Open Hardware: Badgercam, Tesla, System76, 3D Printed
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Badgercam | #MagPiMonday
“Originally the project was created – and I generally referred to it as – ‘Badgercam’, but the current iteration is not at the badger location, so now it’s just Solar and Wind-powered sound recorder (with image capture),” Philip tells us. We think Badgercam rolls off the tongue a bit better though. “[This was] to address the problem and help with identifying the species or source of sounds; making sure it was the badger I recorded; and also to keep my footprint at the setts low by having a discreet recorder, and a way to see into the life of badgers without walking through their environment. They are very sensitive animals and I wanted to only visit once, or a limited amount of times!”
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Tiny Tesla go-kart gains self-driving autopilot
Tesla’s autopilot and full self-driving features don’t allow for 100% autonomous driving, but they get pretty close. Blake’s autopilot is much more limited, but still impressive. It can steer the go-kart around a known track while Blake handles the throttle and brakes. However, it can only follow the course it was trained on and can’t deviate from that without issues. It also can’t account for unusual events, like a pedestrian in the “road.”
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System76 Ditches UEFI Firmware Trash, Ships Coreboot Firmware on Linux Laptops.
Coreboot is the firmware that people deserve to have.
It’s actually designed to “Just boot the computer and get the Hell out of there.”, which is what Linus Torvalds said he missed about “PC BIOS”.
It’s up to the user, really, what they want to run and so I congratulate System76 for taking strong and decisive action on behalf of their customers and recommend that people who need an x86 PC with Linux take their business to System76 as I will do next time I need a laptop.
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3D Printed — Um — Hook And Loop Fasteners
[Teaching Tech’s] latest video discusses “3D printed Velcro.” But as even he admits, Velcro is a trademark, so we think it is more appropriate to talk about hook and loop fasteners. In fact, you can see the good-natured official video about the trademark below [Teaching Tech’s] video. Regardless, his experiments with several 3D-printed Vel… fastener designs are worth watching.