EEJournal

feature article archive
Subscribe Now

‘H’ is for “Horribly Confusing”

by Max Maxfield
September 20, 2022

When it comes to writing, have you ever wondered what the difference is between active voice and passive voice? Have you ever heard someone say you shouldn’t split an infinitive and thought (a) “What does that even mean?” and (b) “I wonder if I would even have the necessary strength to do so?” Did anyone ever tell you that you should never leave a participle dangling resulting in your visualizing a small cartoon-like creature caught … Read More → "‘H’ is for “Horribly Confusing”"

Follow EE Journal’s Coverage of MIPI DevCon 2022

by Larra Morris
September 20, 2022

EE Journal is live tweeting MIPI DevCon 2022! This year’s virtual event is for developers and implementers of MIPI specifications, system architects and engineering managers, including design, test, application, system, hardware, firmware and other engineers. We’ll be covering conference presentations by MIPI experts and working group leaders, featuring use cases, implementation experiences and application examples.

Follow along with our live tweets September 20 and 21:

… Read More → "Follow EE Journal’s Coverage of MIPI DevCon 2022"

SSDs Have a Heart of Darkness and You’d Better Not Ignore It

by Steven Leibson
September 19, 2022

Many years ago, I ordered my first hard drive for my original IBM PC. It was a 5.25-inch Seagate ST-225 half-high, 20Mbyte hard disk drive (HDD). That’s a capacity of 20 MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes. The ST-225 could barely hold one of today’s shortest compressed video files for YouTube but it represented enormous capacity back then, when IBM PC double-sided floppy disks stored only 720Kbytes. Unfortunately, that Seagate drive failed after just one or two months. Although such an early failure was somewhat unusual back then, reliability was a problem. Hard drives became increasingly reliable over … Read More → "SSDs Have a Heart of Darkness and You’d Better Not Ignore It"

Let’s Read Our Little Cotton Socks Off (Part 3)!

by Max Maxfield
September 15, 2022
I simply don’t know where the time goes. It seems like yonks since I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this soon to be famous (or forgotten) mega-mini-series. Speaking of yonks (which essentially means “a long time” but can also mean “a longer time than expected”) reminds me of the fact that we use three tenses in the English language: past, present, and future. For example: Bob ate my bacon sandwich (past), I am not happy (present), Bob will surely suffer for his transgression (future). … Read More → "Let’s Read Our Little Cotton Socks Off (Part 3)!"

Time of Flight Sensors, Trilobites, and Tunable Optics – What an Unlikely Combo!

by Steven Leibson
September 13, 2022

STMicroelectronics has added a new member to its line of VL53 FlightSense TOF (time of flight) distance/ranging sensors, but this new sensor takes a radical departure from the previous generation by replacing a conventional lensing system with metalenses, developed in conjunction with a startup company called Metalenz and based on technology originally developed in a Harvard University metamaterial lab. According to Metalenz, this is the first commercial product to incorporate its metalens technology.

Engineered metamaterials meet or exceed the capabilities of the conventional materials they replace by harnessing the … Read More → "Time of Flight Sensors, Trilobites, and Tunable Optics – What an Unlikely Combo!"

Robot’s Gambit: Watch Out, the Robots are Coming for Us

by Steven Leibson
September 12, 2022

This article is for all those people who think that Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are real. They’re not, and the robots appear to be coming for us. Two seemingly unrelated articles caught my eye on the morning of July 25. The first article described the unfortunate death of a motorcyclist due to being rear-ended by a Tesla AV (autonomous vehicle) operating in Tesla’s Autopilot mode on Interstate 15 just south of Salt Lake City. The second article discusses how a chess-playing robot in Russia broke a young opponent’s little finger when the 7-year-old … Read More → "Robot’s Gambit: Watch Out, the Robots are Coming for Us"

Not Much Happened, or Did It?

by Max Maxfield
September 8, 2022

This is a follow-on to my previous column, All Change! As you may recall, assuming you are a regular muller of my meandering musings, that column described the presentation I gave earlier this week to the MSc students studying Embedded Computing at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

Possibly in order to lure the unsuspecting and more gullible students to attend, this … Read More → "Not Much Happened, or Did It?"

Hot Stuff: You Might Rent the Car Seat that Heats Your Derriere or Your Next Running Shoes

by Steven Leibson
September 5, 2022

When the first reports of BMW creating a marketing program to rent heated seats in its newest vehicles, the news coverage was designed to make my blood boil. “Pigs!” I thought. “They’re just bleeding their customers dry because cars have become always-connected rolling software platforms.” Here are some of the headlines that led me down the garden path:

“BMW owners outraged over $18-a-month charge to use heated seats” – Theo Wayt, New York Post

“The future of cars … Read More → "Hot Stuff: You Might Rent the Car Seat that Heats Your Derriere or Your Next Running Shoes"

Meet the HRRG 4-Bit Mixed-Technology Computer

by Max Maxfield
September 1, 2022

Time seems to be passing extremely fast these days. Every time I blink, another week passes by; every time I sneeze, I lose another month; and every time I… but we digress. Just a few weeks ago (or possibly several months ago the way things are going), someone posted a comment to one of my columns saying they were surprised they hadn’t seen an update regarding the status of my HRRG Computer project here on EE Journal.

If you were to ask me, I’d probably say that I … Read More → "Meet the HRRG 4-Bit Mixed-Technology Computer"

featured blogs
What the FAQ are Perceptive, Enhancive, Generative, Agentic, and Physical AI (and Vibe Coding)
Mar 20, 2026
From machines that see and think, to systems that act, and the humans that nudge them along....
More from Max's Cool Beans...