For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter—bandages, bottles, bananas—will have some kind of smarts thanks to super-cheap programmable plastic processors. If you’ve been wondering why that hasn’t happened yet, it’s that nobody has built working processors that can be made in the billions for less than a […]
First released in 2005, the Arduino microcontroller turbocharged the maker movement. While more advanced boards have joined the Arduino line since, the basic Uno microcontroller remains popular. Inexpensive, simple to program, and robust enough for beginners while still having enough capacity to do interesting things for more advanced users, it forms the basis of countless […]
Historians will probably spend decades picking apart the consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic. But the shortage of chips that it’s caused will be long over by then. A variety of analysts agree that the most problematic shortages will begin to ease in the third or fourth quarter of 2021, though it could take much of […]