dragontamer

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I think this is a bit of a Tempest in a Teapot.

My conservative friends are into Daily Wire and more than willing to sacrifice Tucker Carlson politically speaking.

If you want to harm Republican causes, you need to go for bigger fish than Tucker Carlson. He's really lose influence over the last couple of years.

Wake me up if we're back to talking Fox News, Daily Wire, NY Post, Drudge Report, Reason.com. you know, websites or media that actually have power in the right wing?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Hmmmm. We brain drain the smart people out of Russia and into USA. While they stupid-drain our dumbasses into Russia.

I see this as a win win. Let them go there

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (4 children)

Yes but... Fediverse has more moderators and even server level bans where we can fight back.

It's a different political makeup here on the Fediverse. It's not like the Russians can hand money to just one or two CEOs and suddenly all of the moderators we trust here turn to the other side.

We need to keep our wits about us here. We came to Lemmy (and Fediverse) because centralized commercial control of our discussion spaces led to perverse incentives.

I only consider this political situation to be yet another test of the Fediverse. We have to survive it. But I also believe we moved to the Fediverse because we all believe we can do more about disinformation or malicious actors here on the Fediverse than on... Reddit or Facebook.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I understand the right wingers. I don't like it but I at least understand it.

What I don't understand are the far-left who willingly follows in far-left Russian propaganda.

Remember folks: Russia in 2016 pushed both Black Lives Matter AND Blue Lives Matter. Russia played both sides because they want chaos amongst us. They will coopt and corrupt American calls.

The leftist pro-Palestine stuff (especially to the point where you're supposed to vote for Jill Stein) is one obvious example to me. Iran and Russia are aligned on this issue. Ukraine and Israel are also aligned in our global posture.

I understand the need to protect Gaza civilians too and I think that Israeli administration are full of cowboys whose anti regulation stance is leading to atrocities. But we can't just absorb far-left Iranian or Russian propaganda on that matter.

I 100% expect Russia and Iran to continue to use Gaza as a wedge issue to hurt the left. The left is supposed to be smart enough to see the disinfo tactics turning us away from the Ukrainians but suddenly go blind on the other geopolitical matter.

It's just like the Black Lives Matter Russian disinfo campaign. They are very good at corrupting our ideals into us hating our allies and hating ourselves.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Probably because the Russians kicked up their campaign this year as the battle of Donesk went poorly for them.

Russia realizes that the #1 factor in their war for the Ukrainian East depends on getting Trump elected and the Republicans cutting aid.


The only reason Russia got Adviika was because Republicans cut aid between Nov 2023 and all of winter 2024. Shell hunger they called it, as the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and were forced to retreat from their fortress city.

Russia wants that to happen again. So they're kicking up their influence campaigns.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Russia is quite sanctioned, and the remaining US Business interest in Russia was looted / stolen by the Russians.

The business connection between USA and Russia is basically gone. Most (IE Elon Musk) are now making huge moves towards China now.

What remains are RT and other Russian disinfo groups

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (4 children)

Saudis aren't trying to get Trump elected and directly meddle in the election.

And sure, the Saudis whitewash themselves and try to make us forget about Jamal. But Russia influence is really bad.


I'm not necessarily against foreign influence. Ukrainians have a right to make their case to us for example. But the Russian style disinfo is leading to conspiracy theories and a degeneration of our society.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And I happily charge my EV from my installed solar most times when I need to charge.

You don't ever charge at night?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I appreciate the stats.

Gas is the largest single component, but gas plus coal together comprise only 42% of the energy mix. The rest is nuclear and renewables (though I quibble about biomass being counted as a renewable).

And if you look at the change of the energy mix over time, fossil fuel usage has been declining, though taking massive powerplants offline is not a quick process.

Its going to be difficult to dislodge combined cycle natural gas. Its very efficient, very cheap to spinup. Yes its still a fossil fuel, but its the best of fossil fuels. 60% efficiency means getting 50% more energy per CO2 (compared to 40% traditional plants). As far as I'm aware, natural gas is cheaper than most battery technologies.


Nuclear is good, and continues to be a major supplier at night (when people are likely charging cars). Natural gas drops by 5GW at night, so that's a good sign and the grid at night might be less carbon (even if there's less overall energy due to missing solar). So more nuclear energy into the mix might mean that night energy was better overall. Hmmmmmmm. Okay, I'll accept your point overall.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

ACEEE actually thinks that Prius Prime emits the least pollution for cars today, including EVs.

https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars

EVs universally weigh more, leading to more PM2.5 / micro plastics pollution from the brakes and tires. (Remember that Prius / Hybrids also have regenerative braking, so EVs cannot take Regen as an advantage).

Weight is key. Not only for pollution but also for efficiency. Prius / Prius Primes lighter weight allows for higher efficiencies.

Prius is on the list if you look it up and would be in the top 10. But I think ACEEE preferred encouraging people to buy the Prius Prime instead of something.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Elons beer gut is much much worse than that image.

Some suggest it might be steroid abuse or something. Elon was talking about high-testosterone a few months ago.

 

Just working on my recent electronics project and I needed two temperature sensors for it. This time around I didn't feel like making a full PCB from KiCAD and wanted to keep things simple with a 1/2 size solderable breadboard.

As usual, I'm using an AVR DD (this time: a curiosity nano devboard) for simplicity. (I expect to need the 32768 Hz clock crystal, so a PCB with said clock would be nice. Otherwise, the DIP package is available). The overall circuit is pretty simple, but the topic of discussion today is the MCP970X series temperature sensor.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/mcp9701a

At this point I do recommend people to read the documentation.

