Daily Archives: 2022-08-10

New study overturns 100-year-old understanding of color perception

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I don't feel like fighting my way to the full paper right now, but color perception is so fucky it would not surprise me *at all* if this adaptation was specific to the stride they used for their gradations.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

More Adventures in Tiny Stepper Motors and Drivers

A tiny stepper motor being driven by a TMC2208 Stepstick

Last summer I posted about some tiny stepper motors from the internet, thinking about them as an alternative to mechatronic standbys like those terrible SG90 type servos or larger and differently terrible 28BYJ-48 geared steppers driven through a ULN2003.

At the time, I tried one with an A4988 stepstick from the top of my parts bin, and it didn’t work, so I figured there was some limitation and stuck to directly driving with H-bridges.
…it turns out the “limitation” was that the cheap current-setting potentiometer on that particular stepstick was broken so it was driving no output current.

Discoveries:

  • Those little bipolar stepper motors work fine with bipolar stepper drivers.
  • Generational gains in bipolar stepper driver ICs are substantial (eg. A4988 -> TMC2208).
  • The venerable 28BYJ-48 unipolar stepper motor is easily modified to run from bipolar drivers.
Continue reading
Posted in DIY, Electronics, General, Objects | Leave a comment

Intel iAPX 432

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Just paraphrasing my comment in the HN discussion on my own medium: The 432 was the first of Intel's many expensive lessons about the problems with extremely complicated ISAs dependent on even more sophisticated compilers making good static decisions for performance. Then they did it again with the i860. Then they did it again with Itanium. Some reasonably substantiated opinions: 1. Highly sophisticated large-scale static analysis keeps getting beaten by relatively stupid tricks built into overgrown instruction decoders, working on relatively narrow windows of instructions. 2. The primary reason for (1) is that performance is now almost completely dominated by memory behavior, and making good static predictions about the dynamic behavior fancy memory systems in the face of multitasking, DRAM refresh cycles, multiple independent devices competing for the memory bus, layers of caches, timing variations, etc. is essentially impossible. 3. You can give up on a bunch of your dynamic tricks and build much simpler more predictable systems that can be statically optimized effectively. You could probably find an good local maxima in that style. The dynamic tricks are, however, unreasonably effective for performance, and have the advantage that they let you have good performance with the same binaries on multiple different implementations of an ISA. That's not insurmountable (eg. the AOT compilation for ART objects on Android), but the ecosystem isn't fully set up to support that kind of thing.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

The many derivatives of CP/M

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh, that family tree is more complicated than I knew, and I've played with several things along it.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment