ArduinoMania

Amazon’s Echo Buds are on sale for their lowest price yet. You can get the retailer’s AirPods alternatives today for a mere $35 (that’s $15 off). One of Engadget’s picks for the best budget wireless earbuds, the Echo Buds have a clear, detailed and balanced sound profile, built-in Alexa support and five hours of battery life. The discount comes a few days before Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is set to kick off on March 20.

The third-generation Echo Buds were redesigned to lose the silicone tips and adopt a more AirPods-like form factor. This leads to a more open design that makes it easier to listen to music, podcasts or audiobooks without blocking out your environment. Despite the buds themselves being longer than previous models, their USB-C charging case remains pleasingly compact.

The buds support multipoint connectivity, so you can seamlessly switch them between host devices. Setup takes place in the Alexa app, where you can view the battery life of each earbud and their charging case. You can also control their EQ, SideTone (how much of your voice you hear during calls) and VIP Filter settings in the app. It even has a Find My tool to help you locate them if you ever lose them.

None of that would matter if the Echo Buds sounded terrible, but we were impressed with what they offer for their price point. After testing them, Engadget’s Billy Steele wrote, “Softer and acoustic genres like bluegrass, folk and lighter country sound great, with the warm strums of Zach Bryan’s guitars and vocals on American Heartbreak cutting through the mix.” He found the Echo Buds’ tuning to be generally well-balanced across genres.

Your Spring Sales Shopping Guide: Spring sales are in the air, headlined by Amazon’s Big Spring sale event. Our expert editors are curating all the best spring sales right here. Follow Engadget to shop the best tech deals from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, hear from Autoblog’s car experts on the best spring auto deals on Amazon, and find spring sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Amazon’s Big Spring sale is on the way, running from Mach 20 to 25, and it will include a variety of discounts on "seasonally relevant items." However, don’t confuse it for another Prime Day; according to the retail giant, some offers will be Prime-exclusive, but most will not. We don’t expect the spring sale to be heavy on tech deals either, but rather focus on things like seasonal fashion, outdoor gear and home goods.

Nevertheless, if you're hoping to grab a good gadget at a discount, we'll be sorting through the noise and picking out the handful of tech deals that are actually worth your time. Amazon has put up a landing page for the Big Spring Sale already, so below we've rounded up the best early deals we could find. Currently, the standouts include price drops on Sonos speakers, Apple's AirPods Pro and Sony and Bose headphones. To be clear, not everything is explicitly tied to Amazon's Spring sale — we're still seeing good PS5 and Nintendo Switch deals from a few days ago, for instance — and we've included a few noteworthy sales from stores besides Amazon. If you're looking for a bargain, though, here are the best tech deals you can grab today. We'll update this roundup over the coming days as more discounts pop up.

Your Spring Sales Shopping Guide: Spring sales are in the air, headlined by Amazon’s Big Spring sale event. Our expert editors are curating all the best spring sales right here. Follow Engadget to shop the best tech deals from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, and find the best spring sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Numbers stations are a weird phenomenon where odd voices read out long strings of numbers or random codewords to the confusion of the vast majority of the listening audience. If you’ve ever wanted to build one of your own, you could follow the example of [AudioWanderer].

NumberMumble, as it’s called, is a numbers station emulator. It doesn’t signal spy networks or reveal national secrets. Instead, it randomly plays audio samples using an Arduino, including characteristic bursts of white noise that make it sound more authentic. It relies on the Mozzi library to help with audio tasks, including generating white noise and playing back samples. It’s also kitted out with a filter knob for varying the tone. Audio output is via PWM.

If you want to confuse your neighbours with oddball audio, put this thing on a radio transmitter and get broadcasting. But don’t, because that’s illegal without the proper licenses or — you know — if you happen to be a real spy. Video after the break.

Video may have killed the radio star, but cell phones and smart phones all but killed the pager. They still exist, of course, but only in very niche applications. [João Santos] wanted a pager-like experience for himself, though, so he enlisted an Arduino and got to work. Watch a video of the system working below.

The build uses an Arduino Uno to drive a simple HD44780 LCD display with 16 characters each across two lines of text. It’s hooked up to a Wemos D1, which uses its WiFi connection to get online. To this end, it’s capable of talking to a web application which allows users to enter text messages. It receives these messages, passes them to the Arduino Uno over I2C, and then the Uno shuttles the message to the display. It’s overkill, but [João] just found it quicker to get everything up and running via this route.

