An upcoming project calls for cutting dozens of lengths from a spool of 550 (pound tensile strength) all-nylon paracord, which means I must also heat-seal the ends. Cold-cutting paracord always produces wildly fraying ends, so I got primal on an old soldering iron tip:
Bashed into a flattish blade, it does a Good Enough job of hot-cutting paracord and sealing the end in one operation:
Setting the iron to 425 °C = 800 °F quickly produces reasonably clean and thoroughly sealed cut ends.
Obviously, I need more practice.
Yes, I tried laser cutting the paracord. Yes, it works great, makes a perfectly flat cut, and heat-seals both ends, but it also makes no sense whatsoever without a fixture holding a dozen or so premeasured lengths in a straight line. No, I’m not doing that.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
“Paracord cutting – flattened soldering iron tip”
“Polymorphic Hardware will apply the concept of polymorphism to traditional embedded hardware. This will enable a single electronic device to fulfill multiple functional roles by allowing the user to run multiple firmwares and applications with said device.”
https://hackaday.io/project/11191-polymorphic-hardware
;-)
Looks like that one sank without a trace. I think their notion of “polymorphic” is excessively narrow. As Father Vaughn put it: “When your manager asks you to design a combination waffle-iron toaster, you have a problem.”
Not really dead — maybe just not as special as some people wanted. I can re-program these Arduini and Huzzahs and Teensys to do thing after thing. (I did spend years polishing my programming, and haven’t finished yet, it appears.)
I don’t know that I could ever reprogram my kitchen stove to do anything besides create regions of high temperature.
I wish all car/trucks used the same Powertrain Control Module (“The computer”). Each make/model could run its own software but a 4-cylinder BMW and 6-cylinder Buick would have identical hardware. The benefits would be an economy of scale and a supply-chain resiliency. Those model-specific softwares could be called a “driver” which could be refreshed periodically as improvements are made. {Hah, a small play on the word driver.}