ArduinoMania

• Read more about Next Generation Wireless Charging: Infineon Introduces Qi2 MPP Transmitter
• Log in or register to post comments

BMW's North American EV customers should have an easier time finding charging stations in the future. The company has announced it's adopting the North American Charging Standard (NACS) for all its battery-powered EVs in the United States and Canada. The changeover should be official beginning in early 2025.

The remodel's rollout coincides with all BMW and Rolls-Royce EVs built with a Combined Charging System (CCS) getting access to specific Tesla Supercharger stations. "With six fully electric BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce models now available in the US market, and more to come, it is our top priority to ensure that our drivers have easy access to reliable, fast charging," Sebastian Mackensen, President and CEO, BMW of North America, said in a statement. "This agreement is the latest in our longstanding and continued effort to expand charging options for our customers as we continue on the road to electrification."  

BMW was one of the last car manufacturers in the region which had yet to adopt the NACS. The company follows Ford, General Motors and Volvo — among others — who have recently made the change. Toyota, Volkswagen and Honda are all still holdouts, though the latter two have been in talks with Tesla about making the shift. 

In July, BMW announced a joint venture with six other car manufacturers — including General Motors and Honda — to build a minimum of 30,000 charging stations in urban areas and highways. They should each offer compatibility with the CCS and the NACS. The joint venture plans to start rolling out locations across the US in early 2024 and in Canada at a later point. 

• Read more about Despite Lowest Q2 Market Share in Past Three Years, How China is Still Leading the Global EV Race
• Log in or register to post comments

Fans planning to see the Pokémon exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam may want to take note that they can no longer purchase the Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat promo card from its gift shop. The museum has updated the exhibit FAQ to notify visitors that it has removed the limited edition card from its offerings to ensure that they can enjoy their day "in a safe and enjoyable manner." It explained that it had to make "the difficult decision" after "a small group of individuals... created an undesirable situation." The museum didn't elaborate beyond that, but as Polygon reports, people descended upon the museum's gift shop when the exhibit opened in September.

Based on the videos that came out, pandemonium broke out at the shop as visitors fought over merchandise to buy. A good chunk of the buyers may have been scalpers, as well, seeing as there's now a bunch of the Van Gogh-style Pikachu cards being sold on eBay. 

The Pokémon account on X announced right after the exhibit opening that the franchise merchandise sold at the Van Gogh museum had sold out. In a newer announcement, it said that fans shopping at Pokémon Center in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada will soon receive one of the limited edition Pikachu cards with their trading card orders worth at least $30, at least until supplies last. The card will also be sold through participating retailers in the Netherlands early next year, but it won't be sold at the museum gift shop again. That said, the Van Gogh-inspired Pokémon paintings will remain available for viewing until the exhibit leaves the museum on January 7, 2024. 

It looks like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) truly was working on a free TurboTax alternative like earlier reports had claimed. The US tax authority has announced that it will start pilot testing its new Direct File program for the 2024 filing season, though it will initially be available for select taxpayers in 13 states only. During its pilot period, Direct File will only cover individual federal tax returns and won't have the capability to prepare people's state returns. That's why 9 out of the 13 states testing it — namely Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming — don't levy state income taxes. 

Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York, the other four states in the list, worked with the IRS to integrate their state taxes into the Direct File system for 2024. The IRS says it invited all states to join the pilot program, but not all of them were in a position to participate "at this time." In addition to being only available in certain locations, Direct File will only be accessible by people with "relatively simple returns" at the beginning. It will cover W-2 wages and tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, for instance, but it will not cover self-employment income and itemized deductions. However, the agency is still finalizing the tax scope for the pilot, so it could still change over the coming months. 

Based on the screenshots the IRS shared with The Washington Post, taxpayers will only have to answer a questionnaire to be able to file their taxes directly, simplifying the process without having to pay for a third-party service. An IRS official told the publication that select eligible taxpayers in the aforementioned states will start getting invitations to use the service sometime around mid-February next year. The agency says it will begin with a small group of taxpayers before expanding access to more and more people as the filing season for the 2023 federal tax return progresses.

"This is a critical step forward for this innovative effort that will test the feasibility of providing taxpayers a new option to file their returns for free directly with the IRS," IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement. "In this limited pilot for 2024, we'll be working closely with the states that have agreed to participate in an important test run of the state integration. This will help us gather important information about the future direction of the Direct File program."

The IRS is hoping to gather data and feedback during the pilot to be able to analyze how effective Direct File is. It's also hoping to identify areas of improvement for a "potential large-scale launch in the future."

In the days before every piece of equipment was an internet-connected box with an OLED display, engineers had to be a bit more creative with how they chose to communicate information to the user. Indicator lights, analog meters, and even Nixie tubes are just a few of the many methods employed, and are still in use today. There are, however, some more obscure (and arguably way cooler) indicators that have been lost to time.

[Aart Schipper] unearthed one such device while rummaging around in his father’s shed: a pair of Burroughs Bar Graph Glow-Transfer Displays. These marvelous glowing rectangles each have two bars (think the left and right signals on an audio meter, which is incidentally what they were often used for), each with 201 neon segments. Why 201, you may ask? The first segment on each bar is always illuminated, acting as a “pilot light” of sorts. This leaves 200 controllable segments per channel. Each segment is used to “ignite” its neighboring segment, something the manufacturer refers to as the “Glow-Transfer Principle.” By clever use of a three-phase clock and some comparators, each bar is controlled by one analog signal, keeping the wire count reasonably low.

