Jeff Jones and Andrew Adamatzky, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, wondered if biology could provide an alternative to conventional road planning methods. To find out, they created templates of the UK using a sheet of agar on which they marked out the nine most populous cities, excluding London, with oat flakes. Then, in the place of London, the pair introduced a colony of P. polycephalum, which feeds by spawning tendrils to reach nutrients, and recorded the colony’s feeding activity (see picture).

Most of the resulting “maps” mimicked the real inter-city road network, but some offered new routes. For instance, the motorway between Manchester and Glasgow passes along the west coast of the UK, but the slime mould preferred to travel east to Newcastle and then north to Glasgow (arxiv.org/abs/0912.3967). “This shows how a single-celled creature without any nervous system – and thus intelligence in the classical sense – can provide an efficient solution to a routing problem,” says Jones.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527426.300-designing-highways-the-slime-mould-way.html

These days some of the coolest ICs are only available in SMD packages, e.g.

• the fast SSP FRAM FM25256B-G and
• the famous USB to RS232 converter chip FT-232.

For me as a hobbyist that’s a problem, because I don’t have the equipment to etch PCBs, and I want to develop my circuits on breadboards.

Fortunately there are some SMD adapter boards available. So yesterday I soldered two SSOP-28 chips on adapter boards. Soldering with a pin distance of 0.65mm is a challenging task – and for me it’s definitely the limit. Using good and thin solder (0.5mm) and a soldering rod with a very thin tip are two of the most important premises. Another one is a tremble-free hand.

What I do not like about the SSOP-28 adapters though, is that there are two rows of pins on each side of the chip. This is not good for breadboards. But hey: it’s still lots better than SMD.

For SOIC-8 however, I am very happy that I found better adapter boards. When assembled, the SMD chip can be used like an ordinary DIL-8. The adapter boards are available in Germany from W2micro. They are cheap, and they come complete with double sided SIL sockets and even with SMD capacitors. Thumbs up for this solution. The guys from W2micro really saved my day.

http://www.jave.de/blog2/?p=41