#MCU software

[semimediapress]

Nordic acquires IoT cloud startup Memfault for $120 million

June 27, 2025 /SemiMedia/ — Nordic Semiconductor has announced the acquisition of U.S.-based IoT software startup Memfault for $120 million, aiming to bolster its device lifecycle management and over-the-air (OTA) services across its low-power wireless chip portfolio. Memfault offers a cloud-based platform for monitoring, debugging, and updating embedded systems, particularly those based on…

[shegeekery]

Wait a moment...

It just hit me that I've been worried about being "too old" for a community in which people are obsessing about a character who's roughly the same age as me.

[fohatic]

“Oh No” / Avengers: Assemble (explicit lyrics)

i made another fanvideo for a bingo fill, this time for square Y4 / “starting a new team” for @cap-ironman stony bingo round 2

[hobbitinthetardis]

i made a memey video for the queerbaited crew out here :)

[motherofplatypus]

AN ENGINEERING STUDENT BURNED ALIVE BY ISRAEL, FUNDED AND SUPPORTED BY US GOVERNMENT

[nerdby]

All I can imagine right now are all the artists downloading this and lining up to sue the fuck out of Disney and Ali Selim for using their art for the Secret Invasion credits🤣

[chaoticamelay]

i saw a bucky headcanon on my dash and immediately remembered a meta i've been wanting to write. a moment of silence for any tasks i needed to complete tomorrow bc unfortunately the urge to yap cannot be contained

[thejaymo]

Without You, Patchwork is Nothing

What if Frank Herbert’s 1980 vision of the ‘author’s computer’ was finally here? Patchwork, a collaborative world building app from Midjourney feels like a step towards his dream.

Without Me You’re Nothing In 1980, Frank Herbert and Max Barnard co-wrote a book about personal computers called Without Me You’re Nothing. Published a year after the Apple II’s debut, it aims to demystify personal computing for a ‘computing-curious’ audience. A technology that Herbert (correctly) believed would become central to our lives. The title encapsulates Herbert’s core message…

[grhm2illo]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--microcontrollers--8-bit/pic16lf877a-i-ml-microchip-5373501

Embedded microcontrollers, microcontroller programming, USB microcontroller

PIC16 Series 14 kB Flash 368 B RAM 20 MHz 8-Bit Microcontroller - QFN-44

[bricw2bhr]

https://www.futureelectronics.com/p/semiconductors--microcontrollers--32-bit/stm32g474qct6-stmicroelectronics-8189028

Microcontroller programming, 32-bit MCUs, microcontroller 32 bit controller

STM32G Series 256 kB Flash 128 kB RAM 170 MHz 32-Bit Microcontroller - LQFP-128

[futureelectronic1527]

NXP: MCX A Series Launch Video

https://www.futureelectronics.com/resources/featured-products/nxp-mcx-n-mcx-a-microcontrollers . MCX A Series all-purpose microcontrollers (MCUs) address a wide range of applications with scalable device options, low power and intelligent peripherals. Designed to allow engineers to do more, the new MCX A series is optimized with the essential features, innovative power architecture and software compatibility required by many embedded applications. https://youtu.be/fjNG2t4TBXQ

[nicla2llard]

Pic microcontroller, Programmable lcd microcontrollers, embedded microcontroller

PIC16F Series 1.75 kB Flash 224 B RAM 20 MHz 8-Bit Microcontroller - SOIC-18

[c1qfxugcgy0]

At my last job, we sold lots of hobbyist electronics stuff, including microcontrollers.

This turned out to be a little more complicated than selling, like, light bulbs. Oh how I yearned for the simplicity of a product you could plug in and have work.

Background: A microcontroller is the smallest useful computer. An ATtiny10 has a kilobyte of program memory. If you buy a thousand at a time, they cost 44 cents each.

As you'd imagine, the smallest computer has not great specs. The RAM is 32 bytes. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not kilobytes. Individual bytes. Microcontrollers have the absolute minimum amount of hardware needed to accomplish their task, and nothing more.

This includes programming the thing. Any given MCU is programmed once, at the start of its life, and then spends the next 30 years blinking an LED on a refrigerator. Since they aren’t meant to be reflashed in the field, and modern PCs no longer expose the fast, bit-bangable ports hobbyists once used, MCUs usually need a third-party programming tool.

