标签: null

iHealth Here's the must-have consumer gadget for the geriatric set. Brookstone's iHealth blood pressure monitoring systemworks directly with iPods, iPhones and iPads and includes a diary for tracking blood pressure measurements taken by the included blood pressure cuff and dock. According to Brookstone, iHealth "makes tracking your blood pressure elegant, simple and—dare we say it—fun." Knock yourself out.   Home networking router According to Cyberoam,a division of Elitecore Technologies Pvt. Ltd., 2012 will be the year the home networking router (like it's NetGenie above) will take off because the popularity of the iPad and its competitors, including the new Kindle Fire, will necessitate a way for parents to control their kids' online habits and protect them from unwanted, age-inappropriate sites. Cyberroam claims its NetGenie is the first Wi-Fi router of its kind to add parental controls and endpoint security.   According to market research firm ABI Research, Wi-Fi connections in consumer electronics devices will rise from 113 million in 2008 to more than 285 million by 2012.   Dimmer switch Here's another item that Junior will be fired up to see that Santa has left in his stocking. According to lighting solutions provider Lutron Electronics Inc., the company's C?L dimmer will become a hot gadget in 2012. The dimmers are listed UL for controlling a broad range of dimmable CFL and LED blubs. According to Lutron, 2012 marks the beginning of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which will begin phasing out incandescent light bulbs that do not meet the new standards of energy efficiency. The company claims the C?L dimmer is the only dimmer product on the market that is compatible with both CFLs and LEDs. C?L dimmers can save consumers $50 per year on their energy bills and help extend the life of expensive CFL and LED bulbs by up to three years. Retail prices start at $19.97. Parrot AR.Drone Now we're talking. This baby, also from Broostone, puts the ability to pilot a drone helicopter in the palms of your hand via a smartphone or tablet. The Parrot AR.Drone features a built-in Wi-Fi connection, accelerometer and video cameras and lets pilots fly it using Apple iOS or Android. Suggested retail price: $299. Tankbots Hold your own epic tank battle in the comfort of your living room. Tankbots, also from Brookstone, are mini vehicles that can be driven via Apple iOS or Android devices. These puppies offer infrared obstacle detection and an autonomous personality mode to explore terrain and navigate through mazes, and even duel each other. Available in multiple colors, starting at $29.99 each. Explorer Touch Mouse The Explorer Touch Mouse,the newest member of Microsoft's touch family, is designed for active Mac and PC users, featuring an advanced scroll strip that responds to both horizontal and vertical swipes, flicks and clicks and can track on virtually any surface with Microsoft's BlueTrack Technology. The mouse offers 18 months of battery life, is available in coal black, storm gray and sangria red, and sells for $49.95. Wireless spy tank Brookstone makes the list yet again, this time with the app-controlled Rover Spy Tank. Like the Parrot AR.Drone, this bad boy is controlled via an iPod touch, iPhone or iPad and generates its own Wi-Fi connection and boasts an unobstructed range of about 200 feel. It features a built in microphone that transmits sound in real time. From Brookstone's website: "Whether following friends and family, navigating the office or investigating the activities of your dog, it's all possible with this audio/visual-enabled and photo-taking Rover." Imagine the possibilities. Available for $149.99.   Mobile bodyguard MyForce is billed as the first personal security service that acts as a mobile bodyguard. The one-touch app sends an alert to a live security monitoring team that provides the authorities with details to expedite help. MyForce says it is the first system to provide a security monitoring team that responds, tracks, and follows up with every alert.  

