Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Framework 13's Disappointing Battery Life: A Tale of Two Laptops

2025-09-22

The author compares the battery life of their MacBook M1 Pro and Framework 13 laptops. The M1 Pro retained 90% charge after three weeks of inactivity, while the Framework 13 (with an AMD Ryzen 7840HS) frequently dies after a few days. This stark contrast highlights the superior battery efficiency of ARM64 architecture, leading the author to consider an ARM motherboard upgrade for their Framework. Despite this issue, the author still loves the Framework's modular design, but the poor battery life significantly impacts usability.

(simonhartcher.com)

Hardware battery life

8 Years of Sleep-Induced Reboots: Decoding a Dell Inspiron Firmware Bug

2025-09-22

For eight years, the author's Dell Inspiron 5567 randomly rebooted when put to sleep, across multiple operating systems. A deep dive into the firmware's source code revealed the culprit: the Southbridge's SPTS method. This method prematurely sent the sleep command before properly setting the sleep state, causing the reboots. The solution involved reordering code within SPTS to ensure the sleep state was correctly set before triggering the sleep. The article details the debugging process and explores the intricacies of ACPI sleep states.

(triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog)

Hardware

World's Second Worst Graphics Card: A TTL Gate Masterpiece?

2025-09-22

Inspired by Ben Eater's 'world's worst video card', Leoneq built something even... worse? This text-mode graphics card, boasting a VGA resolution of 800x600@60Hz (accessible 400x300), uses only TTL gates and a surprisingly low 21 IC count. Featuring support for Latin, Polish, and even the Standard Galactic Alphabet, the card leverages EPROMs and SRAM for character storage. While plagued by glitches, noise sensitivity, and a generally unimpressive image, this project is a testament to resourcefulness and a humorous take on hardware limitations. It's a testament to the power of ingenuity even when facing a 'terrible idea'.

(github.com)

Hardware

ams OSRAM Launches Compact Direct Time-of-Flight Sensor Modules

2025-09-21

ams OSRAM has introduced new compact, low-power direct time-of-flight (ToF) sensor modules. These modules integrate a 940nm VCSEL laser, a SPAD pixel array, Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs), and all necessary signal processing for direct distance readout via I2C. Available in single and multi-zone (up to 8x8) configurations, they come in packages as small as 2.2x3.6x1.0mm, with operating ranges and fields of view up to 5m and 63 degrees respectively. Applications include autofocus for cameras and projectors, obstacle detection for robotics and drones, low-power wake-up for camera systems, touchless controls, and hand gesture sensing.

(ams-osram.com)

Hardware ToF sensor 3D sensing

iPhone Air: Surprisingly Repairable, Despite its Thin Profile

2025-09-21

Apple's new iPhone Air boasts a remarkably thin design (5.64mm), but what's even more surprising is its impressive repairability. Through clever engineering, Apple placed the logic board above the battery, simplifying repairs while maintaining a slim profile. Battery replacement is easy, utilizing electrically debonding adhesive strips, eliminating the need for dangerous prying. While the battery is smaller, efficient power management delivers decent battery life. The modular USB-C port also facilitates repairs, although Apple doesn't currently offer replacement parts. Overall, the iPhone Air strikes a balance between thinness and repairability, earning a provisional 7 out of 10 repairability score.

(www.ifixit.com)

Hardware repairability thin design

Budget-Friendly 0.96-inch USB Display Dongle: WeAct Display FS Review

2025-09-20

The WeAct Display FS is a cheap 0.96-inch USB display dongle designed to add an information display or a tiny secondary display to your computer or SBC. It features a full-color 160x80 resolution display and is customizable with WeAct Studio software, supporting text, images, weather, and more. While officially only supporting Windows, its open-source-based software theoretically works on macOS, Linux, and other systems with Python 3.9+. A Windows-only screen projection program is also included, allowing window projection to the small display, though practicality is limited by the resolution. Available on AliExpress for around $2, a larger 3.5-inch version is also offered.

(www.cnx-software.com)

Hardware USB display small display

Teardown Reveals Apple's 40W Dynamic Power Adapter: 60W Power in a Compact Package

2025-09-20

Apple's new 40W Dynamic Power Adapter, unveiled at their Fall Event, packs a punch. A ChargerLAB teardown reveals its impressive internals: a PI ZN1612F master control chip, RECTRON synchronous rectifier, Infineon protocol chip for output control, and NCC and Nichicon capacitors for filtering. Supporting PD3.0 and DCP charging protocols, it delivers fast charging for iPhone 17 and up to 55.94W for MacBook Air. The internal design prioritizes heat dissipation and protection, showcasing Apple's characteristic meticulous craftsmanship.

