Uladzislau Bayouski

In a utility cupboard somewhere in Manchester, a gas meter fitted in 2015 is still sending a reading every night. Same battery. Nobody has opened the case. Meanwhile, the ESP32 sensor you built last weekend — the one on the windowsill reporting temperature to a dashboard — is dead. Three days on two AA cells. The two devices aren't as different as they look. Both are a microcontroller, a sensor and a radio. Both wake up, take a measurement, send a few bytes and go back to sleep. The difference between three days and fifteen years isn't a better battery — it's what the device does with the 99.8% of its life when nothing is happening. That's what power management in IoT actually is: not a component you buy, but a set of decisions about sleeping, waking and talking. 🔋 The Short Version Every battery-life question comes down to one division: capacity divided by average current. A pair of AA lithium cells holds about 3,000 mAh. Draw 3 mA on average and you get six week...

Excited to share our latest YouTube feature: A deep dive into the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. We walk you through the full history of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, from the Manhattan Project to the Nevada Test Site, and the real human costs behind it. In this candid tour, you’ll get: - A front-row look at the Ground Zero Theater and a realistic simulated blast - Nevada Test Site history and Mercury, Nevada’s origins - Einstein’s 1939 letter to Roosevelt and how it began - Real inert warheads, testing gear, and protective equipment - Underground testing tunnels, delivery systems, and the evolution of nuclear science - Interactive exhibits you can actually test, plus insights into nuclear medicine and energy - Oppenheimer, Trinity, and the lasting impact on culture and policy - Thoughtful context on the risks, ethics, and the broader story of science If you’re curious about how history, science, and policy intersect, this is a must-watch. Watch the full video...

A water meter buried in a concrete pit, three floors underground, sends one tiny reading a day. It has no power outlet, no Wi-Fi in range, and it needs to keep doing this for ten years on a battery you'll never replace. Wi-Fi can't reach it. Bluetooth and Thread can't travel that far. LoRaWAN could — if someone built and ran a gateway nearby. But there's already a network that blankets the entire city, penetrates deep underground, is professionally maintained, and charges pennies per device per month. It's the cellular network — running two special low-power modes built for exactly this. Those modes are NB-IoT and LTE-M . 📶 The Short Version NB-IoT and LTE-M sit in the gap no other protocol covers: the reach and reliability of the cellular network, stripped down to sip power and cost almost nothing. They're the licensed-spectrum answer to LoRaWAN — you don't run the infrastructure, a carrier does, and it already covers everywhere. NB-IoT is the...

Big news from TechFest Maker's Lab at the Computer History Museum! We explored a family-friendly, hands-on event where local makers, tinkerers, and small creators showcased what they build—no corporate booths, no keynotes, just real people who love making things. In this video, you’ll see: - A soldering station where beginners can badge a PCB robot - A giant working Macintosh replica built to scale and fully functional - PewBot, an educational, codeable robot for kids that loves to dance and even plays soccer - A 3D printing booth with VR pinball controllers and 3D-printed guitars - A full tour of Maker Nexus, plus their summer camps for all ages - A quick revisit to Apple’s 50th anniversary exhibit We chatted with the makers behind the giant Mac and the Maker Nexus team, sharing our honest take: this cozy, family-style event is one of the best experiences to inspire kids and spark creativity in neighborhoods. Want more? Watch, subscribe, and join us on this hands-on maker jo...

Most people who own a Thread device have never heard of Thread. They bought an Eve sensor, a Nanoleaf bulb, or a Yale lock. It connected instantly. It responds in milliseconds. It still works when the internet goes down. They went back to living their life. That's Thread doing its job correctly — invisible, reliable, and fast enough to never be the reason something didn't work. 🏠 Thread vs OpenThread: Clear This Up First Two names, constant confusion. They are not the same thing. Thread is the standard — an open specification maintained by the Thread Group defining how low-power IPv6 mesh networks operate. It's the definition of what the network must do: self-healing mesh, IPv6-native, no single point of failure, AES-128 encryption end to end. OpenThread is the implementation — the open-source software stack, originally built by Google's Nest team, that runs the Thread specification on actual hardware. Thread is the recipe. OpenThread is the kitchen that m...

In the 1970s, a small group of engineers designing the internet made a decision that seemed absurdly generous at the time. They gave the network 4.3 billion addresses. Four billion. For a research project connecting a few dozen universities, that was infinity. Nobody in that room imagined a world where a single household would burn through forty of them — a phone, a laptop, a TV, a thermostat, a doorbell, a dozen bulbs, a watch, a speaker in every room. That world arrived. And when it did, the internet quietly ran out of room. 🌐 The Short Version IPv4 's 32-bit address space gives 4.3 billion unique identifiers. The central pool ran out in February 2011. Regional registries fell one after another: Asia-Pacific in April 2011, Europe in September 2012, Latin America in 2014, North America in September 2015. No fresh addresses left. The market responded the way markets do when something runs scarce: IPv4 addresses became an asset class. A single address that traded for ~$5 ...