Welcome to our maker news where we wrap up some fun and interesting stories in the maker world from the last few weeks. The video will come out on Fridays, but we are posting a topic here on Wednesdays to post the video’s sources and to collect any news from the community to potentially include in next week’s as well as just open up general discussion.
This week we looked at:
If it exists, it can run doom - the much-applied phrase has been taken to yet another level with someone porting it to an Apple Lightning to HDMI adapter. As it turns out, the adapter has a little 400 Mhz Samsung ARM chip and 256 MB of RAM that is used for video encoding. Combine this with the USB-C port on the dongle, and you have yourself a little doom machine. There have been a lot of really whacky ways to run doom, but I think this is so far the winner of “running doom on something that should have no right to run doom”.
Over the last year or so sodium batteries, or salt batteries have become quite available for your maker projects, especially as an 18650. If you have been a little out of the loop, you can readily purchase them online, and while the technology needs a bit more development (and are far from a mature technology), they are quite promising. They do have a lower energy density than their lithium-ion counterparts, have less of power output due to their higher internal resistance, and also have a lack of readily available battery management and charging modules (gotta get into that DIY nitty gritty to use them), however, they have a greater amount of charge cycles in their life, use more abundant materials and readily available materials (hopefully cheaper than LiPos in the future), and are far safer. If you drive a nail into one, it may smoke and maybe explode, but it won’t try and burn your house down as much. Great Scott has a fantastic video going over all of this.
And a user by vk6 has gotten Linux to run entirely inside of a PDF. PDF supports limited Javascript functionalities, which was used to compile a RISC-V emulator, which runs Linux, all inside a single PDF document. And it’s available online if you want to try it out yourself (you’ll need to use a Chromium browser).
Also happy birthday to C++, it’s been 45 years since the idea was first conceived!
If you have any news from the maker world, feel free to post it below and we may include it in next week’s video, until then we will see you next week!
