A bunch of disorganized tips and product recommendations for when traveling abroad:

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Some of the sincerity slimed up on me
Cards wrote themselves and rifled me
Rigging the blast door to explore didn’t pan out this time
Rushed in, gobbled up and left me bottled up, that monstrous cub

To tell you the truth, I snort mousse
Rust seeps into cereals I produce
Rum may run rampantly down the drain, so let me think
I’ll leave a limb in the pipes to entice a drink

My days with you roll off the line
shrink wrapped and mint

I get to live brand new days
behind a floral tint

My dreams of you are extended by you
past the morning light

Am I awake or fast asleep baby?
I need a hint

I’ve had my Tesla Model 3 for more than a year now. It has been an absolute pleasure so far and I would not trade it for anything else at any price including Tesla’s other offerings (yes, talking about S Plaid). Model 3 just has the most beautiful exterior of any other car. OK, let’s stop here because I can go on forever. But not without a photo of Tin Can:

I live in the city and have a fixed broadband and 5G around but being the tech head that I am, I had to sign up for a Starlink service. I actually thought of uses, mostly for when traveling. I put down my deposit in February and received my dish two month ago. I knew when I signed up that I would need to make it work with my car and while I waited, I crunched some numbers, with the assurance that should I determine it won’t be feasible to run Starlink from the car, I can simply cancel my order.

Model 3 can output 12A continuously on its accessory outlet (aka cigarette lighter port). With a nominal voltage of 12.7V, that’s 150W of continuous power, or 140W when taking into account the regulation losses when stepped up to 56V needed by Starlink. Starlink’s own power supply has a total maximum output of 180W. That doesn’t look too good until one digs a bit deeper through forums and learns that Starlink’s user terminal, called Dishy McFaltface, generates heat either as a result of higher transmit power, or specicially to deal with cold weather and snow. That’s where half of that 180W seems to go into. As luck has it, I live in a warm climate so it’s unlikely that mine would consume as much power. It’s also worth noting that with each firmware update, the dish’es consumption seems to drop ever futher down (40W reported by some users as of late).

TL;DR we need 90W of continuous power to run Dishy and have 140W available from the car.

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TL;DR tiny and easy to use USB-C module to power everything; configure it anywhere, even on your phone!

My first attempt in using USB-C adapters as a power source was met with great enthusiasm. It was just a breakout board for STUSB4500 autonomous USB-PD sink controller. It has since been picked up by Sparkfun with a much better design (as you would expect).

Although sufficient, I wasn’t very happy with how much effort was needed to program the chip. It required talking I2C which for me meant an Arduino had to be available, connected to a computer with USB and a whole bunch of jumper wires. I have since used Adafruit’s MCP2221A breakout board and a Raspberry Pi but the process still has a lot of friction. So, I set out to simplify the programming aspect of STUSB4500 and this post will take you through to what became fpx, a smaller and easily configurable version of fabpide2.

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This post is about a command line tool called pdftilecut which I wrote a while ago that allows you to cut PDF pages into tiles in order to print a large page on small form printers for instance.

A little background: for my wedding, we decided to make an art piece we called “the portal”. It was basically a steam punk spaceship door with an iris window.

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TL;DR My personal set of essential electronics tools that I use on regular basis. This is the first post in a series.

I’ve been dabbling in electronics for 10 years. Naturally, my approach to electronics has been influenced by my approach to life in general. And my approach to life is that of a pragmalist (pragmatist minimalist). In short, I thrive in striking a balance between practicality and fewer possessions. This has led to a carefully selected set of tools, over years of use and through many iterative refinements. The aim of this post is to presgruide (half prescribe, half guide) a set of tools to newcomers in the wonderful world of electronics, so they can get rock ‘n rollin’. More experienced folks can also benefit by multigrading their existing tools.

Safety

No such thing as a safe hobby exists. Even reading books can be hazardous over time (think neck and eye strain). Therefore safety equipment come first in order to maximize the longevity of your enjoyment.

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I don’t watch mainstream news but once in a while I come across some and last piece I encountered was actually thought-provoking. Some viewers of a talk show hosting Denise Richards noticed she had enlarged thyroid gland and let her know that she should see a Dr. In this case, she had ignored the symptoms and looking at the photos, it’s quite obvious. But what about more subtle visual presentations of health conditions? Attentive doctors and specificalists may suspect or detect them watching a talk show, but that’s too few eyeballs. What if computers did the honors?

Google AI research has had years of history developing machine learning systems to detect various health conditions from medical imagery. I believe they started with retina scans looking for early signs of diabetes and more recently, they can detect skin conditions. Microsoft sports a similar history of research and publications. There is other research around detecting genetic conditions from portrait photos in combination with other data. I also remember some app which could detect cataract in photos with flash on. I’m sure much more has been explored in this area.

With the promise of ever improving machine learning in detecting patterns in imagery, specifically relating to health conditions, there are some interesting end-user product and service ideas that can potentially be game changing.

For instance, Google Photos or iCloud can run a bunch of more ML on user photos and videos and notify the user of neurological conditions, eye and skin conditions, strokes, mental health conditions, etc. Similarly, face unlock hardware such as those in iPhones and iPads could detect such conditions everytime the user looks at their phone (which is much more often than taking photos). And let’s not forget about the immense amount of public imagery content such as YouTube. Google already does copyright checks, transcription, thumbnail generation and a whole bunch of other processing. Disease detection will take it to a whole new level.

Apple has already invested quite a bit in health features of Apple Watch. It makes a lot of sense to expand that further.

Of course there are social aspects that I’ve not mentioned. Privacy, fake content, etc.

See the tiny and easy to use fpx module which supercedes fabpide2

Since USB-C’s introduction, I’ve been consistently interested in leveraging it for powering everything under 100 watt (or rather under 90 watt, since it’s hard to come by a full 100 watt USB-C power brick). I finally found time to make the first move and this is the subject of the post.

I wanted to keep it simple at the start. Chips like the popular FUSB302 which only provide the wire level handling of the USB-PD protocol, require a lot of software work to make them reliably operational. And that software will need to run on a µC which adds to BOM. So I went to search and found a gem called STUSB4500 from STMicroelectronics. In short, you program some registers to chip’s NVM via I²C once which define what voltage range/current you require and the chip will negotiate those requirements with a charger connected to it.

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I have always been fascinated by split-flap displays and for years I have wanted to make some myself. Today, I’m releasing my most recent effort to make split flap displays accessible to everyone.

To find out more, visit https://splapr.com