FluidWire - Thesis Prototyping Philippines

26/09/2026

Byte order in computers is named after a war over eggs. In 1980, engineer Danny Cohen borrowed the terms big-endian and little-endian from Gulliver's Travels, where Lilliputians go to war over which end of a boiled egg to crack first. Big-endian stores the most significant byte first; little-endian stores it last -- and mixing them up is still a real bug in embedded systems today, especially when a microcontroller reads a sensor register or network packet using the wrong byte order. Read more IoT and embedded engineering trivia at fluidwire.com.

25/09/2026

Modbus, the protocol quietly running half the world's factories, turns 45 this year. Modicon published it openly back in 1979 so any PLC could speak it -- no licensing, no gatekeeping -- and that one decision is why Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP still dominate industrial IoT and SCADA systems today. If you're building embedded systems or connected devices for manufacturing, understanding Modbus is still non-negotiable. Learn more about our IoT development work at fluidwire.com.

24/09/2026

CAN bus history: in February 1986 Bosch unveiled the Controller Area Network, a way for a car's control units to talk over one shared twisted pair instead of a thick bundle of point-to-point wiring. Its clever trick: when two nodes transmit at once, the message with the lowest ID wins automatically and nothing is lost. Today the same bus runs tractors, elevators, robots and industrial IoT sensors. Building a connected device? Talk to us at fluidwire.com.

23/09/2026

Hamming codes, the first error-correcting codes, exist because a computer kept crashing on weekends. In the late 1940s Richard Hamming ran jobs on a Bell Labs relay computer that, when unattended, simply dumped any job where it detected an error. His frustration led to the 1950 paper that showed how a few extra parity bits can locate and fix a flipped bit automatically, the idea behind ECC memory and firmware-level data protection in today's connected devices. We build reliable IoT and embedded systems at fluidwire.com

22/09/2026

Wire gauge numbers run backwards: 12 AWG is thicker than 24 AWG, not thinner. The American Wire Gauge scale, set out by Brown and Sharpe in 1857, counts how many times a wire was pulled through a drawing die -- more draws means a thinner wire and a higher number. It is a geometric scale, so going up six gauges doubles the diameter and going up three doubles the cross-sectional area.

That arithmetic is the difference between an IoT sensor run that works at 20 metres and one that browns out, and it is why breadboard jumpers (usually 26-28 AWG) quietly sabotage prototypes that draw real current. We build connected hardware and the web services behind it -- fluidwire.com

21/09/2026

Solder melts at a LOWER temperature than either metal inside it. Pure tin melts at 232C and pure lead at 327C, but mix them at exactly 63/37 and the solder melts at 183C. It also melts sharply, going straight from solid to liquid with no slushy in-between stage -- that single point is called the eutectic, and it is what makes a clean, reliable solder joint possible on every circuit board in your home. Lead-free solder melts higher (around 217C) and has a pasty range on the way down, which is one big reason it is fussier to hand-solder.

More IoT and embedded engineering from the Fluidwire team at fluidwire.com

21/09/2026

Need help turning your thesis idea into a working prototype? 🔧⚡

**Fluid Wire × Circuitrocks** can help with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, sensors, coding, wiring, soldering, testing, and hardware setup.

Bring your thesis or project idea closer to a working prototype.
Message us and start building! 🚀

20/09/2026

Why is a byte 8 bits? It was not always. IBM researcher Werner Buchholz coined the word "byte" in 1956, and on the machines of that era a byte was whatever the hardware said it was -- 6 bits, 7 bits, 9 bits, sometimes variable within one computer.

IBM System/360 settled it in 1964: 8 bits, byte-addressable memory, two packed decimal digits per byte and a clean power of two for address arithmetic. The rest of the industry followed the biggest machine on the market.

The old ambiguity never fully died. It is why network standards say "octet" instead of byte when they mean exactly 8 bits, and why C only promises CHAR_BIT is at least 8 -- some TI DSPs still ship with a 16-bit char today. Assumptions about byte width are a real bug class in embedded systems and firmware, not history.

Building connected hardware or IoT firmware? Talk to us at fluidwire.com

10/09/2026