Hopium? This blog is suggesting an incredible margin of victory for Harris.

VDH is the website. They are outright calling respected meta-polls FiveThirtyEight and RCP completely wrong. Their overall argument is that the Senate-race is incredibly favored in the Democrat's favor.

I don't know if I necessarily believe that argument. But its still interesting to think about. Discuss?

Hacker News was talking about this little device, which looks cool. I can't say I'm that into MPUs (like Rasp. Pi, Beaglebone or vocore), but there's a degree of niftyness to them.

Editor's note: I can't post pictures from my Lemmy.world account. I presume that recent trolling-attacks vs Lemmy.world have to do with this restriction, so I'll use my Lemmy.ca account for this post.

Today is a "Sidenote" for my "Beginner Series", because its not a particularly scheduled discussion point. I was browsing the internet for some documentation when I found Microchip's Signal Chain Design Guide.

Yes, this is marketing material. But its well written and covers many important concepts for beginners. Again, the PDF is here: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/21825g.pdf

At the crux of the 'Signal Chain' is the following diagram:

Many, many applications can be simplified down to this loop. Sensors provide a signal of some kind: changing voltages or currents as real life events happen. Temperature changes resistance and/or voltage of a thermocouple, pressure changes resistance of resistors as well. More complex sensors like IR Photodiodes will change their current due to the presence of light. (and that IR Photodiode may itself be encoded information: with lights turning on-and-off associated with machinery RPMs).

Whatever the "sensor" is, it may need analog processors to condition. OpAmps are the most common analog processor, but instrumentation amps, differential amps, and sometimes even raw BJTs are used for this step (when high-frequency is needed, such as amplification of radio signals). There's a side note here about digital-potentiometers and their ability to calibrate analog bits of your circuit, but calibration can be skipped if you don't care much about accuracy.

In particular: whatever your "signal" originally was needs to be converted into a voltage of the appropriate size for your ADC. For example, a capacitive touch sensor can track the human-body (fingers) moving across different electrical pads. This "signal" is watching for the change of capacitance over different electrical lines. But "capacitance" isn't voltage. Instead, you need to inject small amounts of current into the various pads while measuring their change-of-voltage over time, which converts the "change of capacitance" into a "change of voltage" formula, thereby allowing later stages to operate upon your data.

Once the signal is processed to appropriate levels of voltage and/or current (or if you're lucky enough: the raw signal is good enough without need of preprocessing), then you can feed it into an ADC and digitize the signal.

Once the signal is in digital form, you write a computer program to analyze and manipulate the data. For many, the data will remain in digital form perpetually, sent out over WiFi, Bluetooth, or perhaps to a MicroSD card for recording. But for others, the job is not done yet. The combined sensor data goes into an algorithm to determine actuator outputs.

Those actuator outputs leave in either PWM form or DAC as an analog signal directly. Alas, microcontrollers usually have weak pins, so output processing and amplification is needed to increase power levels to appropriate voltages and/or currents.

Finally, those voltages and/or currents affect an actuator. That could be a servo, a motor, LEDs to blink or really anything.

While these steps are individually pretty simple, as a whole they constitute a pattern and architecture that matches a huge number of electronic designs. Your thermostat (temperature sensor -> microcontroller -> turn furnace on or AC on). Drones (accelerometers to measure bearings in space - microcontroller -> motor controls), motor controls (sense current through motor to estimate torque -> microcontroller -> BLDC Motor signals), and more.

This page summarizes the sensors available from Microchip. And remember, this is just one company. There are plenty of sensors available around the world in many other forms.

As far as actuators... Microchip doesn't make too many of those. But motors, speakers, MEMS, refrigerators... anything you can hook up to electricity is something you can control with a microcontroller.

Discussions elsewhere:

• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37224609

• [email protected]: https://lemmy.world/post/3622044

The TL;DR:

"Tesla requested redaction of fields of the crash report based on a claim that those fields contained confidential business information," an NHTSA spokesperson told Insider in a statement. "The Vehicle Safety Act explicitly restricts NHTSA's ability to release what the companies label as confidential information. Once any company claims confidentiality, NHTSA is legally obligated to treat it as confidential unless/until NHTSA goes through a legal process to deny the claim."

Github repo for microcontroller-automation of playing Pokemon.

Information on how to electrically interface with the Switch, analyze the screen to look for various triggers, and otherwise automatically play "Pokemon" games. Using Arduinos, or Teensy, or other microcontrollers.

The microcontroller bit controls the Switch itself, sending USB commands through the Arduino-Leonardo to the Switch, effectively having the Arduino-Leo automatically play the game for you.

More advanced automations include the PC computer to analyze the screen and perform more complex calculations. But the microcontroller bits are probably interesting to this community!

This is the Virginia crash talked about a few weeks ago. Now its officially an NHTSA investigation.

So there's lots of alternative instances that remain federated with Lemmy.world. It may take some number of minutes to move data between Lemmy.world and alternative instances, but you should be able to stay reasonably up-to-date to this support forum as long as federation works.

Ex: https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]

https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]

The way "Federation" works means that lemmy.world and other hosts (ex: sh.itjust.works) will automatically retry and try to synchronize messages as https://lemmy.world goes up-and-down. Effectively, use the other-instances to "automatically F5 / Refresh" for you, so you don't have to manually F5 on lemmy.world.

As the lemmy.ca community has been growing, I've begun to look at some of your /c/communities and ... things are bugged. I can't really post or comment very well on my https://lemmy.world account.

So I created this local https://lemmy.ca account to maybe bring attention to this federation problem.

I'm not sure if this is due to the growth of https://lemmy.world, or some configuration issue on the backend. But I figure that tracking and testing my account access from both sides can help everyone get to the bottom of this.