The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.

I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.

It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.

Things are bleak.

The only time I use brakes on my Tesla is for unpredictable events on the roads or for going from slow to standstill. For everything else, I use regenerative braking. In fact, back when I just got mine, I asked my tire/brake shop about typical brake pad lifetime. They said that they almost never service brake pads on EVs. It's just not a thing.

If your brake pads don't last at least 100k, then you're holding it wrong.

I use the PG&E EV2-A night tariff at home which is still 0.23 $/kWh, though the rate at work is only 0.14 $/kWh which I use as much as possible. I rarely use the superchargers (0.45$/kWh.) Let’s use the 0.23 value.

I drive 15k miles per year. At roughly 2.5 mi/kWh. That gives $1380 per year.

At 20 mi/gallon and $6/gallon, I’d pay $4500 per year. At today’s gas prices, the difference is IMO not marginal anymore. (That said, I didn’t buy the EV for the drive savings…)

Oil changes, break pads, oil filters, spark plugs, …

For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife’s car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)

The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.

That would be a bug to me!

A good example is remembering names: when one’s name is “John Baker”, it is so much easier to remember by silently adding “the” in front of it.

We’re also very good at remembering salacious stuff. I tried constructing my own memory palace for a grocery shopping list that included cream cheese. If you mentally make Claudia Schiffer take a bath in cream cheese, you’ll never forget that. (I read the book at least 10 years ago and still haven’t…)

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809341543494.html

It’d be negligent for anyone to release a product like this without locking down the FW.

Many years ago, we did exactly that: our product had FW update support and our biggest concern was a rogue hacker creating a package that would brick the product.

I wrote a blog posts where I first did it the traditional way and then, a few months later, the lazy way: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge....

These boards are programmed in production with SPI pins or assembled with preprogrammed PROMs.

The Colorlight I5 is a much better choice for that. It’s also a high volume and this cheap HUB75 controller board but with a plug-in configuration so they all pins can be used as input or output.

See my old blog post about it: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2021/01/22/The-Colorlight-i5-a...