Viewing profile — pbo

Do you have an estimate of the efficiency of the DC -> AC -> DC charging system?

That is the principle of a ram air turbine. It's a small wind turbine which can operate as a power generator while the plane is flying.

Redundancy is a well-accepted (at least in aeronautics) way of providing robustness. When designing onboard systems for aircraft, it is not unusual to have a function with a higher…

There is a tremendous number of hardware products and industrial systems where the processing is performed on small and cheap components (microcontrollers, digital signal processor…

If I recall correctly, Intel tried a few years ago to sell a system-on-chip combining an Atom CPU with a FPGA from Altera. I believe it didn't work very well, especially with regar…

I second that. I write assembly for DSPs on a near-daily basis. Up until a few months ago there didn'nt even exist a C compiler for the target architecture. Even when you write C c…

Even though the work environment is peculiar, the technical contents itself is far from exceptionnal, really. If you'd like to read more about this kind of systems, this document c…

Actually I distribute power from the battery to other subsystems, so it's rather far from the ECU.

I wrote firmware (~20kLocs) for a power (electrical) supply that's part of one such power train. This kind of development is very demanding, because you can't afford to leave any b…

Exactly. Since the output is not continuous, the average power remains quite low. This is why you can still power it from regular domestic power :)

It's useful when you have a circuit which needs a high-current burst which is powered from a low current (but high capacity) power source. One application for this is lasers. I'm p…

From here, for the past 3 years: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822

I was lead tech (and first hire) at a hardware startup which launched two unsuccessful products then ran out of money (despite some seed funding). After that I left. Revenue and ma…

This looks great. I want to write a DSL to generate low-level code, and it would have involved both C and Lua at some point, so I'll definitely give this a try.

http://maps.stamen.com shows the same kind of map transformations and is also based on OpenStreetMap. The Watercolor style is especially gorgeous in my opinion.

This also shows in how quick you can iterate. The "REPL time" in mechanical engineering has decreased a lot with CAD software but it's still insanely long compared to software deve…

Small environments also have an influence over the body size of animals. Surprisingly the change does not always occur in the same direction: see Insular Dwarfism and Insular Gigan…

I would love to have a higher-level-than-C language to work with on embedded systems, and Clojure seems good. However my applications run on systems with very limited resources (an…

This reminds of a fascinating book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. One of the most interesting stories is about a man who lost his ability to intuitively r…

I work at a hardware company - high-current and high-voltage power electronics. Things occasionnaly blow-up, but there have never been any serious consequences, because eveyone has…

Nobody mentioned the Shanzai. The term was explained to me by the founder of a hardware company in Shenzhen. They are small companies that specialize in infringing IP laws and copy…

I have used 3D printing in two different contexts: - At a research lab. They had a massive Stratasys which cost around $30,000. They used it all the time for experiment setups; the…