It's not really hard at all, calculate the max power the leds will draw and get a psu that'll never exceed 90% of that. Your average usage will be waaay lower anyways since you don't usually show all white.

5v power supplies are easily available, Meanwell is a popular & reputable brand. The same psu can run your lights and microcontroller.

Newer said it was a hard problem in general, it's hard for me with my limited familiarity with electronics, that's why I was curious how it was done here.

I recall the last time I wanted to do this, my problem with it was that my microcontroller had a different voltage requirement than the LEDs and I tried to put together a little circuit that delivered the right voltage to the microcontroller and LED matrix from a single 5V power supply. I think it worked kind of ok and then not anymore and I had trouble figuring out where I went wrong, most likely did some bad soldering somewhere.

Fully lit, these would be blindingly bright, and would need tens of amps of power supply (source: I have a strip of 100 WS2813s (I think, anyway the 12V ones) and the 3A supply I have would be fully loaded if they were all on full bright white. These suckers are bright).

However, you can always just limit it in software. Total "brightness budget" for the display, scale everything to dimmer if exceeded.

I'm also struggling with a macbook for work, but hold your mouse over the green circle in the top left for a few seconds and it'll pop up. (You don't get the nice snapping that windows does though)

Holding option while hovering gives you more placement / sizing options too. If you click and drag a top bar to the right or left it'll snap to the right or left half of the screen. Dragging it to the top or double clicking will snap it to full size. Dragging to corners will snap to quarter.

I don’t see options for thirds, though. Even on an UltraWide monitor.

Workstations/servers have forced air cooling that drives a significant amount of airflow over the ram sticks. Gaming PCs don't. I don't think you can make the assumption that heat spreaders / sinks on ram don't help in them.

I thought the gaming PC airflow was front fans => cpu cooler => back (and top) exhaust fan(s) which puts the RAM sticks in the smack middle of the airflow.

> which puts the RAM sticks in the smack middle of the airflow

They're usually perpendicular to the air flow. Bonus points for there being a beefy ATX connector in front.

So maybe the first stick gets some air, but all the others are hidden behind it and don't get much. I think that's the theory why many heatsinks on ricing sticks tend to have a comb design.

I also wonder about M.2 drives, mounted flat to the motherboard with what seems like lip-service to cooling. One of my bug-bears with PC design has been as heat/power demands increase it seems like there's a lack of incentive to do more than the bare minimum on coordination to drastically improve layout, the GPU daughterboard growing into a brick you need to mount and cool is another. I don't entirely blame them when shiny lights keep on selling.

Doubtful, if so they would have warned ATC.

That was beautiful. Pilot managed to drag the tail and slow down enough that it looks like the engines barely took a hit at all.

Strong suggestion, do not give advice without explaining any reasons or context

But why not tho?

It’s unclear if this comment missed the fact that the previous user was using mimicry as a rhetorical device to critique the original poster, or if it was an attempt at 'yes and'-ing by doubling down on the brevity. In either case, the question would have been more effective if directed at the grandparent comment, since that is the actual source of the unsupported assertion.

I use them in an esp32 to write a random password to each of my products, so when I sell them they can each have their own secure default wifi password while all using the same firmware.

What advantage do you see from using eFuses and not some other way to store the password?

This is the only way I could come up with that would allow an end user to do a full factory reset, and end up back in a known good secure state afterwards.

Storing it in the firmware would mean every user has the same key. Storing it in eeprom means a factory reset will clear it. This allows me to ship hardware with the default key on a sticker on the side, and let's a non technical user reset it back to that if they need to.

It gives you a 256bit block to work with - https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...

But couldn't you also just set aside a bit of the EEPROM your factory reset skips, and accomplish the same thing?

25 years?! Hardly

https://www.brokerlink.ca/blog/how-long-do-cars-last-in-cana...

> In 2020, the Automotive Industries Association of Canada (AIA Canada) reported the average age of Canadian vehicles was 9.7 years, though many industry experts believe that number is closer to 10.5 years today.

If the average car on the road is 10.5 years old, and you assume a flat demand, it is consistent with the lifespan of all cars being exactly 21 years.

(if you look at a random sampling of 100 cars, 5 will be from this year, 5 from 2025, and so on until you've counted the 5 cars from 2005 ; the average age will be 10.5 years)

If you assume that there are more cars sold every year (due to demographics: way more humans are alive today than in 2005), then this is consistent with a useful lifespan of 25 years or more per car since the "10.5" average is skewed younger because of the age pyramid bias.

It's poorly worded, but the rest of the article implies that's average lifespan, not average age.

“The average car lifespan now is closer to 322,000 kilometres, which works out to around 10 to 12 years for most drivers.”

“While the average vehicle in Canada may be designed to last around a decade, there are several factors, some of which are within your control and some of which are not, that can impact how long your car lasts.”

My last two cars were scrapped at 13 years due to rust effects.

The average Canadian drives 15,200km / year is also from that same article you linked.

322,000 km / 15,200 = 21.2 years. Assuming nobody has multiple cars.

From that link: Here's a breakdown of the average annual kilometres driven in some provinces:

Ontario: 16,000 km Alberta: 15,200 km British Columbia: 13,100 km

Assuming Canada uses salt in the winter in the same amounts as the Northern US, rust will eat the car before the mechanicals wear out.