But you could just use that tool to install a bootloader, which then listens for a magic number on the serial bus. Then you can reprogram the chip as many times as you want without the expensive programming hardware.

There is an immediate bifurcation here. Only hobbyists will use the bootloader version. With 1024 bytes of program memory, there is, even more than usual, nothing to spare.

Consumer electronics development is a funny gig. It, more than many other businesses, requires you to be good at everything. A startup making the next Furby requires a rare omniexpertise. Your company has to write software, design hardware, create a production plan, craft a marketing scheme, and still do the boring logistics tasks of putting products in boxes and mailing them out. If you want to turn a profit, you do this the absolute minimum number of people. Ideally, one.

Proving out a brand new product requires cutting corners. You make the prototype using off the shelf hobbyist electronics. You make the next ten units with the same stuff, because there's no point in rewriting the entire codebase just for low rate initial production. You use the legacy code for the next thousand units because you're desperately busy putting out a hundred fires and hiring dozens of people to handle the tsunami of new customers. For the next ten thousand customers...

Rather by accident, my former employer found itself fulfilling the needs of the missing middle. We were an official distributor of PICAXE chips for North America. Our target market was schools, but as a sideline, we sold individual PICAXE chips, which were literally PIC chips flashed with a bootloader and a BASIC interpreter at a 200% markup. As a gag, we offered volume discounts on the chips up to a thousand units. Shortly after, we found ourselves filling multi-thousand unit orders.

We had blundered into a market niche too stupid for anyone else to fill. Our customers were tiny companies who sold prototypes hacked together from dev boards. And every time I cashed a ten thousand dollar check from these guys, I was consumed with guilt. We were selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price, but they shouldn't have been buying these products at all! Since they were using bootloaders, they had to hand program each chip individually, all while PIC would sell you programmed chips at the volume we were selling them for just ten cents extra per unit! We shouldn't have been involved at all!

But they were stuck. Translating a program from the soft and cuddly memory-managed education-oriented languages to the hardcore embedded byte counting low level languages was a rather esoteric skill. If everyone in-house is just barely keeping their heads above water responding to customer emails, and there's no budget to spend $50,000 on a consultant to rewrite your program, what do you do? Well, you keep buying hobbyist chips, that's what you do.

And I talked to these guys. All the time! They were real, functional, profitable businesses, who were giving thousands of dollars to us for no real reason. And the worst thing. The worst thing was... they didn't really care? Once every few months they would talk to their chip guy, who would make vague noises about "bootloaders" and "programming services", while they were busy solving actual problems. (How to more accurately detect deer using a trail camera with 44 cents of onboard compute) What I considered the scandal of the century was barely even perceived by my customers.

In the end my employer was killed by the pandemic, and my customers seamlessly switched to buying overpriced chips straight from the source. The end! No moral.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Writing Advice #?: Don’t write out accents.

The Surface-Level Problem: It’s distracting at best, illegible at worst. 

The following passage from Sons and Lovers has never made a whit of sense to me:

“I ham, Walter, my lad,’ ’e says; ‘ta’e which on ’em ter’s a mind.’ An’ so I took one, an’ thanked ’im. I didn’t like ter shake it afore ’is eyes, but ’e says, ‘Tha’d better ma’e sure it’s a good un. An’ so, yer see, I knowed it was.’”

There’s almost certainly a point to that dialogue — plot, character, theme — but I could not figure out what the words were meant to be, and gave up on the book.  At a lesser extreme, most of Quincey’s lines from Dracula (“I know I ain’t good enough to regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes”) cause American readers to sputter into laughter, which isn’t ideal for a character who is supposed to be sweet and tragic.  Accents-written-out draw attention to mechanical qualities of the text.

Solution #1: Use indicators outside of the quote marks to describe how a character talks.  An Atlanta accent can be “drawling” and a London one “clipped”; a Princeton one can sound “stiff” and a Newark one “relaxed.”  Do they exaggerate their vowels more (North America) or their consonants more (U.K., north Africa)?  Do they sound happy, melodious, frustrated?

The Deeper Problem: It’s ignorant at best, and classist/racist/xenophobic at worst.