The gist is that you simply apply 3.1V to 5.5V between Vdd and Gnd. Vout will have some amount of startup time, and eventually output 400mV + (Temperature-in-C * 19.5mV). For example, my room temperature is ~24C right now and the voltage output is ~920mV.

(There's clearly errors in my ADC but I'm saving that for later... this device is supposed to be outputting 876mV given the room's temperature)


With a ~6uA expected current, this device is power-efficient enough to run from most MCU pins. AVR DD's 50mA-per-pin is overkill, but more importantly, a through-hole design like mine seemingly has substantial inductance on all wires.

The datasheets claim a startup time of 0.8ms. Alas, when I soldered on the MCP9701 and turned on the GPIO-pin, it took over 20ms (!!!) before the oscillating signal finally calmed down and settled upon the room temperature reading.

To counteract this parasitic inductance, I've added a 10kOhm resistor and a 10nF capacitor out of my through-hole kit. (E12 resistor kit and E6 capacitor kit). With 220us of startup time now on the GPIO pin and with only 500uA max current going to Vdd... there is no more "ringing" anymore and life is good!

EDIT: I should probably note that my goal was to return to 0.8ms startup time, like the documents suggest. 10kOhm was chosen as 500uA (5V) to 250uA (after charging to 2.5V) is a magnitude more current than I need and is a decent starting point. 10nF was chosen to pair-up with this to give me startup time in the 100us range but not over 800us (I don't want to be "slowed down" by the charging capacitor, so I want the Vdd charge to be faster than 800us claimed startup time). It should be noted that a 5V over 1000us curve was claimed as a 800us startup in the MCP970x documents if you read all the graphs.


Moving forward, my last task is that of calibration. The on-board ADC of the AVR DD is apparently quite accurate, but the Vref of the microcontroller is +/-4% (!!). With a +/- 2% accuracy of the temperature sensor, there is some calibration I should do.

The ADC errors + Vref errors are expected to just be linear. The temperature-sensor's error is quadratic however. In both cases, I don't want to overcomplicate things, so I'm planning on just adding a constant-offset to the mV reading to shift it to the correct spot.


All in all: pretty standard Analog-to-digital conversion issues here. But I figured it'd be a good discussion topic for beginners.

 

Modern AVR has a wide variety of Timers (TCA, TCB most commonly, but TCD, TCE, and TCF are uncommon and specific to particular AVR chips).

This can make choosing a AVR DD vs AVR EA vs AVR EB vs AVR DA a difficult choice, especially if you're trying to use timers to their greatest extent possible.

This blogpost covers a basic idea of what the different timers offer.


The blogpost is short enough. I feel like what I can add is to highlight the difference between:

  • Timers -- A background count++, a comparator of count vs some pre-configured values, and then likely an output pin that changes based off of these configurations. Consider this an MCU output. Almost everything listed can be used as a timer.

  • Counters -- Counter functionality is an MCU input. Many protocols, such as Servos, PWM, pulse-train decoding requires a variety of pulse-frequency-modulation, pulse-counting, or wide variety of other kinds of common tasks. "TCB" may be called a "Timer", but its really more of a counter-focused device which can more easily measure frequencies (for pulse-frequency-modulation). TCA and a few others can do some basic counting tasks, but usually not as well as TCB.

The other discussions in the blog are easy enough to understand IMO. This is all AVR specific, but some of the best material online are highly specialized articles like this, so I still feel like sharing.

 

1.5 c Microcontroller alert.

Very low-end, but 38kHz support is explicitly called out in its product manual. This means that this tiny uC is ideal for TV remote control (or other IR-blasters).

I wouldn't recommend anyone use this chip unless you were some kind of professional saving pennies. Typical $1 uCs are far easier to work with and have exponentially more power (even $1 8-bit uCs). Still, its an interesting thought experiment for what a 1.5 cent uC could be used to implement....

 

This blogger booted an F1C100s from scratch, even though they made a mistake buying 16MBit instead of 16MByte of Flash. (Requiring to be booted off of USB-bootloader / Allwinner's FEL Protocol instead of Flash).

So a few mistakes were made, but its still a custom booting Linux + blogpost that explains the steps.

 

What really interests me about this design is the ~~buck~~ Boost-converter

So this ~~buck~~ boost-converter is 100% core-independent. The Analog Comparator, TimerD, CCL, and Event-System are all active while the AVR DB sleeps, meaning that the microcontroller can run this simple ~~buck~~ boost-converter without any cost to CPU time.

An incredible design that demonstrates the flexibility of AVR DB's combined peripherals.

 

Hacker News discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40560300

 

A random article talking about I2C on the NuttX RTOS.

I haven't heard of NuttX before, but the supported platforms (https://nuttx.apache.org/docs/latest/platforms/index.html) is quite impressive, including several chips I'm interested in. There's a number of 8-bit processors (albeit larger ones) on the list, though I'd assume this NuttX OS is best served on a microprocessor??

 

Edited the "I" for less confusion. The blogpost's title is "I made a...", but "I" (Dragontamer) didn't do this. I just found this blogpost and though it was relevant for this sublemmy.

 

I've preferred Pixel phones for the last few years but I've heard that Pixel 6/7 had 5G connection problems (Pixel 8 apparently has a better modem, but I think I'd rather stick to a Qualcomm design for now).

So onto looking for my next phone.

I haven't considered a Samsung smartphone in years because I hated their TouchWiz stuff. But apparently they got rid of that like 8 years ago and have had multiple versions of updates. Can anyone comment on how good "One UI" is compared to stock Android? How much bloatware does it feel like? And what kind of customizations did Samsung do to the UI exactly?

I'm also looking at Asus Zenfone 11, but I figure the "mainstream" choice today is Samsung, so I'll also have to seriously consider Samsung phones.

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