Here's quote from Pat Gelsinger, Intel, 2002: "We're on track, by 2010, for 30GHz devices, 10nm or less, delivering a tera-instruction of performance"   We are all aware of how Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain invented the transistor in 1947, ushering in the age of semiconductors. But that common knowledge is wrong. Julius Lilienfeld patented devices that resembled field-effect transistors (although they were based on metals rather than modern semiconductors) in the 1920s and 30s (he also patented the electrolytic capacitor). Indeed, the United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected early patent applications from the Bell Labs boys, citing Lilienfeld's work as prior art. Semiconductors predated Shockley et al by nearly a century. Karl Ferdinand Braun found that some crystals conducted current in only one direction in 1874. Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose used crystals to detect radio waves as early as 1894, and Greenleaf Whittier Pickard developed the cat's whisker diode. Pickard examined 30,000 different materials in his quest to find the best detector, rusty scissors included. Like thousands of others, I built an AM radio using a galena cat's whisker and a coil wound on a Quaker Oats box as a kid, though by then everyone was using modern diodes. As I noted last month, RADAR research during World War II made systems that used huge numbers of vacuum tubes both possible and common. But that work also led to practical silicon and germanium diodes. These mass-produced elements had a chunk of the semiconducting material that contacted a tungsten whisker, all encased in a small cylindrical cartridge. At assembly time workers tweaked a screw to adjust the contact between the silicon or germanium and the whisker. With part numbers like 1N21, these were employed in the RADAR sets built by MIT's Rad Lab and other vendors. Volume 15 of MIT's Radiation Laboratory Series, titled "Crystal Rectifiers," shows that quite a bit was understood about the physics of semiconductors during World War II. The title of volume 27 tells a lot about the state of the art of computers: "Computing Mechanisms and Linkages." Early tube computers used crystal diodes. Lots of diodes: the ENIAC had 7,200, Whirlwind twice that number. I have not been able to find out anything about what types of diodes were used or the nature of the circuits, but imagine an analog with 1960s-era diode-transistor logic. While engineers were building tube-based computers, a team lead by William Shockley at Bell Labs researched semiconductors. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain created the point contact transistor in 1947, but did not include Shockley's name on the patent application. Shockley, who was as irascible as he was brilliant, in a huff went off and invented the junction transistor. One wonders what wonder he would have invented had he been really slighted. Point contact versions did go into production. Some early parts had a hole in the case; one would insert a tool to adjust the pressure of the wire on the germanium. So it wasn't long before the much more robust junction transistor became the dominant force in electronics. By 1953 over a million were made; four years later production increased to 29 million. That's exactly the same number as a single Pentium III used in 2000. The first commercial part was probably the CK703, which became available in 1950 for $20 each, or $188 in today's dollars. Meanwhile tube-based computers were getting bigger and hotter and were sucking ever more juice. The same University of Manchester that built the Baby and Mark 1 in 1948 and 1949 got a prototype transistorized machine going in 1953, and the full-blown model running two years later. With a 48- (some sources say 44) bit word, the prototype used only 92 transistors and 550 diodes! Even the registers were stored on drum memory, but it's still hard to imagine building a machine with so few active elements. The follow-on version used just 200 transistors and 1,300 diodes, still no mean feat. (Both machines did employ tubes in the clock circuit.) But tube machines were more reliable as this computer ran about an hour and a half between failures. Though deadly slow it demonstrated a market-changing feature: just 150 watts of power were needed. Compare that to the 25 KW consumed by the Mark 1. IBM built an experimental transistorized version of their 604 tube computer in 1954; the semiconductor version ate just 5% of the power needed by its thermionic brother. (The IBM 604 was more calculator than computer.) The first completely-transistorized commercial computer was the . . . uh . . . well, a lot of machines vie for credit and the history is a bit murky. Certainly by the mid-1950s many became available. Last month I claimed the Whirlwind was important at least because it spawned the SAGE machines. Whirlwind also inspired MIT's first transistorized computer, the 1956 TX-0, which had Whirlwind's 18 bit word. And, Ken Olsen, one of DEC's founders, was responsible for the TX-0's circuit design. DEC's first computer, the PDP-1, was largely a TX-0 in a prettier box. Throughout the 1960s DEC built a number of different machines with the same 18bit word. The TX-0 was a fully parallel machine in an era where serial was common. (A serial computer processed a single bit at a time through the arithmetic logic unit .) Its 3,600 transistors, at $200 a pop, cost about a megabuck. And all were enclosed in plug-in bottles, just like tubes, as the developers feared a high failure rate. But by 1974 after 49,000 hours of