#Reverse Engineering Electronics

[icunlockmcucrack]

PCB Reverse Engineering: Unlocking the Secrets of Electronics

Understanding PCB Reverse Engineering

PCB Reverse Engineering is a critical process in electronics. It involves analyzing and replicating existing circuit boards to understand their functionality. This practice is essential for troubleshooting, product development, and even recreating obsolete hardware.

The Importance of Reverse Engineering in Electronics

Reverse Engineering Electronics helps companies and individuals gain insight into existing designs. This knowledge can lead to innovation, improved performance, and cost-effective solutions. By dissecting the PCB, engineers can identify components, trace connections, and recreate the design.

Steps in PCB Reverse Engineering

1. Visual Inspection and Documentation

The first step involves a thorough visual inspection. Engineers document the board's layout, component placement, and labeling. This documentation serves as the foundation for the reverse engineering process.

2. Component Identification

Identifying each component is crucial. Engineers analyze and catalog resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits, and other elements. This step ensures accurate replication of the original PCB design.

3. Tracing Circuitry Paths

Tracing the circuitry is a meticulous task. Engineers follow the copper traces that connect components. This step reveals the electrical connections and overall structure of the PCB.

4. Schematic Capture

Once the circuitry is traced, engineers create a schematic diagram. This visual representation of the circuit provides a blueprint for replication or modification.

5. PCB Layout Recreation

After the schematic is captured, the next step is recreating the PCB layout. Engineers use software tools to design a new PCB that matches the original. This layout is then ready for manufacturing.

Applications of PCB Reverse Engineering

PCB reverse engineering has diverse applications across industries. It is used in:

• Product Improvement: Enhancing existing designs by understanding and optimizing components.

• Obsolete Hardware Recreation: Reproducing outdated electronics for continued use.

• Troubleshooting: Diagnosing and fixing issues in existing PCBs.

Challenges in Reverse Engineering Electronics

While PCB reverse engineering is valuable, it comes with challenges. These include complex designs, multilayer boards, and proprietary components. Engineers must navigate these hurdles to achieve accurate results.

Future of PCB Reverse Engineering

The future of PCB reverse engineering is promising. As technology advances, so do the tools and techniques used in this field. With the rise of AI and machine learning, reverse engineering will become more efficient, enabling quicker and more accurate replication of complex electronics.

Conclusion

PCB reverse engineering is a powerful tool in the world of electronics. It unlocks the potential to innovate, recreate, and troubleshoot with precision. Whether for product development or preserving legacy systems, reverse engineering remains a cornerstone of the electronics industry.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[casioandglitter]

Reverse engineering a display which is no longer available as a spare part. 👾

[icunlock]

The Benefits of Electronic Reverse Engineering for Optimum Product Design

When it comes to product design, businesses must consider every element to guarantee that they can meet the expectations of their customers. The unique combination of electronic hardware and software solutions that bring a product to life is one of the most important parts of product design. Electronic reverse engineering services have become the cornerstone for producing goods that fulfill the needs of today’s customers in today’s ever-changing technological landscape. For more details visit :-https://medium.com/@icunlock/the-benefits-of-electronic-reverse-engineering-for-optimum-product-design-1f0b854a806c

[foone]

Robot girl, finally back online after a year and a half, looking at the newly outfitted soldering station. There's a lot more tools on it than there were when she last closed her eyes: Inspection microscopes, hot air reflow, EEPROM programmers, logic analyzers, thermal cameras and regulated power supplies. She starts to tear up when she sees the video history of her partner (and repairperson): months and months of electronic tutorials, starting simple ("what is a circuit?") and towards the end there's PCB design classes and CCC videos about reverse engineering secure processor firmware.

"You did all this, for me?" she asks, her voice sounding different from how she remembers it, lacking the stutterglitch and 8-bit audio harshness. Her partner smiles. "I thought I'd lost you... I couldn't live with that. I had to!"

She hugs them in a pile of spare parts, servos moving smoothly for the first time in decades, pressure sensors finally accurate enough to hold them without risk of crushing them.

Sometimes, love is stored in the soldering iron.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

hi hello! hopefully what im asking for isn't too obscure, but do you think i could i get resources/tips on how to write a being that was synthetically made/and or coded? Much thanks in advance/for the chance!

Writing Ideas: Synthetically-Made Characters

some character tropes

Artificial Human: A human being who was created artificially rather than born naturally.

Artificial Animal People: Human-like animals or animal-like humans created through science.

Artificial Intelligence: In fictional works, AI most usually refers to artificial general intelligence — a sapient, self-aware computer system capable of independent thought and reason.

Bioweapon Beast: You create your own attack animal, genetically engineering existing organisms or creating your own. Maybe this new organism would rather just be left alone, and refuses to actually fight. Maybe it goes feral and becomes a dangerous monster roaming the wilderness. Maybe it actually works perfectly, but those in charge of it are far from ethical.

Clockwork Creature: May be purely mechanical, or, if in a fantasy setting, there may be a blend of mechanical and magical elements.

Mechanical Lifeforms: A race of robots or robot-like creatures that are also considered a honest-to-goodness species of living things. They're just like your everyday living organisms, except they happen to have metal for skin, wires for nerves, and so on. They're often silicon-based as well. These may be robotic animals, plants, micro-organisms, or sapient creatures. If they are sapient, they would never wish to Become a Real Boy because, as far as they can see, they are as real as that boy. The origin of such creatures is often never elaborated on or unknown to the characters. It's not uncommon for them to have creators Shrouded in Myth and mystified or outright denied in a sort of reversed creationism that are later further explained in plot-relevant and shocking revelations, similar to precursors for organic species. Sapient mechanical lifeforms tend to react as one would expect when they learn the nature of their origin, usually in some kind of denial and anger. There has been a trend of portraying mechanical lifeforms as formerly organic races that roboticized themselves either as the next Evolutionary Level or simply to survive some world-ending catastrophe that affected them in the past. However, it's also common for such creatures to simply arise without a creator in a process comparable to evolution.

Puppet Permutation: A person changes into a living puppet. They sometimes can control themselves, but this is usually not the case. These puppets are often controlled by outside forces.

Examples

Frankenstein's Monster is one of the most classic and well known examples. While it is stressed at certain points through the original Frankenstein novel that the monster is an entirely unique species, he certainly has a human intelligence and personality. It is left ambiguous whether creating the creature was actually a bad thing or not. The creature suffers (and subsequently causes suffering to his creator), not because it was created but because the creator abandoned it afterwards.

Celtic Mythology: Blodeuedd, the woman created from flowers to be the wife of Lleu Llaw in Medieval Welsh mythology.

A Greek myth tells the story of Pygmalion, a man who shunned real-life women but craved that his beautiful sculpture of one would come to life. He loved it so much that he prayed to Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, to grant him that wish. After he kissed the ivory-carved statue's lips, Venus worked her magic and it came to life. This is seen as a literal "Breath of Life".

Pandora in Greek myth was a sculpture that the Gods made and brought to life.

Japanese Mythology: Any non-electronic item can become a Tsukumogami if it's cared for and becomes old enough, which are Animate Inanimate Objects. This can also happen to toys, giving rise to the Living Toys trope.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: An alien civilization created at least one sentient supercomputer, Deep Thought, for the purpose of answering philosophical questions regarding the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

The Hunger Games: During the rebellion which led to the creation of the titular Games, the Capitol bred a number of genetically engineered animals called muttations (commonly abbreviated to mutts) which were used as living weapons against the districts. From the Tenth Hunger Games onwards, they became a regular feature in the arena, with the Gamemakers using them either to kill the tributes directly or to drive the tributes together and force them to fight each other. Examples of mutts seen in the Games include poisonous snakes which are programmed to attack anyone whose scent is unfamiliar, carnivorous squirrels which attack in packs and werewolf-like creatures which have been created to resemble fallen tributes.

Victor Frankenstein (2015): Victor proclaims to Igor that they will create a man after their own image. The process involves stitching together dead body parts and reanimating the corpse with lightning.

Isaac Asimov often averted this trope quite harshly in his Robot Series and related works, preferring to think of robots as tools rather than people. He only imagined robots being roughly humanoid when they needed to be able to perform tasks which human tools for already existed and it wouldn't make sense to replace every piece of equipment when one robot could be made to use them. They were always built to the job, and sometimes that job made for very unusual designs instead.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Hi, here are some related tropes you can use as inspiration. More examples and information on these in the sources linked above. Hope this helps with your writing!

[regular-samdragon]

More tfa Reverse au sketches and rambles. Here's the first post for the initial info on all of this

I dont exactly have a plot idea for this au yet, just mostly silly interactions between the characters. I'm still a little lost on what to have the decepticons doing in this. I have some slight ideas though, just might change up some details later

It makes sense for the decepticons to also be humans in this au. The initial idea I had was that Megatron owned the corporation that paved the way for technological developments in the city. Of course, Megs isn't the scientific mastermind behind it all. He just happens to own the company. Starscream and Blitzwing act as the head scientists, and Barricade is head of security. Starscream is constantly trying to think up ways to take over the company himself while the others are content to keep working under Megs. After all, he doesn't restrict them on how ethical their experiments have to be.