Those who want to message [João] via the system can head to a website that runs on the OutSystems platform. There, they can enter their name and message, and it will be sent to the pager-like device for display.

It’s a fun little thing, and it makes us wonder if pagers could make a comeback. Maybe simple devices could work in a similar way to Sidewalk or Apple AirTags, communicating via a low-power network made up of smartphones in the local area. We’ve seen something similar done with LoRa. If you happen to whip up something along those lines, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Starbucks is pulling the plug on Odyssey, its Web3 rewards program that gave members access to collectible NFTs. The company updated its FAQ on Friday to let members know that the beta program is closing on March 31, and they have a little over a week left to complete any remaining activities (called journeys). Those will shut down March 25. Users won’t lose their Stamps (Starbucks’ NFTs), which are hosted on Nifty Gateway, but they’ll have to sign up for Nifty using their Starbucks Rewards email to access them there, if they haven’t already.

Starbucks was late to the NFT game with Odyssey, which launched in beta in late 2022 — well after interest in the digital collectibles peaked. Unlike some other NFT ventures from major brands, though, it seemed to be aiming for more than a quick cash grab. It gamified the rewards system, offering activities and coffee-related mini-games that encouraged members’ ongoing participation.

In a conversation with TechCrunch published just last month, Odyssey community lead Steve Kaczynski emphasized the community element, saying, “I’ve seen that people who live in California in the Starbucks Odyssey community are really good friends with people in Chicago and they have met up in real life at times. This never would have happened if not for Web3.” But it’s 2024, and brands and consumers alike have long since moved on from NFTs. (Naturally, Forum3, which worked with Starbucks on Odyssey, seems to have pivoted to AI).

Starbucks says the Odyssey marketplace, where members could buy and sell their stamps, will move over to the Nifty marketplace. They can also withdraw their Stamps to trade them on other platforms.

A budding startup called Interlune is trying to become the first private company to mine the moon’s natural resources and sell them back on Earth. Interlune will initially focus on helium-3 — a helium isotope created by the sun through the process of fusion — which is abundant on the moon. In an interview with Ars Technica, Rob Meyerson, one of Interlune’s founders and former Blue Origin president, said the company hopes to fly its harvester with one of the upcoming commercial moon missions backed by NASA. The plan is to have a pilot plant on the moon by 2028 and begin operations by 2030, Meyerson said.

Interlune announced this week that it’s raised $18 million in funding, including $15 million in its most recent round led by Seven Seven Six, the venture firm started by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The resource it’s targeting, helium-3, could be used on Earth for applications like quantum computing, medical imaging and, perhaps some day down the line, as fuel for fusion reactors. ​​Helium-3 is carried to the moon by solar winds and is thought to remain on the surface trapped in the soil, whereas when it reaches Earth, it’s blocked by the magnetosphere.

Interlune aims to excavate huge amounts of the lunar soil (or regolith), process it and extract the helium-3 gas, which it would then ship back to Earth. Alongside its proprietary lunar harvester, Interlune is planning a robotic lander mission to assess the concentration of helium-3 at the selected location on the surface. 

Interlune

“For the first time in history,” Meyerson said in a statement, “harvesting natural resources from the Moon is technologically and economically feasible.” The founding team includes Meyerson and former Blue Origin Chief Architect Gary Lai, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, former Rocket Lab exec Indra Hornsby and James Antifaev, who worked for Alphabet’s high-altitude balloon project, Loon. 

The biggest story this week was TikTok and the US government going at it again, with the house voting in favor of a bill that could force TikTok's parent company to sell to a US owner or face getting banned outright. Don't worry, though; your elected officials didn't waste the chance to embarrass themselves, as usual. Meanwhile, Mike Tyson comes out of retirement to box for Netflix. He'll face-off against Jake Paul, which I feel is best represented by this Punch-Out! tweet.  

This week's stories:

✅🕣⛔️ House passes bill that could ban TikTok

🥊🥊😵 The real fight isn't Tyson vs. Paul — it's Netflix vs. its livestreaming infrastructure

📹🏨 Airbnb to hosts: please stop filming the guests

And read this:

To celebrate this website's 20th anniversary, we're looking back at the products and services that have changed the industry since Engadget's inception on March 2, 2004. I've also been here for over half of its existence. Horrifying. I'd share my not-great first hands-on video for the site, but the footage only lives on through Russian content scrapers. What a shame.

All of the stories live here, but I suggest starting with our stories on how streaming video changed the internet and the game-changer that was (and is) Bluetooth audio.