operation fewer than a dozen had failed. The official biography of the machine (RLE Technical Report No. 627) contains tantalizing hints that the TX-0 may have had 100 vacuum tubes, and the 150V power supplies it describes certainly aligns with vacuum-tube technology. IBM's first transistorized computer was the 7070, introduced in 1958. This was the beginning of the company's important 7000 series, which dominated mainframes for a time. A variety of models were sold, with the 7094 for a time occupying the "fastest computer in the world" node. The 7094 used over 50,000 transistors. Operators would use another, smaller, computer to load a magnetic tape with many programs from punched cards, and then mount the tape on the 7094. We had one of these machines my first year in college. Operating systems didn't offer much in the way of security, and we learned to read the input tape and search for files with grades. The largest 7000-series machine was the 7030 "Stretch," a $100 million (in today's dollars) supercomputer that wasn't super enough. It missed its performance goals by a factor of three, and was soon withdrawn from production. Only nine were built. The machine had a staggering 169,000 transistors on 22,000 individual printed circuit boards. Interestingly, in a paper named "The Engineering Design of the Stretch Computer," the word "millimicroseconds" is used in place of "nanoseconds." While IBM cranked out their computing behemoths, small machines gained in popularity. Librascope's $16k ($118k today) LGP-21 had just 460 transistors and 300 diodes, and came out in 1963, the same year as DEC's $27k PDP-5. Two years later DEC produced the first minicomputer, the PDP-8, which was wildly successful, eventually selling some 300,000 units in many different models. Early units were assembled from hundreds of DEC's "flip chips," small PCBs that used diode-transistor logic with discrete transistors. A typical flip chip implemented three 2-input NAND gates. Later PDP-8s used integrated circuits; the entire CPU was eventually implemented on a single integrated circuit. But woah! Time to go back a little. Just think of the cost and complexity of the Stretch. Can you imagine wiring up 169,000 transistors? Thankfully Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently invented the IC in 1958/9. The IC was so superior to individual transistors that soon they formed the basis of most commercial computers. Actually, that last clause is not correct. ICs were hard to get. The nation was going to the moon, and by 1963 the Apollo Guidance Computer used 60% of all of the ICs produced in the US, with per-unit costs ranging from $12 to $77 ($88 to $570 today) depending on the quantity ordered. One source claims that the Apollo and Minuteman programs together consumed 95% of domestic IC production. Every source I've found claims that all of the ICs in the Apollo computer were identical: 2,800 dual three-input NOR gates, using three transistors per gate. But the schematics show two kinds of NOR gates, "regular" versions and "expander" gates.    

I was having a chat with John Carbone at the Boston ESC about tools. John's company, Express Logic, sells a real-time operating system and associated add-on components. We were talking about the reluctance of so many developers – or, more often, their bosses—to spend money on decent tools and resources. John used an interesting analogy: you can get a nearly-free ax to cut down trees. It will work great! Who can argue with Honest Abe's success with the ax? Or, spend hundreds of dollars and get a chain saw to clear dozens of trees while a Paul Bunyan with huge muscles is still swinging away at his first oak. Give me the chain saw. Actually, I'll go further. A while back I bought a top-of-the-line chainsaw from Stihl pro, because a cheap Home Depot brand will eventually bring a tree down, but will probably be hard to start, will fail early, and will probably infuriate the user. The Sthil costs a lot more, but as the old saying goes, cry once when you spend the money, but reap the benefits for years. Cheap tools are a poor bargain. That $0.50 screwdriver will strip heads, the inexpensive belt sander will run hot and die soon, and the bargain oscilloscope will drift out of calibration every time the humidity changes. I'm biased, having started a tool company in the 80s. We tried to provide devices with powerful capabilities. They were pricey. But as in all of life there's a tradeoff between functionality and cost. Today, with squeezed budgets it's easy to understand that the boss is clamping down on all capital purchases. But meanwhile our salaries, with overhead, are in the six figures. It doesn't take much of a labor savings or productivity increase to offset the cost of a tool. Nothing is new under the sun. I remember fighting this same battle nearly forty years ago with my boss. His response: "I have to pay you anyway." I didn't have the guts to reply "well, actually you don't." Conceivably enough savings from tools could trim engineering staff and budgets. At the very least they'll accelerate the schedule and complete more projects in less time. Tool use is part of being human, and as we've progressed from cave dwellers to 21 st century Homo sapiens the collection and capabilities of our tools has exploded. Some are free. Most of the others are cheap, once one considers the savings in effort or labor. Meanwhile, you can have my ax. You'll have to pry my Stihl MS362 from my cold, dead hands. What do you think? Are the tools we buy for embedded systems development overpriced, under-featured, or spot-on?  

