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  1. Tech Explained: WiFi Aware
    Sep 27, 2026 · original
    This is one piece of tech that has been around for about 10 years with so much unused potential. Glad to see that changing, with the Apple ecosystem finally putting its weight behind it. Let’s discuss that today. WiFi Aware allows nearby devices to discover each other, pair securely and create a direct WiFi link without joining an access point. There is no router, DHCP server or internet connection in the middle. Your phone can also stay on its normal WiFi while talking to the device. Things get interesting on the device setup side. Today, many connected products use Bluetooth only to find the device and pass WiFi credentials. Others create a temporary SoftAP, forcing your phone to switch networks just to configure the product. With WiFi Aware, the app can discover the device, establish a secure connection and communicate over normal IP networking directly. That same link can be used for
  2. Advanced Tech : Ultra-fast battery charging
    Sep 20, 2026 · original
    Fast charging has always carried a battery-life penalty. So BYD’s endurance test caught my attention. Its FLASH system is rated up to 1.5 MW, with 10-70% charging in 5mins. BYD recently ran a production Yangwang U7 electric sedan for 30,000km in less than 9 days. It went through more than 350 high-power charging sessions in 9 days, and BYD reported 98.7% battery capacity remaining. One major fast-charging problem is lithium plating. During charging, lithium ions move through the electrolyte and insert into the graphite anode. Push them in faster than the anode can accept them and some lithium can instead deposit as metallic lithium on its surface. Over time, that consumes usable lithium and reduces capacity. BYD appears to be attacking that transport bottleneck directly. In Blade Battery 2.0, it says graphite particles in the anode are aligned more perpendicular to the electrode plane. T
  3. Tech Explained : USB Killers
    Sep 13, 2026 · original
    Today let’s revisit an older piece of hardware security tech. I just wanted to illustrate that this tech is out there for informative purposes. A naive looking USB drive can fry your personal device. The USB Killer appeared publicly around 2015. Early versions looked like ordinary USB Type-A drives, but instead of exchanging data, they used power from the port to create destructive electrical pulses. The idea later became a commercial stress-testing product, and the current generation is USBKill V4. Fundamentally, the hardware has four blocks. It takes a low-voltage energy source, feeds a voltage-conversion stage, stores energy in capacitors, then switches that stored energy back into USB signal circuitry. Early designs charged the capacitors to around -110V, while later versions reached roughly -220V. The interesting part is why normal USB current limiting on your host is not necessaril
  4. Tech Explained: AI in Electronic Design
    Sep 6, 2026 · original
    GPT-6(Astra) launched this week. It’s an insane step-up model. But one small part of the launch caught my attention more than the benchmarks. OpenAI showed Astra operating KiCad, taking a schematic, placing components and routing the PCB as well as a great intern would. We are on the cusp of massive takeoff. I wrote about AI in electrical engineering almost two years ago, and my view has only become stronger. Over the next couple of years, I think conventional embedded product design will become heavily AI-assisted and to a great extent automated. Give the system a product specification and it should be able to work backwards from it. What processor fits? Which sensors, regulators and interfaces make sense? What is in stock? Which alternatives reduce cost or supply-chain risk? It can read datasheets, compare trade-offs, build the architecture, create the schematic and eventually move int
  5. Tech Explained: Digital Vaccines
    Aug 30, 2026 · original
    Earlier this week, during a few discussions, I came across the concept of digital vaccines. I had never looked into it before, and the name sounded strange enough that I wanted to understand what was actually happening. It’s interesting enough to be worthy of a discussion today. The project comes from CMU and FriendsLearn. Despite the name, this is not a biological vaccine. It is closer to a gamified digital therapeutic that tries to train healthier behaviour in children through repeated choices, rewards and implicit learning. In one randomized trial, 104 children aged 10-11, played a game called Fooya. After two 20-minute sessions, they chose an average of 2.48 healthy food items versus 1.10 in the control group. A later 240-child school trial in Tamil Nadu tested nutrition, physical activity and hygiene. Early analysis found a 0.58-point improvement in infectious-disease prevention kno
  6. Tech Explained: Memory LCD
