The post Fab Academy Students Challenged to Make Something BIG appeared first on Make:.
Thursday, April 30
Fab Academy Students Challenged to Make Something BIG
This R/C Plane Built from a Weed Whacker Actually Flies
The post This R/C Plane Built from a Weed Whacker Actually Flies appeared first on Make:.
Brace Yourself: Tag Heuer's $1400 Android Wear Watch Is On Its Way
Tag Heuer has the perfect option for crazy rich people without iPhones.
ABI Research gives us our first look at the Apple Watch’s S1 board
When iFixit tore down the Apple Watch last week, one of the things it couldn't dig into was the S1 "System in Package" (SiP) that powers the device. The S1's components were covered in a "solid block of plasticky resin" rather than a standard heat spreader, so we couldn't see the individual chips and controllers on the board like we usually can in iFixit teardowns.
Today ABI Research took things one step further, removing that block of resin and exposing what's underneath. Most of the components aren't surprising. There's a Broadcom BCM43342 chip for dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, 512MB of RAM from Elpida, and 8GB of flash memory from Sandisk and Toshiba. An NFC controller from NXP and a signal booster from AMS enable Apple Pay on the watch, and interestingly these appear to be identical to the NFC components inside the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Other chips include a combination accelerometer and gyroscope from STM and a touchscreen controller from ADI.
The most interesting component under the hood is the custom Apple CPU and GPU at the center of it all, here identified only as APL 0778. We still don't know what CPU architecture powers this chip, what its manufacturing process is, or how fast it is relative to the A-series SoCs that power iPhones and iPads—we'll need to wait on more detailed analysis from the likes of Chipworks for more insight. That said, developer Steve Troughton-Smith has already dug into the watch's software and discovered a driver for the PowerVR SGX543 GPU, the same basic architecture found in the Apple A5. That GPU is included in the iPad 2, iPhone 4S, iPad Mini, fifth-gen iPod Touch, and (in a special version with one CPU core) the third-generation Apple TV.
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Should You Back A Kickstarter If The Team’s Last Project Failed?
The post Should You Back A Kickstarter If The Team’s Last Project Failed? appeared first on Make:.
I Used 3D Hubs to Print a Phone Dock. Here’s What Happened.
The post I Used 3D Hubs to Print a Phone Dock. Here’s What Happened. appeared first on Make:.
The inadvertent hilarity of the Heartland Institute vs. Pope Francis
A little while back, word filtered out that Pope Francis was going to devote an encyclical to climate change. It's not much of a surprise; his tenure has featured a strong emphasis on caring for the poor, and the poor are in no position to air-condition, flood-proof, and bioengineer their way out of the worst impacts of climate change.
As part of the preparation for the encyclical, there's a meeting going on at the Vatican Science Academy that's focused on climate change. Guests include everyone from Ban Ki-moon to Nobel Prize winning scientists. Not on the guest list was the Heartland Institute, most notable for putting up a billboard suggesting that people who cared about climate change might be just as deranged as Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
When in Rome...
But Heartland decided to go to Rome anyway. I know this because someone has signed me up to its press mailing list, which offers up quotes from expertise-free "experts" that make you wonder whether some of them might need an intervention—or simply a trip back to Earth from whatever planet they seem to be inhabiting.
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