BREAKING NEWS: Qualcomm is buying Arduino for an undisclosed sum.
But, enough of the Wall Street stuff - Arduino also announced, today, a new UNO form-factor board, the UNO Q, that does signal processing, motor control, reverse kinematics calcs in hardware, has a GPU, CAN FD bus, PWM timers, ADCs, DACs, signal processing, and runs Linux as well as the Zephyr OS RTOS. All for under 50 bucks. Yes, there's analog stuff on board as well, which is how I weaseled into writing about All This Arduino Stuff, Anyhow.
A new IDE supports legacy code development, as well as Python and AI, and includes a LLM generative AI engine that can allegedly produce code from natural language prompts ("Vibe-coding"). But wait, there's more, but you'll need to read about it in the link, below.
A bunch of battery articles in this edition:
1) It turns out that doping Sodium batteries with Scandium extends their lifetime where 60% capacity is retained after 300 cycles (my math puts that at around 40,000 miles for a 66kWh pack - meh).
Notably, Scandium has about the same abundance as Cobalt, which gives something else for the kids to mine in The Congo as compared to simply pumping lithium brine from ancient seabeds or extracting lithium from geothermal locales like the Salton Sea in California. So, I respecfully differ with Murray about Sodium being Lithium-killer chemistry for EVs. I do think it'll put methane-based power generation out of business, though, so this research is still worthwhile and relevant despite the university's PR department's ambitions.
2) Panasonic has a trick up its sleeve to produce an Anode-free 4680 cell, reducing weight and increasing energy density. The aim is to boost battery capacity by 25%, potentially extending Tesla's Model Y range by around 90 miles (145 km) with the existing battery size.
3) James brings us round 2 of his battery quiz series - find out what you know and learn what you don't as he provides explainers to each question.
All for now,
-andyT