(www.chargerlab.com)

Hardware Teardown

90s TV Time Machine: A Raspberry Pi That Plays Random 90s Shows

2025-09-20

Missing the spontaneity of 90s TV? This project recreates that experience using a Raspberry Pi. The author loaded classic 90s shows (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek: The Next Generation, etc.) onto a Raspberry Pi and wrote a script to play them randomly on boot. The guide details the process: installing Raspberry Pi OS Lite, VLC, creating a script to shuffle and play videos, and setting up a systemd service for auto-start. It's a nostalgic tech project showcasing the Raspberry Pi's versatility.

(quarters.captaintouch.com)

Hardware 90s TV

Apple's iPhone 17 Pro: Vapor Chamber Cooling Takes Center Stage

2025-09-20

Apple's new iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max models feature innovative vapor chamber cooling technology. This system uses a sealed chamber with a small amount of water that cycles between liquid and gas to efficiently dissipate heat generated by the phone's powerful components. Similar technology has been used in laptops for years, but its adoption in high-performance smartphones marks a significant step forward. While manufacturing challenges exist, vapor chamber cooling promises superior heat management and is likely to become a standard feature in top-tier phones.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Hardware Vapor Chamber Cooling Smartphone Technology

Resurrecting a Vintage TV with a Raspberry Pi: A 50th Birthday Gift

2025-09-19

In 2017, the author built a unique 50th birthday gift for his father: a vintage TV modified to play shows from the 70s and 80s. He cleverly integrated a Raspberry Pi with an RF modulator to solve video output and channel switching. Software-based channels controlled by a rotary switch were implemented. A power supply solution with voltage regulators was also integrated inside the TV. While the software code is less than perfect, the final result is an 8-hour continuous video playback (including commercials) with keyframe timestamp saving for resuming playback. This creative project showcases the author's technical skills and love for his father.

(blog.davidv.dev)

Hardware Vintage TV Hardware Hack

From Concept to 100 Units in 55 Days: A YC Demo Day Blitz

2025-09-19

A startup built Blue, a voice assistant controlled by a tiny USB-C device called Bud, enabling hands-free control of any phone app. They achieved this feat in just 55 days, culminating in 100 working units for YC Demo Day. Focusing on reliability over features, and leveraging a streamlined design and manufacturing process with a Taiwan partner, they bypassed the need for app-specific APIs, relying instead on iOS's Accessibility features. Their rapid development and successful Demo Day resulted in immediate sales, proving the market demand for their innovative product.

(farhanhossain.substack.com)

Hardware

A Raspberry Pi Cluster: Two Years in the Making (and Why It Might Not Be Worth It)

2025-09-19

After a two-year wait, the author finally assembled a 10-node Raspberry Pi cluster boasting 160GB of RAM. Following multiple rebuilds and extensive benchmarking, the cluster achieved 325 Gflops on the HPL benchmark, exhibiting slightly better energy efficiency than an $8000 Framework Desktop cluster. However, AI inference performance lagged significantly behind the Framework cluster due to llama.cpp's inability to leverage the Pi 5's iGPU. The conclusion? This cluster excels in high-density, low-power scenarios, but isn't cost-effective for most users.

(www.jeffgeerling.com)

Hardware Raspberry Pi Cluster

Intel Arc B770 Limps On, Celestial GPUs Reportedly Cancelled

2025-09-19

Moore's Law Is Dead reports that Intel's Arc B770 high-end GPU is still in development but will reportedly skip PCIe 5.0 support and may suffer from performance inconsistencies. More concerning, the Arc Celestial series of desktop GPUs appears canceled, casting doubt on the future of Intel's desktop GPU efforts. The B770 might be Intel's last desktop GPU.

(www.notebookcheck.net)

Hardware Arc Graphics

Home Experiments with a Budget Air Quality Monitor

2025-09-19

The author bought a £120 Temtop m2000 air quality monitor to conduct home physics experiments. He first tested the CO2 and particulate matter levels in his house, then performed a small experiment: frying an egg to observe its impact on air quality. Results showed minimal and short-lived impact on PM2.5 from frying an egg, posing no significant concern. However, turning on the extractor fan didn't significantly improve air quality, leaving him puzzled.

(chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com)

Hardware home experiments

Apple's Budget MacBook: A18/A19 Pro Chip, $600 Price Tag?

