50 years of Pong. 03.18.2023

A great story at SFGate.com about the early days of Atari and their first hit video game.

SVB peril. 03.11.2023

The Silicon Valley Bank failure casts many small tech start-ups into perilous waters. Some might well fail as a consequence. Here's a Bloomberg article that has a good explanation of how a bank can be solvent one day and bust the next. It will be interesting to see how this mess is cleaned up.

Agrivoltaics. 03.09.2023

More examples that setting up solar panels over farm land can lead to the non-intuitive result of increased food production.

"Solar power can be a land-hungry competitor to farming. But deployed in the right way, solar installations can boost crop yields, save water, and protect biodiversity."

Arduino Club. 03.06.2023

The first Arduino club meeting will be held on Mar 6 at 6:30 p.m. in Coover 3043. The meeting will last about an hour.

We will have a brief introduction to the club, go over some of the basic aspects of the Arduino platform, and look at a simple first project — a digital thermometer.

Anyone who is interested in using Arduinos and building embedded systems is welcome to attend.

Arduino Club is the companion to Audio Club

Ford is cooler than Tesla. 03.05.2023

Ezra Dyer (of Car and Drive magazine) argues that, as a company, Ford is more progressive, more worker friendly, and more honest with their customers than Tesla. Who'd a thunk it?

Certainly something for new engineering grads to consider when looking for a job.

ISU leaving 19th century. 03.03.2023

Finally, the ISU power plant has transitioned away from burning coal to generate electricity for campus. Using natural gas is marginally better, but it would nice to see some 21st century solutions. For instance, solar arrays over all parking lots? And maybe with electric car chargers attached?

Audio Club / Arduino Club 02.16.2023

Here's some news: We are going to start up the Audio and Arduino Clubs again. The first meeting will be on Monday, Feb. 20 at 6:30 p.m. in 3043 Coover. We will start with an Audio Club meeting and alternate between the two topics in future weeks. For this first meeting, we will have a brief introduction to the club, a short description of the engineering aspects of audio systems, and then we will describe a simple headphone amp that can be built as a project.

Anyone interested in audio electronics is welcome to attend.

gtuttle.net 02.15.2023

In what might seem to be budding game of "URL whack-a-mole", I have, for a variety of reasons, decided to switch to a different domain name for this little operation. The new domain is "gtuttle.net", which I plan to use for the long haul. (However long that haul may be.) This is a secure server, although security is not really a big concern for a web site that collects absolutely no user information. The other URLs that I had set up earlier (garytuttle.com and garytuttle.ee) will still work — they direct to the exact same location. The old server (tuttle.merc.iastate.edu) is still on line, but it doesn't really do anything other than re-direct to gtuttle.net. The old server will shut down eventually — probably after the next power outage knocks it offline.