Sumdac himself, I haven't quite decided on yet. The lot that Ratchet's and Prowl's establishments are located in definitely has more than one store, so one idea I had was for Sumdac to stay human and own an electronics repair shop. Perhaps he misses Sari's initial landing, but the gang ropes him in when she ends up needing specialized repairs. Or, alternatively, he could be Sari's cybertronian dad, stuck back home and worried over how his daughter's first mission is going. Although he wouldn't be super involved in the au if I went with that idea.

Swindle is the owner of the local pawn shop, also in the same lot. He rarely seems to ever show up to work, leaving the shop closed for several days in a row. Sometimes even for weeks. It's a wonder to everyone how the pawn shop still manages to make a profit when Swindle is constantly on his 'overseas trips'. Bee and Bulk have swapped plenty of theories on what they think Swindle really does for a living, such as being a secret agent, or his store being a front for secret military experiments.

Thinking more of the lot they all work in, I'm calling it the Tower Plaza. Sort of drawing off the idea of Sumdac Tower from the show, and yeah a little inspo from OK KO I have to admit. The Tower Plaza gets it's name from a tall, abandoned clock tower that stands as the icon of the area. The clock hasn't worked for years but no one can afford to own or repair the building. This ends up becoming Sari's main hiding place. Bulk and Bee help her to spruce things up inside, making her a real home away from home. There's even a big basement door she can hide out in when Meg's men start poking their noses around.

Speaking of Megs again, his goal in this au would primarily be to capture Sari and have his scientists reverse engineer her for their own advancements in tech. Pretty much exactly what Sumdac did in the show with Megatron himself. Although while Sumdac had empathy for Megs when he was found to still be alive, Megs in this cares not what happens to Sari in the process. He doesnt see her as a living being (yet), and mainly just wants to advance his company for even higher profits.

And thus comes the conflict between the Tower Plaza gang and uhhh whatever I end up naming Megatron's company as.

Smaller notes:

•Folks on discord helped me out to find the PERFECT alt mode for Sari. That is, a Folland Gnat fighter aircraft. It's small and speedy and just really fits Sari's vibes

•Bee personally takes it on himself to teach Sari as many human curse words as possible. Orion nearly has a heart attack the first time he hears Sari swear

•Bee is also the one who came up with nicknames for everyone. Although Bulk is the one who came up with 'Bee' for him

•Orion was a second lieutenant before he was discharged

•Orion doesn't like to talk to anyone about why he was discharged from the military. Uncle Ratchet knows it involved another lieutenant and an intelligence officer, both friends of Orion. He doesn't know anything past that.

•Cybertron is not at war in this au, meaning the factions of autobots and decepticons don't actually exist. The need to hide the Allspark was more to keep it away from other alien races who would like to steal and misuse it

•Sari is only minimally trained for combat scenarios. With the occasional battle while on Earth, she asks Prowl to teach her some hand to hand combat. After an incident where she nearly took out a building, they now train far out in the woods

[theskeletongames]

I noticed that Fell has different phone models in your two comics! Does this mean that at first he had a push-button phone, and then a more modern phone appeared?

Yes. I like to think monsters were a bit behind on some parts of human tech as it had to fall into the underground from human trash, and that takes time to get there. Also monsters had a bit of difficulty with the whole capacitive touch screens that are common in smart phones. They would need to reverse engineer them to work with magic feedback instead of electronic.

[sunny-sourzii]

Skibidi Toilet is a machinima web series created by Alexey Gerasimov and released through YouTube videos and shorts on his channel DaFuq!?Boom!. Produced using Source Filmmaker, the series follows a war between human-headed toilets and humanoid characters with electronic devices for heads. Since the first short was posted in February 2023, Skibidi Toilet has become viral as an internet meme on various social media platforms, particularly among Generation Alpha. Many commentators saw their embrace of the series as Generation Alpha's first development of a unique internet culture. The show has a wide range of licensed products, and Gerasimov is "in talks" with Adam Goodman and Michael Bay for a film and television series adaptation. The series depicts a conflict between Skibidi Toilets—singing human-headed toilets—and humanoids with CCTV cameras, speakers, and televisions in place of their heads. The Skibidi Toilets, led by G-Toilet, overtake humanity. Warfare soon develops between the toilets and the alliance of Cameramen, Speakermen, and TV-men. The Titan Cameraman and Titan Speakerman, strongest of their respective races, begin to turn the tide of war. But Scientist Toilet, the Skibidi Toilets' second-in-command and R&D chief, develops a mind control parasite that overtakes Titan Speakerman, causing him to turn on the alliance and cause mass carnage in their ranks. With the aid of Titan TV-man, Titan Speakerman is cured, and, as the fighting continues to escalate in a constant arms race, an alliance force strikes at the toilets' secret underground facility, killing Scientist Toilet. The force's sole survivor, Plungerman, learns that the facility and the enigmatic and omnipresent Secret Agent were somehow involved in the toilets' creation, but the Secret Agent kills him to protect the secret. Concurrently, relations sour between the Skibidi Toilets and the Astro Toilets, a race of powerful extraterrestrial toilets that formerly counted G-Toilet among their ranks, and the Astro Toilets invade Earth. Their power is such that neither the alliance nor the Skibidi Toilets can stand against them alone, and they enter into a makeshift partnership against their common enemy. The Earth's surface is ravaged in the ensuing battles, and the alliance's subterranean main base is eventually compromised along with Titan TV-man, whose mind is taken over by the Astro Toilets and their field commander, the Astro Duchess. With their base destroyed, their strongest soldier turned against them, and innumerable casualties, the alliance enters into a tactical retreat with just one remaining asset, a powerful Astro Toilet weapon they hope to reverse-engineer to turn the tide of battle.

—The silliest anon ever. you dont know who this is shhhh

That's........beutiful.......i.....i think I shed a tear

.......

Thank you bigsillyyy- I mean anon😁

[frostycatblr-fandom-files]

Of Honeysuckle and Haiku [Tech x Fem!Reader]

Warnings and Information: This is my submission for an event hosted by the wonderful @cloneficgiftexchange, written for @apocalyp-tech-a. I hope you enjoy my first Tech x Reader! 2nd Person POV, undescribed Fem!Reader who works as an analyst/researcher for the GAR. Minor AU changes (no missing and/or dead Clones here (but Echo is still part of CF99)!). Prompt sentence/s will be orange to keep in line with the color scheme of the graphics. Tech has a “secret” crush on Reader that she knows about. Flirting is stored in the info-dumping/poetry. Star Wars and real-world swearing is as naughty as it gets. Some Mando’a. Brief references and allusions to injury and other canon-typical violence, and a small flashback where Reader’s senior colleagues are (implied to be) behaving like jerks to Tech, but nothing explicit. Use of stylistic and narrative italics. Fictional flowers. 

Prompt: Can't we ever go to a nice place? | Oh, that's what that button does.

Word-count: 8,270

Another Primeday, another pile of notes in your locker. 

That's how the weeks always started. 

You worked closely with the Grand Army of the Republic as something of an analyst and unofficial bookkeeper, going on for two years now. Colleagues and work-friends would slip scraps of flimsiplast in the ventilation grooves of your locker as a way of non-electronic communication.

The old fashioned way, older department heads joked. 

The flimsi stacks contained a mishmash of written comms. Inside jokes. Recipe trades. Reminders to get CT-6922’s helmet serviced for the video feed you needed for Jais in the Reverse-Engineering Department if they're ever going to find out how that new Separatist spider droid worked. 

And a poem, written in spidery Aurebesh lettering from your “secret admirer”. Always the top of the pile that collected at the bottom of your locker. 

You knew full well who it was after a while, piecing together all the clues he'd strung along for you. Game recognizes game, as they say. It took cracking a complicated cipher in order to- 

Nah, who are you kidding? 

You got impatient and asked Jais in R.E.D. to help you with scrubbing the security footage for the last person to stop by your locker one morning, finding a haiku waiting for you. A haiku regarding subject matter you had just been discussing with a colleague the other day who had a grueling day of carefully dissecting a Flame Beetle from Kashyyyk ahead of them, and you were slated to assist them. 

The shimmering shell  That conceals a beetle’s wing Is called elytra  - I wish I was a beetle 

Mild alarm that someone was messing with you turned to curiosity soon after; it had been Tech of Clone Force 99 who dropped the poem into your locker some weeks ago. 

He'd been helping the analysts while he got his leg in working order, having broken both the tibia and fibula of his left leg in a skirmish. (That's about as much as you knew at the time.) Tech would be returning to fieldwork sooner than later; between check-ups and some physical therapy work, the genius and navigator of CF99 kept himself busy here, so he would still feel useful to the GAR while recovering. 

Of all the analysts Tech assisted, you seemed to be his favorite given that you actually liked letting him help you, and didn't saddle him with a dull day of deskwork like some of the senior analysts who wanted him out of their hair. 

You felt it was incredibly unfair to Tech, but there was nothing you could say to change their minds. You'd tried. 

Instead of reading this week's new stack of flimsi notes from your weekend off at your locker, you decide you'll read them at your desk for a change. The smell of Tech’s typical caf blend is particularly inviting this morning. It’s been raining since last week, this morning the hardest yet. Thank the Maker you had a rain repeller in proper working order for the walk to the research center from the speeder cabs. 

