A tired parent built a custom bedside alarm for their middle-school daughter after finding commercial options either obnoxious buzzer bricks or privacy‑invasive smart displays. The design goals were a gentle sunrise wake with ramping chimes, no night-time screen distractions, school‑district‑aware alarms that disable for holidays, at-a-glance morning info (weather, agenda, bus countdown), and Spotify playback without an active microphone. Hardware choices are simple and tactile: an Adafruit QT Py ESP32‑S3 microcontroller, a retro 16x2 character LCD, a single rotary knob for navigation and confirmation, dusk‑to‑dawn auto‑dimming via sunrise/sunset lookups, and an onboard speaker for alarms.
The clock functions as a Spotify Connect remote while an older Echo sits physically muted so music plays without voice surveillance; track and artist information scroll on the LCD and the dial controls skip and volume. A local web dashboard on the home network integrates the school calendar to suppress alarms on non‑school days, offers sunrise‑simulation scheduling, and exposes timers - including a 16‑segment visual countdown for homework and automatic music shutoff at bedtime. The build transformed chaotic mornings into autonomous routines, and the builder plans to publish a full BOM and DIY guide or pursue broader distribution if there’s enough interest.
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The Intel 8087's tangent algorithm combines the CORDIC method with polynomial approximations for high accuracy and speed. Reverse-engineering the chip's circuitry revealed how it efficiently performs floating-point calculations using specialized functional blocks. (righto.com)
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A guitar amplifier and effects pedal have been developed using the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.06 microcontroller. The project is hosted on GitHub, showcasing open-source hardware design and implementation. (github.com)
NEC will build a subsea cable called Petal for Meta, capable of transmitting 125,000 gigabytes of data per second across the Atlantic. The cable, which will be operational in 2029, has twice the capacity of existing cables, marking a significant advancement in transatlantic data transmission. (japantimes.co.jp)
The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors developed in the 1980s designed for parallel computing. It features a unique architecture with links for high-speed communication between processors. (en.wikipedia.org)
KICKI is a preserved DECsystem1060 with dual PDP-10 models, aiming to restore its operation. Recent efforts included upgrading memory and power systems, with progress shown in videos from the Interim Computer Museum. (icm.museum)
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