it’s the antithesis of what ‘Linux’ is about. This much becomes clear in [Brodie Robertson]’s exploration of this topic as well.
The way to think about ‘distroless’ is that there is a common base using the Freedesktop SDK on which the customization layer is applied, such as Bluefin, KDE or Gnome’s environments. You could think of this base as the common runtime, using the Freedesktop standards for interoperability for a user-selected layer that’s installed on top. This way the idea of basing a distro on a specific distro is tossed out in favor of something that’s vaguely reminiscent of the Linux Standard Base attempt at standardization.
It’ll be fascinating to see how things will move from here, as there are definite arguments to be made in favor of less fragmentation and resultingly less duplicated effort. In many ways this would bring Linux closer to for example FreeBSD, which avoids the Linux Chaos Vortex problem by having a singular codebase. FreeBSD ‘distros’ like GhostBSD and NomadBSD are therefore essentially just specialized customizations that target a sub-group of FreeBSD users.
Of course, when we start talking about package managers and other base-distro specific features, we may very well risk igniting the same problems that tore apart the LSB so many years ago. Will we also standardize on RPM over DEB package files and kin, or something else?
2026-01-13 03:30:50
We suspect there are three kinds of people in the world. People who have access to a Michelson Interferometer and are glad, those who don’t have one and don’t know what one is, and a very small number of people who want one but don’t have one. But since [Longest Path Search] built one using 3D printing, maybe the third group will dwindle down to nothing.
If you are in the second camp, a Michelson interferometer is a device for measuring very small changes in the length of optical paths (oversimplifying, a distance). It does this by splitting a laser into two parts. One part reflects off a mirror at a fixed distance from the splitter. The other reflects off another, often movable, mirror. The beam splitter also recombines the two beams when they reflect back, producing an interference pattern that varies with differences in the path length between the splitter and the mirror. For example, if the air between the splitter and one mirror changes temperature, the change in the refraction index will cause a minute difference in the beam, which will show up using this instrument.
The device has been used to detect gravitational waves, study the sun and the upper atmosphere, and also helped disprove the theory that light is transmitted through a medium known as luminiferous aether.
The tolerances for such a device are tight, but within the capability of modern 3D printers. The CAD files are online. The key was the mirror mounts, which use springs and thumbscrews. So you do need some hardware and, oh yeah, a laser, although that’s not as hard to obtain as it once was. You obviously can’t 3D print the mirrors or the beam splitter either.
The post claims the device is cheap because the bill of materials was roughly $3, although that didn’t include the beamsplitter, which would bring the cost up to maybe $20. The device, in theory, could detect distance changes as small as one wavelength of the laser, which is around 650nm. Not bad for a few bucks.
Not all Michelsons use lasers. The man behind the Michelson instrument also worked out how to do Fourier analysis with a mechanical computer.