“Good morning, Tech.” 

Sitting down, from around the other side of the desk, you can see he's in a walking boot now. An improvement from when you last saw him just two short days ago. 

“Hey, that's a good sign! Think you'll be back with the rest of the Bad Batch soon?” 

You take no offense when his eyes do not lift from the screen of his datapad. “Good morning. I suppose, yes…” He doesn't sound entirely enthusiastic like one might've expected, but you have enough of a grasp on his mannerisms by now to know that Tech is eager to return to his brothers in due time. 

You've met the rest of his squad on a handful of occasions as they've come to check on him, making sure he's not missing all the action by keeping him up to speed on their exploits. 

Smiling, you slide a cup of caf you believe to be Tech’s closer to him as you leaf through the notes from your locker. 

“Don't let your caf get cold.” 

The datapad drops away. “That is for you,” he explains, “if you desire to try it, that is. I recalled you expressing interest in the last blend of caf I brought in, saying that it smelled good last Taungsday.” 

You blink, surprised he remembered those details. Well, not that surprised; you understood Tech had a remarkable memory that allowed him to recall obscure details. It’s saved you from a few headaches, like that same Taungsday when a visiting representative from Glee Anslem insisted upon having the innocuous bouquet of Nabooian Honeysuckles sent off for allergen testing. Whatever it was that provoked the Nautolan’s (thankfully minor) allergic reaction, it was not the flowers, though they were refused return. 

Shame… the delicate white, orange and cream blossoms were such a thoughtful gift from Senator Amidala to the visiting representative and now they look so out of place on your desk, still in the elaborate ceramic vase they came in. You’re going to need to find a way to return it to Ms. Amidala once the flowers have shriveled and lost all their silky petals. 

Thanking Tech for the thoughtfulness behind brewing you a cup of caf, you give it a careful taste and find the flavor far more robust than the instant mix the breakroom keeps on hand while you read the first of the notes. (Looked to be a heads-up that a commando had some grisly footage to be analyzed because Trandoshan pirates were involved and the credits were on Delta Squad being responsible.)

“Mmm… That’s nice. Thank you again, Tech.” 

“You are welcome.” he replies, half-ducking his head back down into the datapad, though his eyes remain on you. 

Framed by the yellow lenses of the black-strapped goggles he wears, there is an observative nature to those brown eyes. The phenotypic eye color for all Clones is brown, he explained to you once. Though yes, there were a few aberrations in physical traits among his brothers in the GAR, just not quite to the same scale as the experimental squadron that Echo from the 501st Legion (once thought to be dead) joined not long ago. Echo still keeps in contact with the 501st, Captain Rex and a brother named Fives the closest of all. You figure what he must have been reading off his tablet before he came in this morning were more messages from his brothers. 

Setting aside notes as you read them, you’re careful to keep the scrap of poetry for last as always. Wonder what it’ll be today. A sonnet? Free-verse? Acrostic or maybe a limerick? Another haiku? Tech seemed to love leaving you haikus most of all. 

Still finding his eyes upon you, you lay aside the last note about keeping an eye out for a missing label-maker and delicately clear your throat. “Yes, Tech?” You’re careful to offer him a friendly smile, a quiet measure of assurance that you’re not annoyed or disturbed by his watchfulness. 

“Senator Amidala sent a letter of apology to the center regarding the honeysuckles and vase,” he begins, explaining the letter was forwarded to everyone who worked in the analysis department, “and since she feels terrible about the situation inadvertently caused for both her guest and the center, she suggested someone is welcome to keep both, if they wish.” 

“Well that’s very kind of the senator.” you reply, giving the flowers on your desk a look of consideration, one that prompts a strange expression out of the genius you generously share your desk with. 

You ask what the matter is with another swig of caf. 

“I hope you don’t mind too terribly that I… accepted on your behalf.” Tech confesses, aware he’s more than likely crossed a line by doing so. You and Tech do not know each other all that well, but he’s strung together enough clues to have some idea of what you like. He’s noticed what you give the most attention to, and you had secretly been admiring the Nabooian bouquet for some time on Taungsday… 

Cautiously, Tech adds, “You could always give them to a friend.” 

Casting a third glance over the tri-colored flowers, Tech is assured that won’t be necessary, and he’d been correct in his assessment all along. “I don’t mind at all; thanks for saving me the trouble. I was secretly hoping to take these home, I’ve been obsessed with Naboo for a while now…” you admit, dropping your voice into a near-conspiratorial whisper. 

There was an often sunny windowsill back home with plenty of space for the vase and flowers that would make for the perfect spot to show both off. Maybe it’d inspire you to finally take that trip to Naboo you always wanted. Naboo sounded like a nice place, nestled in the Chrommell system of the Outer Rim Territories. 

Idyllic, picturesque, it was often described. 

All this analyst-work had you in a position to see the glorious, the gory, and everything in-between in the adventures of the Grand Army day in and day out. Compiling reports near and far was beginning to instill a sense of longing for adventure in you; nothing grand was necessary, just something different. Something beyond the walls of the GAR research center here among the Core Worlds. 

I’ll be satisfied with a taste of adventure. Just one bite. Just one, I promise. 

The yellow-lensed goggles are adjusted. “What fascinates you so much about Naboo?” Tech asks, curiosity burning at him. 

“Oh… I dunno,” you say with a shrug, smiling, “it’s hard to put it all into words.” And you wouldn’t exactly have the time, either, with your shift due to start soon. While you’ve still got the time, you should finish as much of the caf as you can before it grows cold, and finally get around to this new poem Tech’s left for you. Maybe he can already guess that you know these are from him, but a part of you finds it fun in some way to pretend you don’t. 

Fixing an errant strand of hair back in place, you unfold the note and read. Another haiku, today, lamenting the dreary weather. 

To simpler splendors  Like summer's gentle breezes and honey most sweet - When will the rain stop?

You find it curious and strange - this possible complaint - given you know Clones come from the storm-cloaked world of Kamino. Surely this weather feels just like home for him; familiar, maybe even comforting. But maybe it’s not his complaint, it could have been your own off-handed remark from some time ago that he’s echoing back to you now. 

Tech’s level of observation was truly incredible, sometimes. You already felt yourself missing his knowledgeable presence once he was healed up and returned to the Bad Batch. That wouldn’t happen until he was rid of the walking boot and cleared for active duty, which was mildly comforting to you, selfishly speaking. Logically you know this arrangement is temporary, and you will not always have your willing assistant. 

A willing assistant who has given his attention to closing off communications with Wrecker, from the sound of things as CF99’s genius reads the messages under his breath. Tech is trying very hard to appear like he’s not taken notice that you’ve read his latest haiku. 

You set the poetry aside along with the other locker notes, and pick up your clipboard full of the day’s tasks. “Take your time, Tech.” you promise, chuckling warmly as he flashes the famous pointer finger in your direction, requesting just an extra moment. “I know Wrecker misses having his big brother around.”

Tech says nothing in response to your teasing quip, only offering an appreciative if distracted smile before he’s ready to help you with your tasks for the day. 

On Primedays, the first item of business on the list is often the most nerve-wracking of all your assignments, today no exception.

“Dammit, I grabbed the wrong screwdriver… Would you mind handing me the… the, uh…?” Tech takes the incorrect screwdriver from your fingers and replaces it with what you need while you struggle to think of the name for the correct type, much to your relief. “Oh, thank you Tech. Will you need this back when I’m done?” 

Tech nods, a silent promise it was no trouble. “I will not. I’m finished with what I needed it for. Feel free to use it as long as you need.” He does not need to remind you to go slowly. 

Your first research assignment of the morning involves dismantled bombs, and the additional Clone tucked in one corner of the room clad in the bright orange of ordnance specialists serves as an eye-catching distraction rather than a precautionary measure. Nicknamed Reddy, this Clone trooper is only doing his job, of course; he’s supposed to be here as part of the protocol. This facility has gone one thousand and twenty-seven days without an explosive incident, which is a comforting number, but there is no room for complacency. In the unlikely event a bomb somehow reactivates, Red Wire is here to snuff it out for good. 

(Or tell everyone to evacuate and seek shelter if he somehow can’t.)

Helmet clipped to his utility belt, Reddy is reading the printed report, bobbing his head in time to some jaunty tune he’s got stuck in his head. “Disarmed and partially dismantled by… CT-9903. That’s your squadmate Wrecker, right?” 

“Correct.” Tech replies tersely, hoping not to prove himself distracting to you. He’s only standing as close as he is to give or take tools as you need them. 

Reddy nods his head in approval of the work scattered over the examination table. “He did a good job. Definitely has the gentle touch needed for bomb disposal.” Yes… Wrecker certainly had steadier nerves than yourself right now. You would prefer not to have shaking hands, no matter how incapable this bomb is… should be… of going off. 

“Reddy…”

He catches the warning. “Sorry, ma’am.” 

You just need to pull off a particular durasteel plate, and take detailed pictures of a unique section of wiring to enter it into the GAR database of known bomb constructs and find close or exact matches. Then Reddy has the pleasure of disposing of the remnants for you. Fewer distractions while you remove notoriously fiddly screws, the better. 

So why are your hands still shaking now that you should be able to focus again? 

