Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.
More likely a hall effect sensor, which is solid state and a lot smaller. And yes, older MacBooks had something like that, as evidenced by the fact you could put them to sleep by holding a magnet in the right place (just to the left of the trackpad IIRC in the models I'm familiar with)
Nice one ! Curious since I know almost nothing about HW - do magnets screw with computer HW otherwise ? I would guess no since we don't use HDD anymore but not sure.
As far as I know, even HDDs were pretty resilient to magnets when in their enclosures. I once took a large magnet meant for holding together concrete forms, one strong enough that it stuck to a ferrous surface it could probably support my weight, and stuck it to a hard drive for a full year to see if it'd break. The drive, as well as all of the data on it, were fine.
Non-spill fluid quick disconnects are established tech in industries like medical, chemical processing, beverage dispensing, and hydraulic power, so there are plenty of design concepts to draw on.
A fairly intellectual audience, in the 50s and 60s when the space race was big news and von Braun's Nazi past was recent history? I'd guess a majority.
> My family had a small B&W CRT that fascinated me with its image quality, in that it always reminded me more of a b&w photo than color CRTs reminded me of color photos.
The problem of a finite dot pitch interfering with image quality, especially on small displays where the dots were necessarily larger relative to the image size, is what motivated Tektronix to develop field-sequential color CRTs which they used in their digital oscilloscopes in the 80s and 90s. JVC also used the technology in some professional broadcast video monitors. Basically it was a B&W CRT with a changeable (liquid crystal) color filter in front of it. The R, G, and B channels would be shown one after another with the corresponding filter activated, in a similar manner to a color wheel DLP projector.
The real project is the sense of accomplishment we gained along the way, or something like that.
But anyway, there are institutions like the Craftsmanship Museum <https://craftsmanshipmuseum.com/> that exist to present this kind of passion project to the interested public. That one in particular came out of and is still very centered on the hobby machinist and model steam engine community... if there's not already something similar for electronics and computing type projects, it definitely seems like maybe there could/should be.
My read of that caveat from Google is that the code that was removed was third party code that Pebble had a proprietary license to use, thus it was not Google's to release.
It was based on FreeRTOS, but FreeRTOS at the time was extremely bare bones and only provided a preemptive scheduler, task management, and synchronization primitives. Everything else (memory management, I/O, ...) had to come either from whatever libc implementation was in use, or be built from scratch.
In my opinion it's not always the most readable codebase, due to some idiosyncratic style choices, but it definitely has the advantages of being small and focused.
