#video of #Fraser looking at ancient Greek #automata, replicating a wooden mobile robot described by Heron of Alexandria. He talks through a bit of the #history of the Greek automaton tradition. A weight sinks down into an hourglass, supported by the sand (or in this case seeds) and pulling on cords which move the automaton; the cords are wound around axles, which have pins in them around which the cords can be wrapped to alternate directions of motion, without cam #mechanisms.
"Biocurious" is a #bio #hackerspace at 3108 Patrick Henry Drive, Santa Clara, California
“[#Borland founder Philippe] Kahn, a 34-year-old mathematics instructor-turned-programmer-turned-entrepreneur, wrote about one-third of the programming code of Turbo Pascal. He says the last of his code to get into a commercial product was the phone dialer in Sidekick.” #news from 01988. #history
““Being a developer myself I needed a tool that would make me more productive,” [#Borland founder Philippe] Kahn told eWEEK. “I had worked on integrated development environments as a student of Niklaus #Wirth at the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule] in Zurich. I give a lot of credit to Niklaus for inspiration.
Then it was a matter of putting it all together. My partner wrote the compiler, and it was fast. Yet most of the development time was used in going back and forth between source code and execution. Then debugging the executed program. So we decided that a fast one-pass compiler was the way to go because it allowed us to pinpoint runtime errors right into the source code,” Kahn said.” #history
#video on #Sharp’s discontinued 6-inch #memory-LCD, which was 24mW at 30fps.
#EEVblog #video about #low-power #LCD #displays (like 14.3μA at 3.3V, up to 25μA during updates, 2.9" diagonal and 384×168) and why he prefers them to #e-ink: e-ink takes tens or hundreds of milliamps for a second or two to update. And service life is only 5 years or 10 million switches. He’s going to try the nice high-resolution ST7305-based #good-display.com (Dalian Good Display Co., Ltd.) reflective active matrix TFT LCD, even though the MOQ is 1000, because they sent him a demo board. It’s a nice high-contrast black and white and a very wide viewing angle despite (I think?) not being #memory-LCD. @mikeselectricstuff says the ST7305 datasheet says it supports up to 30Mbps over SPI. @afreestone101 says that if you peel the polarizer layer off the memory LCDs, the black color becomes mirror shiny. #electronics #hardware
usage guidelines for #e-ink (“e-paper”) #electronics #hardware #displays: “• ePaper displays are suitable for update cycles ranging from tens of seconds to minutes. • Most black-and-white ePaper screens have a fast refresh rate of 1.5-2.5 seconds.” #good-display