“... dammit…” You’ve worked yourself up about the unsteady nature of your hands now. Stress will only worsen it, prolonging the tremble. Setting the screwdriver aside is the best course of action until you can find your nerve. 

Rational thoughts, you remind yourself, everyone has had this happen to them at one time or another. 

“May I?” Tech offers, voice softer than you ever remember it being before now. 

He is careful in offering to help without immediately trying to take over your work. Tech recognizes you are capable in all the various aspects of your job, and he does not wish to undermine or blow off your expertise. He understands from experience how that can be frustrating, even disrespectful.

And Tech aims to be very respectful of you. He's been very careful in how he's hinted his interest in you thus far. (Maybe too careful.) The haikus in your locker had been because he heard you liked poetry, and he proactively accepted the honeysuckles Senator Amidala offered for the trouble because he thought you might like them. Sharing his favorite blend of caf was a decision more premeditated than the other two.

You step to the side, accepting the offer. 

“Thank you, Tech...” you say, gesturing to the tools in an unspoken measure of please, by all means. Tech takes position where you previously stood, and begins to work on the dismantled explosive. Long, dexterous fingers make the process of loosening and extracting the remaining screws look deceptively easy. 

“You’ll want your datapad soon,” Tech suggests helpfully, soon down to just two more corner screws to remove. 

“Oh, yes…!” 

Scooping the tablet off of the examination table, you habitually skip your fingers across the reactive transparisteel and pull up the camera function, priming everything to capture the colorful chaos of wiring and circuitry inside once Tech has removed the panel. Once it is lifted out of the way, Tech side-steps to allow you in front of the bomb once more so that you can capture records for the GAR database. 

However, the camera will not focus.

“Strange…” You tap the center of the screen, hoping perhaps the datapad will behave like your modern comlink and auto-focus, but it does not give you the result you hoped for. You chuckle somewhat bashfully. “Sorry, it’s… been a while since I’ve used this old datapad for taking pictures.” 

“Press the red, center button on the top row twice.” 

Taking the advice of the bespectacled Clone beside you, the image on the screen comes into crisp focus, not a detail lost. “Oh, that’s what that button does.” This tablet is an older generation, but the facility keeps it because it's sturdy and reliable. No sense in replacing perfectly good technology so long as it continues to work. 

“Been using these tablets for ages and I never knew that. How'd you know that?” Reddy asks from the corner, safely voicing his curiosity now that the hard part is behind you. “Just real tech-savvy, I take it. That how you get your name?” 

Tech smiles knowingly. “Learning the ins and outs of each machine I use is crucial to my effectiveness in service of the Republic. Much in the same way you're here to assist the researchers, analysts and reverse engineers in bomb identification, in some cases.” The second question goes unanswered, you notice, but Reddy seems to let it go. 

“Hah, can't argue with that comparison!” he says agreeably, his smile sunny. You’ve always liked that about this particular member of the bomb squad; Red Wire has an optimistic disposition and general attitude despite the nerve-rattling nature of his job. He’s not terribly jaded or gruff like some of the other Clones on rotation at this facility. 

Once you've collected all your necessary pictures, you are promised that he'll take it from here. “Good work as ever ma'am. I'll clean up while you get started on the search.” 

“Thank you, I appreciate the help as always from both you and Tech.” you say, patting him on the shoulder before you follow after Tech, who’s already making his way back to your desk, neck craned over his datapad. Stepping past the blast doors to catch up to Tech, you breathe a sigh of relief while Red Wire begins the disposal process, the hardest task of the morning behind you. 

“Glad that’s over,” you say, finally feeling your quickened pulse slowing at last, “Thank you for the help once again, Tech.” You’re certain he heard the first thank you, but extra gratitude never killed anyone. 

Tech’s deliberate stride slows to match with yours. “It was no trouble. I thought you might want the help.” A polite smile breaks the veneer of the usual expression of thoughtfulness and concentration you’ve become accustomed to in the time Tech’s been here. 

You’re very familiar with how he appears when he’s concentrated: the furrowed brow, his shoulders rolled forward, the subconscious setting and unsetting of his jaw as he mulls over a million thoughts. Wowing your colleagues with how he could extrapolate info from separate, complex datasets within multiple windows on the screen of his datapad without error. 

The way his brown eyes, deep and dark, looked like honey when framed behind his goggles…

Sitting down at your desk where you fire up the database you’ll be working with, already you see the slight furrow of his brow as Tech takes his seat on the other side, trading messages with his squadmates while he elevates his leg to alleviate the pressure of the walking boot. Tech misses being out there in the field more and more with every passing day. 

“Tell ‘em I said hi.” you request with a soft chuckle before allowing him to concentrate on keeping himself in the loop. You just have to hope his handsome face painted in deep concentration doesn’t prove too distracting for you as you cross-reference your wire samples. The squad leader of the Bad Batch, Sergeant Hunter, had teased Tech once a few weeks ago, when he dropped by with Echo, on the depths of Tech’s concentration. That’s when you’d truly taken notice of it for the first time.

Tech, utterly embroiled in some “little” project he’d created for himself here at the research center, was staying long after your scheduled hours, repeatedly promising that you really don’t have to stay here. 

You turn another page in your holomag. “I’ll be fine staying here a little longer. I want to make sure none of the senior analysts bother you. Again.” It was a slow Zhellday afternoon you had no other plans for, and a couple of people a little further up the chain of command really had a bug up their ass about Tech’s presence here today in particular, continually complaining about an incident with his crutches.

Someone hadn’t been looking where they were going and bumped into the mobility aids propped against a wall, knocking them over this morning. Unfortunately, there had been a tray of glass instruments set aside nearby that did not survive the crutches’ sudden descent. The senior analysts, most of them much older than you, wanted him thrown out of the facility and have the agreement with the GAR that Tech would be here until his broken leg healed nullified. 

“He’s got a broken leg! Is he supposed to just hobble around the lab without his crutches? It was an accident, but I’m starting to suspect you’re looking for excuses to get rid of him because you’re feeling threatened by his intellect!”

Clone Force 99’s second-in-command hums shortly in delayed response, a frown marring his otherwise concentrated expression. Tech adjusts his goggles as he pours over some reference. The man with partial skull iconography inked across his similarly tanned face next to Tech carefully nudges him with his elbow. 

“Tech, this is when you’re supposed to tell the nice lady thank you.” Hunter warns him, teasingly of course. He’s gotten back from a long deployment, and rather than going to the nearest mess hall with Wrecker and Crosshair, he’s come to check up on Tech, finding that he’s still at the GAR research center. He’s too tired to give any kind of reprimand just for the sake of appearances. 

“Especially after this morning… Don’t make me do the nat-born thing, vod.”

Tech sort of scoffs, the threat of referring to him by his CT number, like a misbehaving natural-born child hearing the use of their middle name, by his brother having little effect. 

“No thanks necessary, honestly.” You turn the page to your holomag, skimming the article to see if it’s worth an in-depth read, then meet Hunter’s eye. “It was honestly a bit cathartic to have a go at those jerks.” Decrying them as jerks to the squad leader of the Bad Batch was putting it real mildly given your true thoughts of them right about now. 

Echo gives you a knowing nod. The sergeant smirks, and this is what gets Tech to break his silence. 

“Don’t, Hunter.”

“Glad you made a friend, Tech.” Hunter says it with complete sincerity, so far as you can tell. Leaning back in the borrowed lab chair, Hunter kicks his feet up for a moment on a corner of the desk to adjust some parts of his armor. “Wrecker might get jealous.”

“I think we all would.” Echo says with a kind chuckle.

“Plenty of me to go around,” you promised the three of them, “I love making friends with the GAR.”

A few hours later, now four items deep into your checklist for the day with the wire cross-referencing behind you, you lean back in your chair and stretch your arms above your head, feeling something pop with great satisfaction. “Mmm! That felt good. Hey, Tech?” He nods to show he hears you, at which point you continue. “I’m thinking of running home real quick during lunch to take the honeysuckles home so I’m not wrestling with those on top of everything else I’ll have to take with me tonight. You gonna be okay on your own for a bit?” 

“I will be fine.” he assures you, sliding the clipboard from “your” side of the desk over to his. “I may need the password to your desk-mounted computer terminal, however.”

“It’s ‘naboofields’. All one word, no capitals, special characters or letters.” 

You root around your desk for one of the seemingly innumerable sticky-flim pads you possess, scribbling down the password - just in case - as neatly as you can before removing the top flimsi-note and hand it over to him. Honeyed eyes blink once in mild surprise after he inspects your handwriting. 

“Not very secure, I know.” you laugh bashfully, straightening a few sheafs of flimsiplast before gathering up the stack of locker notes to tuck them in your pocket. Busywork to avoid any kind of lecturing look. But when you meet his eyes for the moment before wondering how best to pick up the ceramic vase full of beautiful tri-colored honeysuckle, you find no disappointment. Only more curiosity. 

“Have you ever been to Naboo?” Tech asks. He’s noticed this particular topic has been cropping up a lot between the idle doodles on flimsi scraps of the bulbous Shaak grazing through lush emerald fields and little reminders you’ve written to yourself scattered across your desk lately. Ticket prices. Best time of year to go. Popular festivals. Fashion. You were weaving a curious pattern.  

Tech doesn’t do this very often, but he hazards a guess. Could you perhaps be… homesick?

