Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Retrocomputing, and Benchmarks
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Introducing the new Value Selector and Dropdown Widgets for Arduino IoT Cloud dashboards
We're excited to announce the release of two new widgets to the Arduino IoT Cloud: the Value Selector and Value Dropdown Widgets.
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Exploring Woodworking Mysteries With Strain Gauges And Raspberry Pi
If you’re not a woodworker, you might not have heard of the “45-degree rule.” It goes like this: a clamp exerts a force that radiates out across a triangular region of the wood that forms a right angle — 45 degrees on each side of the clamp’s point of contact. So, to ensure that force is applied as evenly as possible across the entire glue joint, clamps should be spaced so that these force triangles overlap. It’s a handy rule, especially for the woodworker looking to justify the purchase of more clamps; you can never have too many clamps. But is it valid?
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Retrocomputing info is easy to find, until it isn’t
It’s a common refrain among bloggers and video creators that retrocomputing as a hobby has never been easier, thanks to the modern Internet. It’s true to an extent, from the explosion in hobbyist hardware replacements, to scans of available documentation, to the sheer size of retrocomputing communities that can offer help.
But I’d caution anyone entering from thinking it’ll be easy. Even leaving aside the increasing failure rate of old components, two of the biggest challenges remain documentation and drivers. These are less of an issue if you’re using popular hardware with limited numbers of SKUs, like a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIc. But if you have an ISA modem in a generic PC clone? Not so much.
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Graviton 3, Apple M2 and Qualcomm 8cx 3rd gen: a URL parsing benchmark
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL. We can use URL parsing as a reasonable benchmark of a system performance.