My last two cars succumbed to rust at a little over 20 years of age yet were still reliable, started easily and ran well.

Depends on province; ON loves salt (salt mines and auto manufacturing go hand in hand?).

AB uses grit and brine, I see lots of older cars driving around here (in good shape excluding windshields).

Recent CATL independent battery testing has demonstrated 1.25 million mile longevity for battery modules produced. While EV uptake may take time, the EVs that are built will be with us for some time. That equates to 62 years of service life assuming ~20k miles/year

Propulsion is not the issue. Quality cars' engines last just fine for decades, if maintained.

Cars in the north have major rust problems, even if you're exceptionally careful, from exposure to snow and road salt.

Plenty of 30+ year old cars in Candida show rust isn’t that much of an issue. It’s increasing maintenance costs per year that take most vehicles off the road.

Is batteries the limiting factor? I would have assumed road salt + rusting the bejesus out of the car's metal would be the limiting factor.

> One final factor that can impact how long your car lasts is good, old-fashioned luck. Unfortunately, luck is one factor completely out of your control. You have control over the way you drive, but not the way others drive. Even if you are a defensive driving expert, you can still find yourself involved in a car accident.

So the numbers are calculated including traffic collisions in the life span calculation.

I wonder what the actual number is if you exclude traffic collisions? "How often should I expect to have to replace my car" and "How long should I expect a car to last" aren't quite the same question.

I would say they are the same question if you expect to always replace the car at its end of life. I don't see the distinction you're making.

Providing API specs is not open-sourcing them. Where's the source code?

Yeah that's quite fair, the article is not very accurate.

It sounds like there are two main pieces to me:

1. Removal of cloud dependency

2. Making usable the API (and providing documentation)

With a minor 3rd piece:

3. The official app will be updated to support the "offline" mode without losing as many features as possible now that the cloud service is going away.

All very laudable things IMHO. I'm actually going to buy one of these

yes. especially when you consider that point 2 requires some amount of investment (writing the api docs, ensuring no ip leaks, etc.)

Those APIs have already existed. So it is probable that they already had a documentation.

Sanitizing an existing documentation for public release might take notable time and effort if there are 100s of endpoints. But I would assume that is not the case with an API for a speaker.

Source code to what?

This is making them controllable.

The headline may be inaccurate, but I'm not clear on what source code you'd even want. To the firmware do you mean?

A documented API seems like the most useful option here.

The title of the article is misleading. The API documentation is indeed useful but I wouldn't call publishing the API documentation open source.

The soundtouch web api which is what was "open sourced" was already an existing thing for a long time. You just had to access it from the bose developer portal I think. I don't think anything actually happened here. I'm so surprised that HN is excited about this story because nothing seems to have been released.

There are several things they could open source: the firmware, the server, the app.

I assumed they meant the firmware, and was quite surprised they would do that...

Maybe Bose doesn’t have all the rights necessary to open source their code, eg because they rely on libraries.

Firstly, the source code is probably being used on newer devices, so Bose would not like sharing their proprietary solutions which might contain thirds party code they cannot share.

Secondly, these devices are basically one step above embedded. It's highly unlikely you can load and run anything custom on them.

Since they are opening up the API, you can keep using them for what they were made for, which is at least a solid basic liberty

I admit that I expected more. They really did the minimum, as in, anything less should have been illegal. It is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that it is.

Seeing that, I expected the ability to build and run a custom firmware, like with an Android device with its bootloader unlocked. But it is not that, and they didn't open source their app either.

What they did is that they removed dependence on their servers, and opened their device to be controlled by third party apps. That is, they let users use their device past its end of life, including when the first party app will stop being maintained, but not to the point of letting user add features.

In understand why they would do that, they don't want users to backport features only available on their latest models that are sold at a premium, therefore competing against themselves. After all, the value in smart speakers is not the sound producing device, which I think is a problem that has been solved more than a decade ago at the consumer level, it is all about software features.

Agree that the 'Open Source' is misapplied in this instance. I do applaud Bose for providing a graceful EoL to their product and consumers.

Yeah, it's kinda sad how much applause this is garnering when publishing API specs should be bare minimum for any smart device, never mind EoL concerns.

Don't let perfect be the the enemy of good. I fully agree with you on what the bare minimum should be, but the reality is that our definition of bare minimum is currently a fantasy. Any steps taken toward our vision is good and should be applauded IMHO. Especially when it's a major player like Bose that hopefully sets a positive precedent and gets other manufacturers to realize this is not only possible but leads to applause and hopefully more sales.

Evolution v. Revolution. I'd prefer the latter, but realistically the former is the more likely to succeed short of people like us getting control of regulatory bodies and forcing it.

what more do you actually need?

Unless you want to actually develop ON the device (and build binaries etc...), this completely allows you to use the device and connect it to whatever, so I don't know what more we should expect.

No one else is doing this, so yeay applause

Open sourcing the server code would make getting your own instance of it way easier, and maybe opening the app code so people should change the controls?

I owned a couple XPS 13 laptops in a row and liked them a lot, until I got one with a touch bar. I returned it after a couple weeks and swapped over the to X1 Carbon.

The return back to physical buttons makes the XPS look pretty appealing again.

This is exactly what I was hoping to see. I also returned one I ordered with the feedback that I needed physical function keys and the touchbar just wasn't cutting it for me.