A modern car carries 70 to 150 microcontrollers, and the network that lets them speak to each other is the most invisible piece of every vehicle on the road. We walk why CAN won the first round, how CAN FD doubled the payload, the LIN and FlexRay supporting cast, the move to automotive Ethernet and the zonal architecture replacing the flat harness, the gateway in the middle, and what an OBD-II scanner is actually doing under the hood.
Embedded
-
The CAN Bus and Modern Vehicle Electronics -
How Automatic Transmissions Work An engineer's tour of the automatic transmission: planetary gearsets as mechanical computers, the torque converter as a fluid coupling with a lockup cheat, valve bodies as hydraulic logic predating microcontrollers, modern mechatronic shift control, and an honest look at CVT belts, dual-clutch trade-offs, and why "lifetime fill" is marketing.
-
The Espresso Machine Is a Control System An engineer's tour of the espresso machine as a thermal-hydraulic control problem: PID loops fighting boiler thermal mass, the puck as a time-varying resistance, the architectures (thermoblock, thermosyphon, dual boiler) framed honestly, and the open-source firmware scene rebuilding the inside of a $5,000 machine from a Gaggia and an STM32.
-
Raspberry Pi vs the Competition: How the SBC Landscape Stacks Up in 2026 The Raspberry Pi 5 is not the fastest single-board computer you can buy, nor the cheapest, nor the one with the most I/O — Rockchip RK3588 boards from Orange Pi and Radxa beat it on cores, NVMe, and 2.5GbE for less money. So why is the Pi still the default? Its moat is software and supply: a purpose-built OS, thousands of compatible HATs, the best documentation and community in the category, and a committed production lifetime that the clones can't match. This guide maps the whole landscape — the RK3588 challengers, the proven Odroid, NVIDIA's CUDA-powered Jetson, x86 N100 mini-PCs, and the ESP32 microcontroller floor — and gives you an honest framework for picking the right board instead of the most-hyped one.
-
The Apollo Guidance Computer: 2K of RAM to the Moon The Apollo Guidance Computer flew humans to the Moon with 2,048 words of RAM and software woven into wire by hand. This is the machine, the priority-scheduled executive that survived the famous 1202 alarms, and the engineering discipline it forced into existence.