You pretty much never see authors writing out their own accents — to the person who has the accent, the words just sound like words.  It’s only when the accent is somehow “other” to the author that it gets written out.

And the accents that we consider “other” and “wrong” (even if no one ever uses those words, the decision to deliberately misspell words still conveys it) are pretty much never the ones from wealthy and educated parts of the country.  Instead, the accents with misspelled words and awkward inflection are those from other countries, from other social classes, from other ethnicities.  If your Maine characters speak normally and your Florida characters have grammatical errors, then you have conveyed what you consider to be correct and normal speech.  We know what J.K. Rowling thinks of French-accented English, because it’s dripping off of Fleur Delacour’s every line.

At the bizarre extreme, we see inappropriate application of North U.K. and South U.S.-isms to every uneducated and/or poor character ever to appear in fan fic.  When wanting to get across that Steve Rogers is a simple Brooklyn boy, MCU fans have him slip into “mustn’t” and “we is.”  When conveying that Robin 2.0 is raised poor in Newark, he uses “ain’t” and “y’all” and “din.”  Never mind that Iron Man is from Manhattan, or that Robin 3.0 is raised wealthy in Newark; neither of them ever gets a written-out accent.

Solution #2: A little word choice can go a long way, and a little research can go even further.  Listen carefully to the way people talk — on the bus, in a café, on unscripted YouTube — and write down their exact word choice.  “We good” literally means the same thing as “no thank you,” but one’s a lot more formal than the other.  “Ain’t” is a perfectly good synonym for “am not,” but not everyone will use it.

The Obscure Problem: It’s not even how people talk.

Look at how auto-transcription software messes up speaking styles, and it’s obvious that no one pronounces every spoken sound in every word that comes out of their mouth.  Consider how Americans say “you all right?”; 99% of us actually say something like “yait?”, using tone and head tilt to convey meaning.  Politicians speak very formally; friends at bars speak very informally.

An example: I’m from Baltimore, Maryland.  Unless I’m speaking to an American from Texas, in which case I’m from “Baltmore, Marlind.”  Unless I’m speaking to an American from Pennsylvania, in which case I’m from “Balmore, Marlin.”  If I’m speaking to a fellow Marylander, I’m of course from “Bamor.”  (If I’m speaking to a non-American, I’m of course from “Washington D.C.”)  Trying to capture every phoneme of change from moment to moment and setting to setting would be ridiculous; better just to say I inflect more when talking to people from outside my region.

When you write out an accent, you insert yourself, the writer, as an implied listener.  You inflict your value judgments and your linguistic ear on the reader, and you take away from the story.

Solution #3: When in doubt, just write the dialogue how you would talk.

[thereoncewasagirlnamedjane]

⋆⪩⪨˚ CALL SIGN: Jane “Janie” ▇▇

⋆⪩⪨˚ PROFILE: Twenty-six, she/her, East Asian DOB: 29/11/1998, Sagittarius ♐️

⋆⪩⪨˚ WRITES FOR: Select characters from the MCU Select Chris Evans characters Select Aaron Taylor-Johnson characters Select Lewis Pullman characters Follow @ficsbyjane for notifications

⋆⪩⪨˚ NOTES: I do not write 18+ content, nor do I ever write RPF. However, I will block blank/ageless blogs/minors for my own peace of mind.

⋆⪩⪨˚ LINKS: AO3 | CREATIVE CAMPAIGN

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[demon-of-punk]

So, in one of my classes, the final was a project where we had creative freedom to design anything we could think of. The only caveat for the project was that we had to design something capable of being tested in an engineering capacity.

Due to my recent hyperfixation with Marvel and the MCU in general, I decided to try and model a version of Falcon's wingsuit for the project, and now that it's been graded, I wanted to post the results here!

The design took around 15 hours total in the SOLIDWORKS 3D modeling and simulating software for Engineering purposes from initial concept to the final product

Each of the individual wing sections can rotate individually (I'll try and find a way to screen record messing with the assembly to show it sometime)

It was modeled to fit my own proportions (for the purpose of the project, and easier to find reference)

It was actually deemed successful in one of the tests I tried on it!

Please let me know what you think! (only if you want to!)