    Aug 23, 2026 · original
    Memory LCDs have been around for a while. It came into my radar only recently. I thought it deserved an dedicated explainer. It sits right in the middle of a TFT LCD and e-paper. Let’s discuss that today. A Memory-in-Pixel LCD is still an LCD, but each pixel contains a small memory circuit. In Sharp’s panels, its 1 bit/pixel. Once written, unchanged pixels do not need the same image streamed continuously. The panel is reflective too, so daylight replaces the backlight used by most TFTs. Its really power efficient. Sharp’s 1.28-inch, 128 × 128 LS013B7DH03 specifies about 1µW typical while holding an unchanged image and 50µW when updating the full screen once per second. A similar 1.3-inch TFT module can use around 90mW just for its backlight. E-paper can approach zero between updates, but a typical 1.54-inch B/W panel uses about 26.4mW while refreshing and takes around 2s for a full refre
  7. Advanced Tech: AI Text Watermarking
    Aug 16, 2026 · original
    In an older post we looked at how SynthID hides a watermark inside AI-generated images. Today, let us look at text watermarking and how it works. This week Anthropic says Claude models will use a version of Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text for all text it generates. So an LLM writes one token at a time. At each step it usually has several reasonable choices. For eg. “The regulator stayed stable even when the load suddenly _ ” Here changed, increased or jumped can all fit the line. SynthID-Text uses this freedom to leave a statistical signature. A secret key, together with the recent text, generates hidden scores for possible next tokens. The sampler chooses from sensible options, and over many steps those choices become correlated with the secret pattern. These scores change with context, so there is no fixed list of “watermark words”. The same token can support the watermark in one senten
  8. Advanced Tech: Donut Lab Battery: Revisited
    Aug 9, 2026 · original
    A few months ago around CES, I wrote about Donut Lab’s “all-solid-state” battery. I was skeptical then, but wondered whether some surface-storage or capacitor-like mechanism could explain its claims. A lot has happened since then. So I owe it to whoever reads my posts an update on that. Donut commissioned Finland’s VTT institute to test its cells. The results show there is a real rechargeable battery here. It held charge for 10 days, so the super capacitor theory looks unlikely. VTT also measured 0–80% charging in about 4.5 minutes at 11C, although a full charge took roughly 7–8 minutes. Then Ryan@Ziroth did a detailed investigation with more than 20 battery experts. Their strongest clue is in Donut’s own VTT data. The voltage curve looks similar to high-nickel lithium-ion, while the measured cell expansion has a distinctive shape associated with lithium entering a graphite anode(Check P
  9. Advanced Tech: Space Data Centers
    Aug 2, 2026 · original
    There is a lot of buzz in this literal “space” about moving data centers into orbit. Space sounds cold, so it may seem like a cooling engineer’s dream. But I think this is one of the most misleading parts of the pitch. A processor converts almost all its electrical power into heat. A 1 MW AI cluster therefore produces roughly 1 MW of waste heat. On Earth, air or water carries it to chillers, cooling towers or dry coolers. In vacuum, no surrounding fluid carries heat away. You must conduct it from the chips into cold plates and liquid loops, then spread it across radiators that emit infrared energy into space. Radiated power follows the Stefan-Boltzmann law. It rises with radiator area and the fourth power of temp. It’s estimated that a 40 kW AI rack would need about 80 m² of radiator near 60 °C, facing deep space. At 100 MW, that becomes roughly 0.2 km². At 1 GW, it approaches 2 km², bef
  10. Tech Explained: What Survives an Internet Shutdown?
    Jul 26, 2026 · original
    The protest in Jantar Mantar, Delhi, ended after Education Minister resigned. But internet shutdowns during the protest, followed by a Govt direction asking GitHub to remove opensource BitChat, concern me as a technologist. Privacy is a fundamental right in India, and personal communication cannot be held hostage to the whims of Govts. Alternate decentralized routes exist, I want to talk about that today. When mobile data is blocked, your phone still has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. BitChat uses Bluetooth Low Energy to discover nearby phones. Each phone relays packets, so a message can cross several people without towers or a central server. It works best in a dense crowd. Encrypted messages can be stored temporarily on nearby phones and delivered when one later encounters the recipient. A local Wi-Fi network is another option for a confined site. A RPi Zero 2W can act as both an access point an

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