2025-09-19

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts Apple will mass-produce a budget MacBook with an iPhone A18 or A19 Pro chip in Q4 2025, launching in late 2025 or early 2026. This 12.9-inch or 13-inch laptop, rumored to cost between $599 and $699, will feature bright colors but compromise on Thunderbolt support, offering only a single external display and 10Gbps USB-C. While offering performance comparable to the M1 chip, it will be the first Mac with an iPhone A-series chip, targeting a price point below the MacBook Air.

(www.macrumors.com)

Hardware

Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator Pilot Ad Program

2025-09-19

Samsung is piloting an advertising program on its Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S. A software update will deliver curated ads to the idle screen, which users can dismiss. Ads won't appear in Art Mode or photo albums. The initiative aims to enhance customer value, but privacy concerns are likely to follow.

(www.theverge.com)

Hardware Refrigerator Ads

Flipper Zero Gets a Geiger Counter App!

2025-09-18

The Flipper Zero, a versatile handheld device, now boasts a Geiger counter app! Using third-party firmware like unleashed or Momentum, the Flipper Zero can measure radioactivity, displaying data in CPS and CPM. The app includes features like recording, zooming, and unit conversion. Additionally, it features an atomic dice roller using the Geiger counter's randomness for games or decision-making. Note: This app is for educational purposes only and should be used responsibly.

(kasiin.top)

Hardware Geiger Counter Radioactivity Measurement

Andes' Cuzco Core: A RISC-V Challenger in the Datacenter

2025-09-18

Taiwanese chipmaker Andes and its US subsidiary Condor Computing unveiled Cuzco, a groundbreaking RISC-V core aiming to disrupt x86 and Arm's dominance in datacenters. Cuzco employs a novel time-based scheduling architecture, eliminating power-hungry CAMs while maintaining high performance. Its unique execution unit design and multi-level cache architecture support up to eight cores and is compatible with the latest RVA-23 specification. With a track record of over 17 billion RISC-V chips shipped and significant inroads in the AI sector, Andes positions Cuzco to become a leading high-performance RISC-V CPU IP.

(www.nextplatform.com)

Hardware

Sony Quietly Releases Downgraded PS5 Digital Edition with 825GB SSD

2025-09-18

Sony has quietly released a revised PlayStation 5 Digital Edition (CFI-2116) with a reduced 825GB SSD, down from the previous 1TB. While the price remains the same, this move is speculated to be a cost-cutting measure in response to economic challenges. The change has sparked debate among gamers, with some arguing the 200GB reduction is insignificant, while others worry about the 1TB version's availability. The revised console is currently available on select European Amazon sites, with its future availability in other regions uncertain.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Hardware Hardware Revision

Orange Pi RV2: A $40 RISC-V SBC That Redefines Affordability

2025-09-18

The Orange Pi RV2 is a $40 single-board computer (SBC) featuring an 8-core RISC-V processor, offering a budget-friendly entry point into the world of RISC-V computing. Packed with connectivity options, it excels in IoT and lightweight AI applications. However, it's not a desktop replacement, showing limitations in software support and desktop performance. Despite this, the RV2 strikes a compelling balance between affordability and innovation, making it a viable option for cost-effective specialized projects.

(riscv.org)

Hardware

Long-Term Review: Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSDs

2025-09-17

This review shares the long-term experience of using four Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSDs in a home server and backup setup. Manufactured in 2021, these drives have shown excellent performance, maintaining write speeds of 140-170 MB/s even under heavy load. One drive reported 4 bad blocks, but overall, they've written over 170TB of data, far from their 1440TBW endurance limit. While prices have dropped, they remain slightly more expensive than competing drives, but offer consistently reliable performance.

(ounapuu.ee)

Hardware Samsung 870 QVO SSD Review

Noctua Quietly Optimizes the Framework Mini PC

2025-09-17

Noctua collaborated with Framework to improve the cooling and noise profile of the Framework mini-PC. Custom side panel and duct designs significantly reduced noise levels, especially at lower fan speeds (around 7dB(A) reduction). While not currently mass-produced, Noctua provides 3D printable files. Further testing with different fans and exhaust configurations revealed the custom side panel and duct as the optimal solution for noise reduction.

(noctua.at)

Hardware noise reduction

ASUS ROG Laptop Firmware Bug: A 13ms CPU Core Hold-up

2025-09-17

Many ASUS ROG gaming laptop owners experience system stuttering, audio crackling, and other performance issues. Conventional fixes fail because the root cause lies in a deep-seated ACPI bug within the BIOS firmware. A technical investigation reveals a firmware interrupt handler sleeping for 100 milliseconds, effectively blocking a CPU core. This periodically triggers attempts to power cycle the dedicated GPU, even in direct-connect mode, potentially leading to blue screen crashes. The bug stems from flawed firmware design, neglecting proper interrupt context handling and lacking platform awareness. Millions of ASUS gaming laptops are affected, with the manufacturer yet to respond.