Owen Diaz's lengthy court battle against Tesla is officially over, now that both parties have agreed on a settlement. Attorney Lawrence Organ, Diaz's lawyer, told CNBC that that the "parties have reached an amicable resolution of their disputes," but that the "terms of the settlement are confidential." If you've been following this case for a while now, that means you won't get to find out how much Diaz is getting after the massive $137 million in damages he was originally awarded got dramatically lowered to $3.2 million. 

The former elevator operator famously sued the automaker for enabling a racist workplace, saying that he faced discrimination "straight from the Jim Crow era" as a Black individual. He said his fellow workers left left drawings of swastika and racist graffiti, such as ones of Inki the Caveman, on his workspace and around Tesla's Fremont assembly plant. Diaz also said that he and other Black workers were subjected to racial slurs, and that the company failed to address thes behaviors despite repeated complaints. 

In 2021, a San Francisco court ordered Tesla to pay $137 million in damages to its former worker, which was one of the highest amounts awarded to a plaintiff suing on the basis of discrimination. However, a judge during the appeals that followed found the amount excessive and lowered it to $15 million, even though he upheld the original jury's verdict. The parties went back into trial after Diaz refused the lowered amount, but a jury lowered the damages Tesla must pay even further to $3.2 million. At the time, Diaz's lawyer said he was wrongly attacked by the defense and that they had already requested a new trial due to misconduct. It looks like both parties have since agreed to negotiate behind closed doors. 

While Diaz's case is done, Organ also represents Marcus Vaughn, who filed another lawsuit against the automaker for racial harassment. Vaughn called Tesla's Fremont plant a "hotbed for racist behavior" and petitioned the court last year to give his lawsuit class action status so that he could add 240 Black colleagues to his complaint. 

Confession time: I already have a copy of Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the PS5 even though I still don't have a PlayStation 5 console. I never get consoles the moment they come out and usually wait a few years for their next version. In the PlayStation 5's case, I thought it was going to be the PS5 Slim, but it looks like I could have another option by the end of the year: The PlayStation 5 Pro. Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming says the PS5 Pro details leaked by the Moore’s Law is Dead YouTube channel came from documentation Sony itself recently sent to third-party developers. 

Take the website's confirmation with a grain of salt, of course, but Henderson has a pretty good track record when it comes to leaks. In 2022, he reported that Sony was working a "genuine professional controller" for the PS5, two months before the DualSense Edge was officially announced. He also revealed that the company was set to release a version of the console with a detachable disc drive a full year before Sony introduced the smaller and lighter PS5 model. 

Based on leaked information on the PS5 Pro so far, it will offer improved and consistent frame rate (FPS) at 4K, as well as a "performance mode" for 8K resolution. It's also expected to be able to render games up to 45 percent quicker and to have ray tracing capabilities that are two to three times faster than its non-pro counterpart. Plus, the documentation Moore’s Law is Dead featured in its video shows that it will have a GPU with 67 Teraflops FP16 (33.5 Teraflops FP32) performance, which indicates faster speeds and better graphics overall.

Henderson says Sony is targeting a holiday release for the PS5 Pro, most likely to take advantage of heightened sales for the season. However, that could still change, depending on whether the company feels there haven't been enough first-party title releases this year. 

The Federal Trade Commission is looking into Reddit’s AI licensing deals, the company disclosed in paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which is in the midst of its Initial Public Offering, said that the regulator notified Reddit officials that it “intended to request information and documents” about the company’s AI deals.

It’s not clear why the FTC is probing Reddit’s relatively new licensing business, but it seems to be in the early stages of its inquiry. “On March 14, 2024, we received a letter from the FTC advising us that the FTC’s staff is conducting a non-public inquiry focused on our sale, licensing, or sharing of user-generated content with third parties to train AI models,” Reddit wrote in a filing. “Given the novel nature of these technologies and commercial arrangements, we are not surprised that the FTC has expressed interest in this area. We do not believe that we have engaged in any unfair or deceptive trade practice.”

Reddit’s deals to license its catalog of user-generated content are a key part of the company’s strategy to grow its revenue as it gets ready to go public. On the day the company filed for IPO, the company announced it had reached a deal with Google, which will use Reddit data to train its AI models. That arrangement was reportedly worth around $60 million. The company said it was in the early stages of “exploring” these types of deals.

According to Axios, other companies have received similar letters from the FTC. The regulator has previously shown an interest in the current wave of generative AI upstarts and their relationships with large tech companies, The FTC is currently investigating Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon over their investments into prominent AI startups.