“Were you born there?”

You shake your head. “I wasn’t born there, and I’ve never visited before. Naboo’s just some… silly dream of mine lately.” 

“Why do you say ‘silly’?” The question is earnest and sincere, and Tech sits forward off the backrest of the lab chair, posture straightening out. “Has someone said something unkind about your desire to see Naboo?” He couldn’t imagine why someone would disparage this; many galactic citizens express some level of desire to visit this planet in the Chrommell sector at least once in their lifespan. 

He’s assured there’s no one being unkind to you when you wave him off, sliding the vase across your desk carefully. “No one other than me, I guess. I dunno when I’d ever have a chance to go visit between the work I do for the GAR, plus being in the middle of the Clone Wars for stars’ sake…” You’re considering if it would be worth telling him about your developing case of wanderlust, your craving for a taste of adventure. (Just a taste… just a taste!)

What Tech was supposed to do with that revelation, you weren’t sure. Did you want his help planning this whimsical trip? Or did you just need to confide in him with this harmless little secret? 

“Would it be impolite to presume you don’t have many vacation days accrued in order to enjoy a short holiday?” Tech assumes you’re well aware of labor laws the GAR has to comply with for civilian staffing, like yourself, but he has no means of knowing how much PTO you have stored up without rooting into the system.

“Karabast, I- I hadn’t even thought of…” Your thoughts trail off as you look out one of the rain-spattered panes of transparisteel and determine you need to stop by your locker to gather your weather wear and rain repeller. When was the last time you had some extended leave from work that wasn’t a sick day, anyways? “I have some PTO I’m owed, but I try to be smart and save it for emergencies… I, uh, think I have more than two week’s worth.” Truthfully it’s been some time you looked at the amount of PTO you’ve accrued. It very well could be less than you remember, or more than you imagine. 

Tech makes a quiet murmur of agreement that saving the time off for emergencies is rather smart, shrugging after a stretch of clearly contemplative silence. “I was merely curious.” The statement makes it tempting to tease him in return, say something like aren’t you always? but he has something more to say before you work up the nerve, gesturing to the clipboard. “May I watch the helmet footage for you while you take the Nabooian Honeysuckles home?”

“I was warned it was grisly.” you caution him out of kindness, thinking back to one of the locker notes. “So, as long as you don’t mind or won’t be bothered, I suppose you can look at the footage for me… Credits are on it being sent from Delta Squad.” 

Scrutinizing the datadisc, Tech finds RC-1207 etched into it. Commando Sev, he tells you, went missing on Kashyyyk for a month early in the war… (Thank the Maker, his pod brothers had been fortunate in finding him.) Sev has never spoken of the experience. 

“This should prove to be fascinating, in some regard.” Tech speculates, slotting the disc into an external inspection device to set everything up to complete this in your absence. Goggles are adjusted every so slightly, changing the way they are seated on his face. “I’ll leave the notes for you on your desk by the time you return.” he promises. 

You make sure you’ve gathered the last of your things, saying that you better get going now that everything’s agreed upon. Carefully cradling the vase in the crook of your arm, you arrange the bouquet slightly with your free hand to avoid bruising any of the velveteen petals as you carry it. 

Turning on your heel, you head for your locker to collect your rain repeller. “Appreciate it, Tech, thank you. I’ll catch you later.” 

“Watch out for the deeper puddles, don’t slip.” Tech calls after you. 

He’s overheard many of your colleagues using this phrase the last couple of days to warn one another; the longer the rain’s gone on, the deeper the areas of rain retention have become since the water table is oversaturated. There has been no break in the weather, but the end is in sight. 

‘When will the rain stop?’ Soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

Habitually, you call back that you’ll be careful and another farewell, flashing him a sunny smile as you head out the door for the speeder cabs, the honeysuckles in one hand, repeller in the other. You don’t expect to be gone long.

Taking the vase full of honeysuckle home is your highest priority, right along with making sure the flimsiplast scraps in your pocket remain dry. Flimsi, while conveniently reusable, was hair-thin, had a slight transparency to it, and dissolved in water. (Why some disposable gowns for med centers were made out of the acrylic material when it was kriffing semi-transparent you had yet to figure out.) If you were careful of the shifting winds before you got to a speeder cab, Tech’s poems would stay safe and dry in your pockets, joining the others in a box of precious keepsakes at home. 

Maybe you could put them all in a scrapbook one day, able to read and admire them all at leisure, or whenever you miss having new haikus show up in your locker once Tech’s broken leg is fully healed and he rejoins his brothers. Tech’s been careful not to voice how much he’s come to miss his brothers - else he risks sounding ungrateful for the research center agreeing to let him assist there after much back and forth - but you know he’s getting somewhat impatient. 

“If I had known a second BX droid was around the boulder, I wouldn’t have tried to kick the first over the precipice…”

“That’s how you broke your leg?”

“Had it broken for me when the commando droid grabbed me, more accurately. Better me than Echo…” 

He’d return to his brothers in time with the whole of hyperspace at his fingertips. Hunter would get his second-in-command back. The Havoc Marauder will have both of her pilots and it won’t be Echo spending time alone in the cockpit. Wrecker and Crosshair will once again have their brother to parse through factitious scenarios and the complicated mathematics necessary to pull it off relating to their enhancements to help one another in staving off hyperspace hypnosis. 

And you’d go back to dreading Primedays and dreaming of clover covered plains on Naboo between every string of data you analyze for the GAR once Tech left. You’d miss the extra pair of capable hands and his talented, dare you say exceptional, mind. You’d miss the presence of yellow-lensed goggles and the steady, red light of the cylindrical camera attached to them that sometimes followed you around the analyst lab, that were as much a part of Tech’s face as the rest of his features. 

You’d miss him and the harmless little crush Jais teases you over since helping you find out who your secret admirer was. 

“Swing by your locker lately?”

“You have better eyesight than a Mynock but all the subtlety of a Reek, Jais. Yes I saw he left me another haiku.”

“What do they say?”

So much by using so little. 

Tech has just seventeen syllables to work with, but boy does he make them work. 

They will last far longer than any tender blossom, tucked carefully on the windowsill and lovingly arranged to fill in the gaps in the bouquet during transport. Home only for a short time, you settle for tucking the new haikus and other notes on the low table in the living room to sort through later tonight while eating dinner. 

Come to think of it, maybe you should invite Tech over for dinner sometime, while he’s still here. (While there’s still time to leave things behind in order to remember him by.) He’s been staying in temporary accommodations in the unofficial research district since the nearest GAR barracks are an hour away, and the district isn’t too far from your place. You’re not sure what the protocol on this is (or if there’s any), and he’s more than welcome to turn you down, but-

This harmless crush has gone beyond only going one way. 

You’re going to miss Tech when he leaves, not just because it means you'll lose an eager assistant who shares what he learns while you work. You've grown to like him in ways you haven't devoted proper time to exploring why with the nature of your work, but you like Tech too. And you don’t want just a vase full of honeysuckle that will one day wither and a smattering of haikus to remember him by. 

You want something more. Something meaningful before he goes back to making mayhem for the Separatists. 

And maybe it can start today, if you're clever enough. 

It's time to stop daydreaming.

When you return to the research center, you first put your rain repeller away in your locker and collect the few notes that appeared while you were out. No new poems, only warnings that one of the senior analysts had a bug up their ass the size of a mynock (scratch that, a bantha) again over something minor, and it's best to stay out of their way until they cooled off. 

“Hey, Tech, I'm back.” You announce your return from the lockers to avoid potentially startling him, finding him fiddling with a part of his vambrace. “Got some cryptic notes in my locker. Feel like I missed some excitement while I was away.” 

“Yes… You certainly did.” One of the analysts lost their temper with the ‘newfangled’ caf-pot in the break room, Tech explains. Nothing newfangled about it in truth, it just wasn't working because it had been unplugged for cleaning and someone just forgot to leave a note. 

“Speaking of notes,” he says as an aside, procuring a printed message from Lieutenant Waxer of Ghost Company in the 212th, “This came in just before you arrived while I was at the copier.” 

Giving the lieutenant’s request a once-over, you find a general greeting after the Grand Army of the Republic’s letterhead, asking if someone would mind helping him locate the origin of a particular word in the language of the Twi’leks. Printed requests are deemed non-urgent, but it’s simple enough that you don’t mind adding his query to the bottom of your daily checklist, on which you find only the helmet footage crossed off. 

“Thought you’d have gotten more done than this.” you say, chuckling as you take a seat at your desk. 

Tech adjusts his goggles and meets your eye. “Felt it would be impolite to take your work from you when we had an agreement for just the footage.” He returns to fiddling around with his vambrace and his datapad, perhaps trying to sync something up. 

His concern of taking further work from you without asking is very kind, and rather touching. You feel warmth in your face disproportionate to the heating system warming the labs on this rainy day. “Oh. Well, I wouldn’t have minded too much, but thank you. What’d you do instead until I got back?” You figure it didn’t take all too long to study the commando’s footage, finding the notes Tech’s took for you pinned underneath the datadisc the feed was stored on. Lifting the high-tech paperweight, you give the notes a glance. 

It’s the same thin lettering as the haikus. 

