A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
So much in there: so much hand-soldering of SMD, the way he made an SMD resistor bridge to bodge his MOSI/MISO mixup, using the Bambu 3D printer as a test harness (with pogo-pin attachment) to test his "blades"…
(I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)
This is great. It somewhat reminded me of Steve Ciarcia's build of a Mandelbrot-generating supercomputer from around 1990. That was also made from microcontrollers (Intel 8052 in that case).
Do you have a link? As far as I can tell you're referring to a BYTE magazine article, but I can only find vague references to it, not anything specific enough that would allow me to locate it.
0 FLOPS those MCUs only support IMBC instructions. No hardware floating point, at least it has integer multiplication/division. My estimate is maybe 1-8Gflop total using software float. If you avoid float and design around fixed point, might do some interesting stuff.
IIRC, the Connection Machine CM-1 also was not designed for floating point ops, but Richard Feynman convinced Danny Hillis that it could compete with supercomputers in the scientific market.
One could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
Not really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
I think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in space.
Every computer is just space heater with side effect of computations.
The same way every diesel engine is just oil stove with side effect of rotary motion. If the engine was in the back of the car you could totally put a pot on it and braise something.
A diesel engine is a very inefficient stove though, as only half (more or less, depending on the exact engine) of the energy is converted to heat, the leftover being mechanical energy.
The Volkswagen 1.6D is probably the most reliable engine ever made. Only two failure modes - overheat or shitty fuel for the span of decades to break the fuel pump.
I’m curious about what you’re thinking of, but for both electric heaters and computers, essentially 100% of the input energy is converted to heat one way or another.
What you may be thinking of is efficiency when the output is intended to be something other than heat. In those cases, efficiency is lost because a significant proportion of the input energy is converted to heat.
But if heat output is what you’re interested in, I’m happy to report that 100% is a perfectly achievable, in fact hard to avoid, number!
Computers need more blinking lights.
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