(github.com)

Hardware Firmware Bug

Building a 1U Rackmount Trigger Crossbar: A Tale of Woes and Triumphs

2025-09-15

The author details the design and construction of a custom 1U rackmount trigger crossbar for synchronizing multiple instruments in their electronics lab. Built around an FPGA and MCU, the device boasts numerous trigger I/O ports and an Ethernet SCPI interface. The journey, however, was fraught with challenges: power supply issues, soldering mishaps, an FPGA flash pinout error, and even the need for mini-mill surgery on the PCB. Despite these hurdles, the device is now operational, controllable via SSH and SCPI, and serves as a valuable lesson in hardware development.

(serd.es)

Hardware

LinHT: Amateur Radio's Software Defined Transceiver Revolution

2025-09-14

LinHT, an open-source hardware software-defined transceiver, successfully booted for the first time! Praised by industry veteran Bruce Perens as the most important hardware project in amateur radio today, LinHT achieved a 5dBm output power in the 420-450MHz UHF band despite initial skepticism. The project owes its success to Vlastimil OK5VAS and Andreas OE3ANC, and the PCB design is publicly available. Prototype production cost approximately $190 per unit (based on a 5-unit run). LinHT signals a revolution in amateur radio, driven by software-defined transceivers.

(m17project.org)

Hardware Software Defined Transceiver

AMD RDNA4: Efficiency Reigns Supreme in New GPU Architecture

2025-09-14

AMD's latest RDNA4 architecture prioritizes efficiency over raw performance. The RX 9000 series GPUs featuring RDNA4 boast significant efficiency improvements in ray tracing and machine learning, while also enhancing rasterization. Improvements include enhanced compression, a faster media engine (supporting H.264, H.265, and AV1 codecs with reduced latency), and an upgraded display engine (integrating Radeon Image Sharpening). RDNA4 excels in power consumption, particularly multi-monitor idle power. Further performance and efficiency gains come from an improved workgroup processor, larger L2 cache, and optimized Infinity Fabric architecture. In short, RDNA4 marks a significant leap in AMD's GPU design, prioritizing efficiency to deliver a more balanced and power-efficient experience for gamers and professionals alike.

(chipsandcheese.com)

Hardware

Building a CPU with Only a MOVE Instruction: A Transport Triggered Architecture (TTA) Experiment

2025-09-13

This article details the author's experience building a 16-bit CPU using only a MOVE instruction based on the Transport Triggered Architecture (TTA). Unlike traditional CPUs, TTA lacks an ALU and registers; all computations are performed in memory. Using the Digital simulator and simple logic gates and counters, the author implemented instruction fetching, data reading, and writing, successfully running a Fibonacci sequence calculation program. While TTA is not mainstream, this article showcases its simplicity and the author's deep understanding and practical skills in CPU architecture.

(justanotherelectronicsblog.com)

Hardware TTA architecture digital logic

Raspberry Pi: The Unexpected Heart of Modern Synthesizers?

2025-09-13

From Korg to Erica Synths, a growing number of synthesizer manufacturers are incorporating the Raspberry Pi as a core component in their digital audio workstations. This isn't 'cheating,' but rather a clever leveraging of the Pi's low cost, programmability, and power to reduce manufacturing costs and accelerate development. The article explores the Pi's role in synthesizers, highlighting examples like the Korg Wavestate and the open-source Zynthian platform, discussing its advantages in cost and development efficiency.

(www.gearnews.com)

Hardware Digital Audio Workstation

Reliving a Childhood Dream: Restoring an IBM PS/1 2168

2025-09-12

In 1993, a 14-year-old's passion for computers led him to dream of owning an IBM PS/1 2168. Years later, he embarks on a journey to acquire and restore a well-preserved used model. The article chronicles the restoration process, detailing the selection of parts, system installation, troubleshooting, and upgrades. It highlights the machine's unique design and excellent performance, including its iconic Model M keyboard and remarkable expandability. This isn't just a computer restoration; it's a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

(fabiensanglard.net)

Hardware

Hot Chips 2025: A Roundup of the CPU Session

2025-09-11

The CPU session at Hot Chips 2025 featured exciting presentations from several industry giants. Condor Computing showcased their new Cuzco core, PEZY revealed details about their upcoming SC4s chip, IBM discussed their already-shipping Power11 chip, and Intel teased their next-gen E-Core based Xeon CPU, codenamed Clearwater Forest. Links to in-depth articles on each are provided for further reading.

(chipsandcheese.com)

Hardware

Category: Hardware