Tech tuts in thought while snapping a part of his vambrace back where it belongs. “General research. Nothing important.” He does not immediately elaborate on what he had researched, thinking you may want to take a moment to mentally prep yourself for returning to work and start on the next task at hand. 

They were not concerns he (often) had to keep in mind with Hunter, Echo, Wrecker and Crosshair because he knew them so well compared to other people, compared to you. They spent the most time together and could give him a playful ribbing for overstepping boundaries, or starting detailed explanations when it wasn’t the best time. No one cares! was often said in-the-moment, and apologized for in ways that did not involve the words I’m sorry - and that was normal with his brothers. 

So when you break into a big, friendly smile and draw out the word “Liiiike…?” while you continue to settle in, Tech knows it’s okay to elaborate. That you seem interested in what he has to say. 

“It was the origin of halliksets. I became distracted when I learned they were quite popular on Naboo, and spent some time looking into that instead.” As he expected, you perk up with the mention of Naboo, interest piqued. “They’re made with seven strings, and the ore commonly used to make them comes from Kreeling, a mining planet also within the Chrommell sector.” The ore seems to be used to decorate the rounded body of the instrument, from what he had been reading. Ornamentation rather than function. 

“Huh,” you say politely with a smile to match, “I had no idea. That’s really neat.” 

You thank him for sharing before agreeing that perhaps you should get started on some of your work when he warns you that he can hear someone from another department coming, and it may be wise to appear busy. 

For the next fifteen or so minutes, you and Tech are careful to appear focused on tasks from the clipboard. Something about figuring out why a standard caustic compound utilized by the GAR didn’t work. Tech casts a subtle glance over his shoulder while you muse over the specs, wondering just like you why someone from another department is taking their sweet time to leaf through all the disposable pipettes in the storage cabinet of all things. Trying to eavesdrop? Just really particular about their lab supplies? Who karking knows. 

While looking into the humidity record on Felucia the day of the recorded equipment failure, you take a moment to open the system you submit your time-off requests to and look at the amount of paid time off accrued. Two and a half weeks. That’s not bad. 

“Good to know….”

“What is it?” Tech asks.

“Oh, just poking into weather records,” you hum, hiding the portal, “Seems the caustic compound failed because of higher than average humidity that day. It was under six months old, so I don’t think it was a product age failure.” From the flashpoint of the Clone Wars on Geonosis, much of the equipment utilized barely sits on a shelf any longer than six standard months after its production and purchase for the Grand Army. 

Clones were clever. Well trained. They knew how to account for things like planetary climate, weather conditions and equipment age out in the field, but you’ll always have the occasional fluke. Things beyond your control, beyond what you trained for. (Some things you could never train for.) But the Grand Army of the Republic could be trusted to give it their all, no matter the occasion, no matter the challenge. 

You trusted men like Red Wire with your life here in the labs when you had to work with disarmed bombs, never doubting his ordnance training for a second. The same goes for the man sitting on the other side of your desk from you now, the injured leg in the walking boot propped up in a spare chair. You trust Tech too. 

When the personnel from another department finally leaves, they’re grumbling something venomously about the missing label-maker under their breath, the word “di’kut!” loudest of all. 

You recognize the Mando’a. Pronunciation DEE-koot. Multiple meanings. Idiot. Useless. Waste of space. (More accurately a waste of their time… Pretty sure someone already said the label-maker wasn’t in there.) You wonder where they know the word from. 

Speaking for yourself, you’ve picked up a smidgen of the language from working as a researcher and analyst, and you’ve added a few more words to your repertoire from Tech’s uninterrupted correspondence with the Bad Batch that he’s allowed you to see some of. 

And speaking of them… Now that you and Tech are alone, this might be a good time to try putting your plan in motion knowing how much PTO you have to work with now. You want to go to Naboo, and you want to see if there’s any way you can convince Tech to go with you. Maybe even meet you there with the rest of Clone Force 99. Make bumping into them look like a coincidence. 

“Hey Tech, when you return to your brothers, any plans or ideas on where you’ll go first?” 

A pad of sticky flimsi-notes is pulled from one of the many drawers of your desk, and you root around for a working pen while you wait on an answer. Calling upon courage from the very heart of the cosmos, you hope you can pull this off. 

Tech answers the break in relative silence with a quirk of his eyebrow. “None that I’m aware of, but I suspect we’ll be going wherever we are needed.” There is a long contemplative pause, eyes flicking to his trusty tablet more than once as a few new messages from Wrecker come in. 

“Is there some reason you’re asking?” He pushes the datapad aside now, giving you more of his attention, which is appreciated. 

Shoulders bounce. “What if I said I was just curious?” You don’t expect him to buy that, he’s too clever. But you need a moment of quiet contemplation on his part to count out the syllables without messing up. Once you’re certain you have five, then seven syllables, you flash him an easygoing smile. “Being curious isn’t a crime, is it?”

“On some planets it is. Some rather… ridgid, often self-isolated cultures across the galaxy view curiosity as a sign of an idle mind and fear it will inspire mischief. Free thinking. Rebellion.” 

The question had been rhetorical, and you don’t mind that he answered, but you find the fact quite sad. You also don’t want to begin to imagine how that sort of “crime” is punished. Curiosity is a natural part of life to all, to criminalize it is… frankly ridiculous.

“Well good thing we’re not in one of those isolated cultures.” you say, now thinking how you’ll finish penning this poem. Should you add your reasoning for why you wrote this at the bottom? (Would you even have room?) Maybe you should just tell him after he’s read your poem instead. 

“Agreed.” Another message comes in from Echo this time, but Tech ignores it, continuing to hold eye contact with you; almost like he’s performing an inspection. “So I hope it does not feel like an accusation when I say I don’t believe you are ‘just curious’.” 

“I did have an idea…” you admit, fiddling with the pen in your hand for the moment, “Since I heard Clone Force 99 isn’t keen on following every little order…” This is when you choose to slide the haiku you were working on over to “his” side of the desk, waiting in nervous silence as brown eyes scrutinize every Aurebesh letter laid bare before them. 

Can't we ever go  to a nice place, verdant fields  of spring eternal? - Feel like breaking a few rules?

Tech’s eyes lift from the flimsiplast note, looking surprised. He didn’t take you for the sort of person who’d encourage breaking certain GAR protocols, let alone… Your name falls from his lips, asking what this is about in the same tender tone. 

“I thought about what you asked regarding how much time off I have, and I found out I have two and a half weeks…” You explain, fiddling with the pen some more to occupy your nervous hands while he continues to monitor you. “I thought… Maybe once your leg heals up, and you’re cleared to return to active duty, you could find an excuse to spend some time on Naboo. Get to know each other better, perhaps?” He clearly has some kind of feelings for you that are in the earlier stages of reciprocation, and if you’re away from the lab, and he finds the time or the excuse to nip down to the Chrommell sector and meet up with you on Naboo, then neither one of you have to worry about behaving quite so professionally. 

Looking down at the haiku once again, Tech takes in your explanation, your invitation, and offers a mild chuckle at long last.

“You know what my brothers will say if I tell them about this?”

You swallow nervously. “W-what?”

“That it almost sounds like you’re asking me on a date.” 

You do what you can to keep your jaw from dropping, but there’s little to be done about the fiery feeling building in the apple of your cheeks that suggests there may be color blooming there. If you’re blushing, Tech certainly does a splendid job of politely pretending he sees no such thing while he gives your poem another look. 

You do the same in kind when additional color builds in his own face and crawls up his neck from under the top of the body suit. “I take it you figured out who was secretly leaving you the haikus.” His smile is timid, but not quite as nervous as your own. 

“I did. A while ago, actually.” you confess, confirming his suspicions. “I had help checking the cameras to see where the first one came from. I didn’t see a reason to say anything, or stop you.” You add that you’ve kept every single one, too, to some surprise of the computer and weapons specialist sitting across from you. 

He sits forward now, carefully easing the walking boot to the floor. “You really want to spend time with me on Naboo?” Your earnest nod surprises him further. You do. Out of millions of Clones in the galaxy, you’re asking Tech (and his brothers by proxy) to join you in visiting the idyllic planet. 

You carefully carve out a little portion of your PTO and submit the request as the very first step in the planning process, and while you await approval you and Tech will continue to work together as normal. You still have to behave professionally in the meantime. 

Well, as professionally as possible when Tech decides he can now confess he has a backlog of haikus for you, enough so you could have one waiting for you in your locker every day until he’s cleared to return to fieldwork in a few weeks, in theory. 

“Poetry every Primeday, honeysuckles today, and now you’re offering daily haikus? Maybe I will be asking you out on a date if you continue to spoil me like that.” you warn him, chuckling. Of course now you get the feeling Tech will make sure the weeks leading up to your time-off would consist of honeysuckle and haiku to ensure that you would. 

And those were going to become some of your best weeks working as a researcher and analyst for the GAR, whether you got that time off or not, because it would be spent making precious memories with Tech. 

That was what mattered most.