Don’t get us wrong, the warm, comforting glow of Nixie tubes will always have a special place in our hearts, but neon bar graphs are just hard to beat. The two do have a similar aesthetic though, so here’s hoping we see them used together in a project soon.

Thanks to [Jan] for the tip!

After weeks of speculation, X has confirmed its plans to charge new users for the service previously known as Twitter. The company shared details about a new subscription called “Not a Bot,” that it’s currently testing in New Zealand and the Philippines.

The subscription, which was first reported by Fortune, requires new users to pay the equivalent of $1 USD per year in order to be able to post. “As of October 17th, 2023 we’ve started testing ‘Not A Bot,’ a new subscription method for new users in two countries,” X explains. “This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount.”

Under the scheme, new users will be required to verify their phone numbers and pay the $1 fee if they want to use core features like tweets, retweets, bookmarks and likes. Those who who don’t pay will only be able to use X in a “read only” mode.

The company said that for now the fees will not apply to existing users. “It is not a profit driver,” X said.

Developing...

X is making a significant change to its crowd-soruced fact checking tool in an attempt to stem the flow of misinformation on its platform. The new rule is one that will be familiar to professional fact checkers, academics and Wikipedia editors, but is nonetheless new to X’s approach to fact-checking: the company will now require its volunteer contributors to include sources on every community note they write.

The company announced the change in a post on X, shortly after Wired reported that some community notes contributors are worried the tool is being manipulated by bad actors and worsening X’s misinformation problems amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. “Starting today, sources are now required for proposed notes,” the company wrote. “We haven’t previously required this, as some helpful notes inherently do not need sources – for example, they refer to details of the post or media it contains. But those instances are less common, and we believe the overall impact of this change will be positive.”

The change comes amid mounting scrutiny of the amount of misinformation and other falsehoods spreading on X in recent days. Longtime researchers have said that misinformation has reached new heights following Hamas’ attacks in Israel and the ensuing war. The advent of paid verification, and algorithm changes that boost paying subscribers, have allowed misinformation to spread relatively unchecked, researchers have said.

European Union officials have also raised concerns, pointing to the viral spread of video game footage and other unrelated content falsely claiming to depict scenes from the ongoing conflict. EU officials opened an investigation into X over its handling of misinformation last week.

Under Elon Musk’s leadership, X cut the teams responsible for curating reputable information about breaking news events, removed misinformation-reporting tools, slashed safety teams that patrolled for disinformation, and stopped labeling state-affiliated media accounts. Instead, the company has relied almost entirely on Community Notes, which allows volunteer contributors to append fact-checks to individual tweets.

Contributors are not vetted before joining the program, though notes have to reach a certain threshold of “helpful” ratings from other contributors before they’ll be visible. X CEO Linda Yaccarino told EU officials last week that the company had “recently launched a major acceleration in the speed at which notes appear.”

According to Wired, the system is easily manipulated as groups of contributors can rate each other’s notes, or selectively rate contributions that align with their opinions. The report also says that community notes related to the Israel-Hamas war have been filled with conspiracy theories and infighting between contributors.

The change to require a linked source may be X’s attempt to increase the quality of its notes, though it doesn’t seem to have any guidelines about the types of sources that can be cited. The company says “thousands” of new contributors have joined the program in recent days, and that notes have been viewed “millions” of times.

Self-driving is currently the Holy Grail in the automotive world, with a number of companies racing to build general-purpose autonomous vehicles that can get from point A to point B with no user input. While no one has brought one to market yet, at least one has promised this feature and had customers pay for it, but continually moved the goalposts for delivery due to how challenging this problem turns out to be. But it doesn’t need to be that hard or expensive to solve, at least in some situations.

The situation in question is driving on a single stretch of highway, and only focuses on steering, so it doesn’t handle the accelerator or brake pedal input. The highway is driven normally, using a webcam to take images of the route and an Arduino to capture data about the steering angle. The idea here is that with enough training the Arduino could eventually steer the car. But first some math needs to happen on the training data since the steering wheel is almost always not turning the car, so the Arduino knows that actual steering events aren’t just statistical anomalies. After the training, the system does a surprisingly good job at “driving” based on this data, and does it on a budget not much larger than laptop, microcontroller, and webcam.

Admittedly, this project was a proof-of-concept to investigate machine learning, neural networks, and other statistical algorithms used in these sorts of systems, and doesn’t actually drive any cars on any roadways. Even the creator says he wouldn’t trust it himself, but that he was pleasantly surprised by the results of such a simple system. It could also be expanded out to handle brake and accelerator pedals with separate neural networks as well. It’s not our first budget-friendly self-driving system, either. This one makes it happen with the enormous computing resources of a single Android smartphone.

We still have months to wait before Dune: Part Two hits theaters, so what better time to reminisce about David Lynch's intriguing adaptation of Frank Herbert's masterpiece? Reviled at the time, Lynch's Dune has now firmly established itself as a cult sci-fi epic, a film with boundless creative energy hampered by studio interference.

In this bonus episode, Devindra chats with film journalist Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune. We explore why he devoted two years of his life towards researching an unloved film, as well as how it's a refreshing departure from the superhero films dominating theaters today.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Subscribe!

• iTunes

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• Stitcher

• Google Podcasts

Credits
Host: Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Max Evry
Music: Dale North