I visited Bletchley Park museum this summer when in London. Can recommend and it's also really easy to get there; just a 50 minute train ride from London Euston station, and 5 minute walk to the museum. Entire family enjoyed the museum (have two teenage kids). There is also the "National Museum of Computing" located next to it which contains the Bombe, Collosus and related equipment. As I understand it most (or all?) of the original hardware was destroyed after the war to avoid leaking any information about the British code breaking skills. Thus, the machines on display are replicas, but should be fully working.
The computer museum also exhibits post-war computers all the way to modern machines. I'd say that museum is more for the geeks while the Bletchley Park museum is definitely worth a visit even if you're not into computers.
A personal Bletchley Park anecdote: my grandfather, an electrical engineer, staffed a radio listening station during the war, and every evening a motorcycle dispatch rider would take the day’s intercepts away to a secret location. It was more than 20 years before my grandfather figured out they went to Bletchley.
In the 1980s the Bletchley museum project put out a call for wartime electrical components so they could build their Colossus replica. My grandfather in the 1950s had made a chain of Christmas tree lights from govt issue tiny light lightbulbs he pinched from work. He painstakingly removed the nail polish he had painted them with 30 years earlier, and sent them to Bletchley. They used his family Christmas lightbulbs in the replica that is still there today.
I had the privilege of touring the museum with him in the 1990s. Also on that day I heard my grandmother’s stories of her time in the British Army during the war. That day was incredibly interesting and moving, and is an important memory for me.
At the end of 90-s some parts sent to the Russian Mir space station were found and bought at flea market - these parts had been pinched from work and their production ceased during those years of collapse in USSR/Russia.
I recall from my own visit that the electrical transformers are supposedly original. So, the National Museum of Computing justifies calling its Colossus a rebuild rather than a replica, since it is made with some original parts.
Hear hear. I joined a company which made a prosumer product I truly loved using. However, shortly after jointing i realized the company was nothing that I hoped for (Ancient tech, toxic culture, micro-management. All red-flags you can imagine). Fortunately a small startup made a blipp on my radar and after interviewing with them, as I apparently made a good impression, I got an offer so I immediately switched. I didn't realize it at the time but this happened to be a major inflection point in my career (technologically, socially and economically) for which I will be ever thankful. Not exactly OP's experience but my takeaway is that sometimes, even if you think you want to work at a place, it might not be the best option for you. There are so many more opportunities out there.
Our house have geothermal heating (heatpump conncted to 160m drilled hole, pretty common in Scandinavia). The heatpump supports having a coolant loop for cooling the house in the summer. Thus the heat pump pretty much exchanges heat from the house to the well (heating it up ever so slightly). It would certainly be possible to insert a resistive dummy load on that loop and just store that heat in the bedrock as well.
This! Or, if you don't have geothermal heating but have an electric water heater, maybe temporarily increase the temperature it goes to: maybe it's normally set to go to 65C, then when you detect that you have negative prices and your batteries are full and your water already hot, maybe heat the water to 70C and store that little bit of extra energy as heat! If you have thermostatic valves in your bathrooms, you won't even notice the difference except by the fact that your water heater now can apparently hold a little bit more water than usual :)
I have a heat pump for hot water and calculated this with an offered floating energy tariff.
It is not economical because the high net tariffs are not floating but fixed per kwH and negative / very low prices are seldom here and only for a short period of time available.
Assuming regular negatives (more than once a day) you could also tie the heating to the grid prices with maybe an hour buffer around your high water usage times to make sure you are up to temp.
Modern water heaters will keep temp for a shockingly long period of time.
The final version of the Kinect, called "Azure Kinect" was based around the ADSD3100 time-of-flight sensor from Analog Devices. The Kinect has since been abandoned by Microsoft. However, Analog offers a match-box sized module ADTF3175 integrating the ADSD3100-sensor, optics and VCSEL (940nm laser illuminator) with MIPI 4-lanes output. A devkit [1] also exist and is available from mouser, digikey, et al.
I got the dev kit and looking for someone to team up for commercialization of the potential of one megapixel time of flight camera. There will be probably nothing better for a long time due to complex pixel analog circuitry design. It’s very interesting sensor at the moment.
You can also buy a rebranded Azure Kinect called the Orbbec Femto Bolt. Like the original Azure Kinect, the quality is amazing and blows the Realsenses out of the water.
At work I've introduced various in-house tooling based on Dear Imgui and people are just blown away by how fast everything is. "I didn't know computers could be this fast and responsive". I say, well just think about the fact that the machine at your fingertips can do billions of calculations per second and it shouldn't be that much of a surprise really.
Yup, Rolled my own BLE Peripheral stack on NRF52 relying on nothing but Nordic's docs and the BLE specification. It's not fully feature complete but works well enough for me to communicate with the mcu from my MacBook using l2cap connections.
The people in these talks go quite a bit further than just BLE packet TX/RX (which you can do with the documentation on most chips). In theory this work allows implementing a totally different protocol.
Yes, though sharing BLE with other protocols is challenging (even with first-class citizens like ANT+ there are various caveats). The proprietary protocols are Shockburst/Gazelle [0] which are based of the ancient nrf24 setup.
Having said that, the radio peripheral on the chip is dead simple to drive bare-metal. Create a packet (with the convenience function), put its address in a register and hit the 'send' bit (more or less, glossing over waiting for ready bits here). Receiving is as easy - point to where you want packets to land, go into RX mode and wait for the "packet received" bit to be set.
At work I've developed a buildroot based "embedded OS" för intel machines. Our buildroot system gets bundled into the kernels initramfs and we boot straight into that from UEFI. For upgrades we kexec() into a new kernel-image so generally we never write anything to disk (The original image can still be upgraded if deemed necessary). All applications are then regular docker images. All this is managed by an in-house developed deamon. Works quite well. That said, we're not really using buildroot for anything other than building a few libs + this in-house daemon so I'm leaning towards getting rid of it and just rely on busybox+musl+a few other deps built using a simple script.