First time I've ever participated in one of these events, and I don't think I did too badly, considering I completely restarted this at one point! (Apologies for how long this ended up being, too, haha.) I hope you liked it, Tech-a! 🩷

Fic taglist: @msmeredithrose @lonely-day3636 @dukeoftheblackstar @dystopicjumpsuit

[Masterlist] [TBB Masterlist] [Taglist] [Requests: Open]

[floatingcatacombs]

Anaheim Gals Being Anaheim Pals

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 2

Zeta Gundam has a real lurching, strange start by design. In the time between the One Year War and the Gryps Conflict, things have gone terribly! Not only did a good amount of Zeon’s forces escape to the asteroid belt and start rebuilding, the Earth Federation is getting taken over from within by the ruthless Titans. But wait, the Titans are still feddies at the end of the day, so why are they the ones piloting Hizacks and other Zeon-style designs at the start of the show?

The answer to this is brilliant and sadly relegated to a narrative footnote. You see, after the One Year War, Zeonic’s personnel and blueprints got absorbed into Gundam manufacturer Anaheim Electronics, as part of an Operation Paperclip-style deal. This leaves Anaheim's mobile suit aesthetics during the interwar period a total hodgepodge, iterating on both GM and Zaku style designs while also moving forward with plenty of secret prototype successors to the RX-78 Gundam. Maybe it’s just the OL in me, but this particular era and company really pique my interest! The culture shock and office politics that would follow from Anaheim folding in the engineers from the other side of the last war, the competition between rival design teams, the back-channel deals of an arms manufacturer now compelled to play both sides…

I’d been told that the Gundam OVA entitled Stardust Memory was vaguely about this, but I’d also been told that Stardust Memory was terrible and just plain not worth watching, so I steered away from it. Instead, my prayers were answered in the form of a lovely 2009 yuri doujin visual novel called Anaheim Girl’s Love Story.

I don't feel like cropping the screenshots, so peep my VM setup. it'll add to the vibe

First things first, I would like to simply acknowledge the joy of being alive, and alive at this exact moment in time. It is so wonderful that a group of dedicated fans made a complete visual novel starring lesbian office workers at the Mecha War Crime Engineering Company. And not only did they realize this dream in the first place, a separate group translated the script into English in 2013, and then another team reverse-engineered the game’s engine and released a patch in 2020 so that now the translation can be experienced in its original format. Each and every one of you is a true yuri warrior.

Anaheim Girl’s Love Story is a passion project through and through, extrapolating from all the bits and pieces of lore we get about Anaheim Electronics across various shows and crafting a believable setting, while still making it feel like a Gundam story on some level. It’s also fully voice acted? I don’t know what typical doujin VN production values were like in 2009, but still, color me impressed. We play as Rinne, a new recruit to Anaheim and a mecha otaku through and through. She loves these mobile suits, just like you and me! And she wants nothing more than to work for the company who invented the Gundam. Anaheim is a tech company through and through – most of the workers on the ground really believe in what they’re doing and put their whole heart into it, even as their leadership takes on increasingly shady and secretive contracts. But it’s also implied, in the VN and in the Gundam shows, that the company is staffed by mostly women. Great! I really do like when a setting asserts that being invested in mecha is primarily something that women do. After all, girls were the ones that kept 0079 popular in the first place according to Tomino.

All of the Anaheim girls have pale blue double-breasted suit jackets and long pencil skirts, culminating in an extremely 80’s look. AGLS also covers its blurry background photos with a dark blue filter, resulting in a fairly monochrome game where the character expressions really pop out from everything else. The mecha CGs are surprisingly well done, even if they suffer a bit from 2000’s shading syndrome, when everyone went a little too hard on the airbrush. The character portraits holds up a lot better in comparison. All of this to say that the presentation is fairly minimal, as they were clearly working with limited resources, but it gets the job done.

Rinne likes milk tea and is equal amounts excited and anxious about her job. This is the sort of milquetoast relatable protagonist traits you’d find in any dating sim, so the fun twist here is that when she’s feeling down about her work, she’ll go to the hanger where an RX-78 (the RX-78? It’s left unclear) is being stored and start talking to it. Rubber-ducking your mobile suit designs with an actual mobile suit is cute!! Things unfold as you’d expect, with Rinne befriending her hacker kouhai, starting a rivalry with the office villainess, and getting intimidated by her boss Sophie. It’s nothing revolutionary, but that’s fine, because the setting alone does a ton of the lifting. While no named characters from any official Gundam series appear, they’re namedropped ever so occasionally, and there’s plenty of cameos and lore sprinkled about for a Universal Centuryhead to lap up.

Of course, Rinne invites her boss over for dinner a bunch and discovers her soft and vulnerable side, and the two of them engage in a slowburn office situationship while trying to also trying to win the Gundam Development Project, an internal competition to develop next-generation experimental mobile suits. And wouldn’t you know it, office politics are afoot. She’s been keeping it from Rinne, but Sophie was originally an engineer from Zeonic. Trust issues ensue, as do complicated feelings about being in love with someone who designed the weapons that nearly killed you. The leadership of Anaheim has a clear bias towards Federation-style suits, and still views the Zeonic hires with scorn and suspicion, even if they bring useful perspectives in design philosophy. Sophie wants to design every part with cost and performance in mind! That’s what enabled the Zakus, after all. But if we skip ahead and look at the results, the end goal of this intra-office competition seems to have been extravagance bordering on wastefulness. Rinne and Sophie’s team produce a fairly standard but combat-versatile Gundam, while the other teams contributed a hyper-flexible Gundam, a hilariously overinflated mobile armor that you can stick a Gundam into, and a Gundam with a fucking nuke attached to it.

Most romance VNs and stories in general have some sort of last-act plot development that threatens to end things so the couple can bounce back and have a narrative climax. Sickness, family, trauma, a breakup feint, really anything is fair game. Anaheim Girl’s Love Story pulls out the most brutal one yet – “Stardust Memory happened”. It turns out that Anaheim has been playing both sides of the emerging Delaz conflict, and was planning on giving your team’s ship to a particularly unhinged Zeon commander as a gift of goodwill and temporary alliance. In doing so, they dismantle the iconic Gundam armor from the mobile suit frame, replacing it with a new and undeniably Zeonic red outer shell. It’s a genuinely fucked-up moment! To see your child ripped away from you and corrupted into being the other kind of war crimes monster, and your boss/girlfriend knew this was going to happen and was too ashamed to tell you. Rinne runs out of oxygen while trying to stop the Gebera Tetra from deploying, and falls into a coma afterwards. By the time she wakes up, the events of Stardust Memory have all played out, and things are in the process of returning to normal. Our protagonist ends up on a research vessel to Jupiter to test cutting-edge mobile suits, but promises to meet up with Sophie again when she returns. One wonders if she got recruited into joining Paptimus’ crew while on Jupiter, and was subsequently killed by Kamille. The timelines just barely overlap to make it possible!

Anyways, that’s Anaheim Girl’s Love Story. I’m not sure how fleshed out the hacker girl’s route is, or if there are different endings I could have gotten on mine. Maybe I’ll give it another shot next year. This game is by no means amazing. It is on some level just a softcore lesbian eroge with a Gundam coat of paint. But the delicacy with which it fits itself into the UC chronology without messing things up or being a fully irrelevant plot, the care put into having these ladies fall in love and do the usual OL yuri rituals, the honesty with which it carries itself… I’m so charmed by it all. I don’t know if I’d recommend it outright (you’d want to already be very invested in this slice of Gundam, and you need a VM with an older version of Windows to play it, and I think the website linking to the patch went down earlier this year), but I’m so happy that this exists in the first place and that I got to play it.

What I am less happy about is that this visual novel made me trick myself into watching Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. This is entirely on me, mind. Most lesbians are fooled into watching Stardust Memory because they saw images of Cima Garahau online, but I was ready for that trick. No, I genuinely wanted to fill in the finer plot details of the 6.5/10 visual novel I just played. Oopsies.

[cr4shdummy]

tech talk: ride height, road bikes, and entertainment

last week, we witnessed fabio quartararo relinquish a hard-fought race lead due to a unique type of mechanical error: the rear ride-height device of his Yamaha M1 was stuck in the low position. i was struck by the similarities of that incident to maverick viñales' DNF at sachsenring in 2022, the first real peek at the potential unreliability of rear ride-height devices.

the process is simple: the back end of the bike drops down when exiting a corner, improving acceleration and stability. lowering the bike's center of gravity reduces its chance to wheelie, meaning all that low-gear torque from the engine goes straight into the front wheel.

the ride-height device that MotoGP bikes use is, under the current rules, entirely mechanical. a sensor at the fork reads the front position as the bike corners, then starts a sort of rube goldberg machine-esque series of reactions to trigger the back to drop during corner exit.

the front ride-height devices that Ducati used briefly until they were banned in 2023 were a similar system, but were triggered by the rider instead of automatically. in this clip, you can see pecco disengage it coming out of the last corner at mugello.

when front ride-height devices were banned in 2023, it was with the support of 5 out of 6 manufacturers -- Ducati were the only ones opposing it. i'm conflicted; on one hand, ducati worked hard to develop and integrate the technology, and even if it gave them an advantage, that's just how improvement works in a machine-based sport. on the other hand, if one team can guarantee success by just pouring the most money into development, the sport becomes increasingly asymmetrical and frankly boring.

with all ride-height devices now set for elimination in 2027, i'm again split on the rationale for turning the clock back and regressing a lot of racing technology. in terms of making MotoGP more road-relevant and accurate to the average consumer, eradicating ride-height devices is supposedly an obvious solution. but consumer ride-height add-ons exist, and they're not mechanical, they're electronic! they're more reliable as well. in fact, when the ducati front ride-height device was banned, both romano albesiano of Aprilia (now Honda) and sebastian risse of KTM both raised that example.

albesiano said,

risse said,

it's the same argument that Dorna has used to justify the 2027 tech rollbacks, but in reverse: front ride-height tech wasn't road-relevant because it was behind what production motorcycles can do, not ahead.

this exposes a contradiction in Dorna's plan. if MotoGP should exist as a sport to help manufacturers test and develop technology specifically to improve production motorcycles, why eliminate tech that exists in better forms for the average consumer? why not simply mandate that ride-height devices be electronic, thus resolving the issue of unreliability and making the technology more accurate to something a normal person could buy?