I was reading "Best Engineering Practical Jokes" by Brian Fuller on EE Times , then I bounced over to the original submission of the winning entry, which was How to shut the sales guy up by Bob Stevens. This really was a great practical joke that made me laugh out loud. Then I started reading the comments. These were all interesting, but one especially caught my eye. This is where a reader with the screen name Antedeluvian said: I am reminded of a circuit by Bob Pease, if I remember correctly, to make a member of staff at National talk in a softer tone. It was an audio noise generator and as the voice grew louder so did the audio disturbance forcing the speaker to raise his voice above the noise in a positive feedback loop. Must've been awfully noisy while "training" the offending party! Of course Bob Pease – who was a well-known expert in analog electronics – recently passed away in a tragic accident. He was one of a kind who will be sorely missed. He also had a great sense of humor. One of his quotes was "My favorite programming language is ... solder." I also recall seeing a picture of him on the top of a flat-roofed building throwing a digital computer over the edge. The computer had just left his hands and was on its way to oblivion. I think the accompanying caption was something like "There's one digital computer that will never lie to me again." (I just tried to find a copy of this picture on the web, but I failed. If you know of one, please post a comment telling the rest of us where it is). As an aside, I once met Bob Pease at a debate on the pros and cons of Fuzzy Logic. Bob was not a fan of Fuzzy Logic as I recall, but that has absolutely no bearing on what we're talking about here (grin). Returning to Antedeluvian's comment, another reader replied: That circuit is called the "Hassler" ( www.national.com/rap/Story/widlar.html ) So I of course bounced over to this article on Bob Widlar , which was written by Bob Pease. In the middle of the article I found the following: One of the celebrated things Widlar did was to put a "hassler" in his office. When a person came in to his office and spoke loudly, this circuit would detect the audio, convert the audio to a very high audio frequency, and play back this converted sound. The louder you talked, the lower the pitch would come down into the audio spectrum, and the louder it would play. So if you really hollered, it would make sort of a ringing in your ears. Of course, if you noticed this "ringing" in your ears, and stopped for a while to listen, the "hassler" circuit would shut up. He gradually got people to stop yelling at him. I mean, Bob really was almost always a soft-spoken person. He didn't have to yell or shout to get his message across. When he did speak, and softly at that, people would soon realize that it was a good idea to listen to him. This sounds like a great idea. My first thought was that I would love to see the original circuit and build one (does anyone know where that circuit can be found?). My second thought is that with all of the new digital signal processing techniques that are around these days, maybe we could do something similar – but more sophisticated – using a low-cost FPGA evaluation board (does anyone have any ideas?).

I finally gave in and purchased an iPad 2. Now I'm thinking which apps I need to get... It wasn't my fault. I couldn't help myself. While I was at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) last month, I was amazed to see how many folks were wandering around with iPads – predominantly the new iPad 2 flavor. Some were taking notes, while others were using them to search the web or even give demos. Later, while flying back home after the conference, the guy sitting next to me spent the entire trip working away on his iPad. I would have loved to have been capturing notes on the various companies I'd met and the amazing things I'd seen at the conference, but I was sitting in coach and there was no room. The person in front of me had their chair tilted back, so if I had tried to use my notepad computer with its 17" display I would have "Done myself a mischief" as they say in England (at least, they say this where I come from). So I dithered around for a day or so convincing myself that this was a legitimate business expense and not just an "I want something cool!" It turned out that I wasn't hard to convince, so I ran down to the local Apple store (everyone else I called said that they were sold out) and purchased the 64 GB Wi-Fi model (no 3G because I didn't want to sign up for yet another wireless contract).   I also got a Smart Cover, which has built-in magnets that snap into place on the iPad. The cover also wakes the iPad up when you pull it back and puts it to sleep when you close it. Plus it folds over to form a stand as illustrated in the image above. I'm currently sitting outside on our back porch as I pen these words. I'm still getting the hang of this little beauty, but thus far I have to say that I am VERY impressed. I've seen reviews saying that the iPad's camera's aren't as good as they could be, but I took a wander around the outside of our house a few minutes ago taking pictures and they look fine to me. One thing I hadn't realized in that there's no hard disk – the iPad uses only solid-state memory. This means that it's "instant on" as soon as you open the cover. Compared to the netbook I bought last year, the iPad is simply light-years ahead. Of course there's going to be a bit of a learning curve. For example, I understand that I can use iTunes on my PC (oooh, I just discovered that you can hold the uppercase key down while typing) to import and organize photos and then copy them over to the iPad, but at this time I don't have a clue how to make this happen. Also, I'm currently writing this blog using the pre-installed "Notes" application, which seems to work OK for text. But while I was at DAC, I saw someone using a stylus to handwrite notes with accompanying sketches. I just had a meander around the Apps Store to discover that there are a bewildering variety of apps out there. So first of all I'm looking for advice as to the best app for taking notes—ideally one that supports both keyboard and stylus input and also allows me to add line-art sketches. Also, I would be jolly interested to hear about any other "must-have" apps (including games) that are uber-cool or mega-useful... any ideas?