Dorna has also been clear that the tech rollback is a response to negative reactions among fans and viewers, who feel that the sport has become uninteresting. i'm one of them. but i would point to World Superbike, which is significantly more road-relevant since the bikes used are (theoretically) actual road bikes: World Superbike is fucking boring. i'm sorry, it just is. and a lot of that is because the bikes are slower and more realistic, not in spite of it! now that BMW has lost its superconcessions for the current season, they're running a very stripped down machine that's on par with or worse than most others on the grid. and because of that, the only rider that can find any success on it is Toprak Razgatlioglu, who is leaving anyway.

i'm not saying Dorna should just allow teams to pour money into futuristic rocketship motorcycles that win a million championships. but if Dorna wants to make the sport more fun and more realistic, they need to make more specific, in-depth changes than just sweeping bans. an electronic ride-height system would be a great way to test that principle.

[mindblowingscience]

A new material that moves like skin while preserving signal strength in electronics could enable the development of next-generation wearable devices with continuous, consistent wireless and battery-free functionality, researchers report. The researchers developed the material by embedding clusters of highly dielectric ceramic nanoparticles into an elastic polymer. The material was reverse-engineered to not only mimic skin elasticity and motion types, but also to adjust its dielectric properties to counter the disruptive effects of motion on interfacing electronics, minimize energy loss, and dissipate heat.

Continue Reading.

[foone]

So the Las Vegas gambling board has a lot of power. Like, they can walk into any casino, point at a machine, and say "give me the memory card out of that one", and the casino has to do it.

I want to somehow get that authority for all electronics.

Like, if I see an interesting machine out in the world, I can go "gimme that, I want to take it apart" and they have to give it to me, while the Federal Office of Reverse Engineering writes them a cheque for the cost.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

An earth-abundant mineral for sustainable spintronics

In 2023, EPFL researchers succeeded in sending and storing data using charge-free magnetic waves called spin waves, rather than traditional electron flows. The team from the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics, led by Dirk Grundler, in the School of Engineering, used radiofrequency signals to excite spin waves enough to reverse the magnetization state of tiny nanomagnets. When switched from 0 to 1, for example, this allows the nanomagnets to store digital information, a process used in computer memory, and more broadly, in information and communication technologies. This work was a big step toward sustainable computing, because encoding data via spin waves (whose quasiparticles are called magnons) could eliminate the energy loss, or Joule heating, associated with electron-based devices. But at the time, the spin wave signals could not be used to reset the magnetic bits to overwrite existing data.

Read more.

[mariacallous]

At 12:30 pm local time on Monday, the power went out. Across Spain and Portugal, trains and traffic lights abruptly stopped working.

Reports emerged of people being stuck in lifts, and Google Maps live data showed traffic jams in big cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, as they became gridlocked. Major airports warned passengers of delays due to the blackout. Its cause is still unknown. The blackout is estimated to have affected the entirety of Portugal and Spain and small regions in France.

“Traffic lights aren’t working. The streets are chaotic because there is an officer at every crossing,” says Gustavo, who lives in Madrid. “Water doesn’t reach flats at the top of buildings because the pumps are electric, and the very few shops that are open are only taking cash.”

This is every electrical engineer’s nightmare scenario, says Paul Cuffe, assistant professor of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin. “The reason we don’t have widespread outages all the time is because system operators are very conservative and very proactive about using big safety margins to make sure this doesn’t happen,” he says. Engineers plan for failures in grids or surges in consumer demand that could destabilize the power supply. “These things are unusual, but to a power engineer the latent threat of it happening is always there.”

Spain’s electricity operator Red Eléctrica said in a post on X a few hours after the initial blackout that it had recovered power in some areas of Cataluña and Aragón in the northeast; País Vasco, Galicia, La Rioja, Asturias, Navarra, and Castilla y Léon in the north; Extremadura in the east; and Andalucía in the south.

Experts believe that getting the grid back up and running in both countries could take between a few hours to several days, depending on the area. While the grid is powering back up, emergency services will likely be prioritized over things like stable internet connection, they say.

There is a well-rehearsed sequence of steps that now happens, says Cuffe. They are going to be doing what is called a “black start"—a process that gradually reconnects power stations to form a functioning grid again. Electrical supply and demand has to be balanced to avoid further blackouts, meaning as power stations come online, only portions of the grid can come online with them, with the country gradually powering up, step by step. There should be a team within the grid operator that plans for this and that has identified which generators to bring online first, he explains.

Demand on the grid (yellow) fell drastically at around 12.30 local time. Typical usage is marked in green.Red Eléctrica de España

“You should be anticipating every failure that can happen, and you should survive any one of them,” Cuffe says. From the control room, engineers should be able to tell what parts of the grid are definitely functioning so they won’t be flying blind—but it will still take time.

“Even with a completely healthy grid, to do that black start could take 12 hours or 16 hours. You have to do it sequentially, and it takes a long time. I’m sure there are engineers in vans swarming all over the place as we speak trying to make all this happen,” Cuffe says. “It’s like assembling some hellishly complicated Ikea furniture.”

The biggest issue is that without an established, obvious cause for the blackout in the first place, it will be difficult for engineers to know where to reestablish power first without triggering another outage.

“The challenge is to constantly match supply and demand,” says Ketan Joshi, an independent climate and energy consultant. “You need to perform that balancing act, not just plugging everything back in there.” Joshi describes it as a blackout “in reverse.”

“When a tree falls on a power line, you end up chopping off a small chunk of the grid. It’s a pain. A hundred homes get blacked out, a crew comes and they reenergize and reconnect the section that was disconnected,” Joshi explains. This is the same thing, but at an enormous scale. “When you have a blackout like the one we are seeing in Spain and in Portugal, the challenge to map supply and demand becomes ridiculously complicated. Every time you connect up a new chunk of households, you have to perform that same balancing act. The generators that are producing electricity have to match the new demand that has suddenly come on to the grid.”

REN (Red Eletrica Nacional), the main power operator in Portugal, gave a statement to the BBC saying that the outage was caused by “extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain. There were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration.’” Spain has yet to respond to this allegation.

“I scratched my head at that,” says Cuffe. Both of the country’s grids may be run by national operators, he explains, but they are shackled together as a synchronized grid, which means if one side fails the other one does too—making it not entirely unexpected for one to blame the other.

When it comes to propping the grid back up, both operators are on their own. The Iberian peninsula is an “energy island,” says Jan Rosenow, vice president of global strategy at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO advancing policy innovation and thought leadership within the energy community. Spain and Portugal’s collective interconnection capacity with the rest of Europe—that is, how much of their energy they can draw from or send into the wider continent—is around 6 percent, far below the 2030 target of 15 percent set by the European Union.

“There’s a lot of speculation at the moment, but perhaps with better interconnection the problem would have been a lot less worse,” he says.

In a press conference, Spanish president Pedro Sánchez said that the cause of the power cut is still unknown and warns against speculation. He claimed that the regions that have recovered power have done so with the assistance of connections with France and Morocco, and confirmed that the hydroelectric plants in Spain are back online. He claims that hospitals are unaffected by the power outage, and that air traffic had been “voluntarily” reduced by 20 percent during this incident. He said that trains will be halted for security reasons.

Blackouts in Europe do not happen frequently—a blackout across the whole of Italy in 2003 is the closest example that experts cite as having a similar scale to the one affecting the Iberian peninsula. In that case, a tree brought down a line between Switzerland and Italy, causing other lines nearby to take over the power from the failed line and overload. This caused a blackout for 18 hours that plunged over 55 million people into darkness.

At the beginning of the current blackout, things seemed more or less normal, says Daniel Borrás, head of editorial content at WIRED’s sister publication GQ, who is based in Madrid. “People understood that it would be a couple of hours, or something like that. Now the feeling is a little different because a lot of communities in Spain are recovering step by step. For example, Cataluña, Galicia, and Pais Vasco are more or less working, but in Madrid it’s basically still a complete blackout. A lot of people are in the streets and in the bars and the terraces drinking something and it’s a very quiet mood.”

The main issue where he is, says Borrás, is with people trying to come back into Madrid and finding themselves in terrible traffic because trains aren’t running.

“No one has lost their sense of humor, and people are going out to enjoy some digital disconnection,” says Gustavo. He says he’s on his balcony enjoying a good book and contemplating going out to buy candles. “I’ll need a couple of hours to decide whether I should get lavender vanilla spa or geranium.”