标签: device

Although the term "smart phone" first appeared in print in 1995, describing ATT's "PhoneWriter Communicator" as a "smart phone," it was the indomitable Steve Jobs who forcefed it into our vocabulary and consciousness 12 years later. "Smart phone" has stuck ever since with no contender to replace the ubiquitous name.   Steve Jobs, and most of the world’s population didn’t know then, and may not know now how extraordinarily powerful, useful, and essential the smartphone of 2016 is going to be.   That’s the good news. The bad news is that less sophisticated marketing types, looking for the sound bites to excite the news tonight, will declare inaccurate heights, and in some cases give consumers the frights. Smartphones are going to seem intelligent, but they will not be thinking machines, just very, very well-trained, adaptive, and adaptable devices with multi-sensor inputs.   As a result of the digestion of hordes of data collected by the device and other sources, processed on the device, and sorted in the device and/or the cloud, our personal companions are going to appear to be intuitive. The result will be better experiences and interactions with our devices and the world at large.   The goal of the device builders and their processor and application suppliers is to bring a more human-like understanding to the device so we users are not aware that we are dealing with a machine, as I am fond of saying, the technology works when it disappears.   When we can teach our devices to respond to us, in a manner we prefer, which will be different for each and every user, we’ll have a human-like relationship. But as long as the device and apps have to train us on how to deal with them, it’s still just an annoying machine that heats up our pockets and frustrates us as we try to deal with it while dealing with three other things simultaneously.   The device builders and their suppliers understand this and are taking steps to improve the situation, and they are working at warp speed — you are going to be amazed at the development over the next 18 months. Feeling secure One of the major components of those developments will be better personal security. The smartphone of 2016 will have twice the local memory of today’s devices, and more than twice the capacity for plug in memory.   The memory will be faster, and use less power. That’s item one in the improved security — keep your stuff locally, and privately. The industry emphasizes the need for more processing on the cloud and ignores the need for on-device processing, our future smartphones will do more and store more locally.   The access to the local data will be biologically unique, with multifactor biometric authentication, including eyes, face, voice, touch, and maybe even heartbeat.   If you choose to share your data, the uplinks and downlinks will be so fast you’ll barely think about them. That’s both the good news and the bad. If it’s too easy and too fast, you may inadvertently share something you didn’t intend to. That’s where intelligent behavioral analysis comes to play.   If your devices have learned your patterns, and know who your friends and trusted sources/sites are, then there will be little to no challenge. But if you do something erratic, unpredictable, or potentially dangerous, then the action will be challenged.   We will come to expect our devices to see, hear and understand their surroundings through technologies such as computer vision, directional audio, sensor fusion and machine learning. And from that data infer context, anticipate needs, and take appropriate actions through technologies, such as, always-on sensing and on-device machine learning.   Smartphone cameras won’t only capture a high-quality image and see it as millions of individual pixels, but will also understand the image, recognize objects, understand the scene, figure out context, etc. In this new paradigm, camera is not just capturing pixels, but understand them.   The expanded sensor array in the next generation smartphones will be extraordinary. Our phones will view the world in 3D, and collect information about things in 3D, with information about how far things are from us, and their rate of travel toward or away from us. Imagine your phone telling you, “might as well stop running, you can’t catch that bus.”   Augmented reality won’t be a novelty, it will be automatic and active anytime the phone senses it is not in your pocket, purse or briefcase. The AR in the phone of 2016 will constantly tell you stuff about your surroundings, and not just annoying ad-driven messages for taco stands and gas stations, but notifications about things you care about and are interested in.   If they get in the way you’ll simply say, “That’s enough Igor,” or, “stop it Igor,” you won’t have to tell Igor what to do in an exact construct of speech that Igor tried to train you to use, Igor will understand your intentions, and behave accordingly — a true personal companion. Never lonely, never uncomfortable These technologies, techniques, and concepts will spread beyond the personal companion. You’ll find them in your home, car, retail stores, and other things that you contact. Due to the massive manufacturing scale of mobile devices, processors, sensors, and associated components, parts are very inexpensive while providing amazing processing capabilities. It’s the democratization of technology and the sharing of it that will enrich our lives overall.   Our cars will behave smarter, more sensitive to our needs, comfort, and most of all safety. And our homes will be more aware of our presence, both coming and going, the ambient conditions inside and out, and adjust itself for our comfort while observing energy management protocols. Imagine the house getting a message from your phone alerting it to your arrival in 10 minutes.   The house checks the outside temperature and wind-chill factor and sets up the heaters in the rooms it knows you first use when you come home. The phone also gives the house your agenda for the day, and the house, with the phone’s help, sees that in addition to having fought with rush-hour traffic for the past 45 minutes, you were in a stressful, over-extended meeting with your boss. Aha says the house I better put on some soothing music, he probably won’t want to hear Machine Head tonight.   Consumer suppliers will send complex computer graphics models to your TV and/or mobile device so you can see high fidelity and faithfully reproduced examples of products you are interested in.   The technologies to enable these ideas are getting ready to make this a reality. All the great ideas that have been proposed over the past 20 years for the technological life of the future are remarkably close to being realized. For example, the advancements in machine learning, computer vision and other cognitive technologies.   It is due largely to the smartphone, its broad acceptance, and the manufacturing volume of complex electronic parts and associated software. And the processors and sensors will operate at remarkably low power while doing it. As usage and number of sensors continually increase (a dozen of sensors in your smartphone today), ultra-low power sensor processing will be essential.   Love triangle Your smartphone could become a threat to your relationships. People have commented, “my phone knows me better than my husband/wife.” A Survey (by Brandon McDaniel of The Pennsylvania State University and Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University in Utah) found that almost three quarters of women in committed relationships feel that smartphones are interfering with their love life and are reducing the amount of time they spend with their partner.   Jon Peddie is president of Jon Peddie Research (Tiburon, Calif), a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm.

I had never even heard of molded interconnect devices (MIDs) until a few days ago when I read about it. Now I think they are wonderful—I want to use them in my own projects. As I've just discovered: Molded interconnect devices (MIDs) are 3-dimensional electromechanical parts that bring together the best of both mechanical and electrical engineering. MIDs combine the circuit board, housing, connectors, and cables that comprise traditional product interfaces and merge them into one fully functional, compact part.   A molded interconnect device used in an automotive user interface. Now I come to think about it, I do seem to recall people talking about this sort of thing way back in the mists of time that we used to call the 1980s, but—like so many ideas—it seemed to fade away again. This might have been because the required technologies were either too expensive or simply not up to the task. According to the article, however, it appears that the MID concept is making a comeback. Now that I've been made aware of this, I'm going to start probing deeper. Have you come into contact with MIDs in your projects? If so, it would be great if you could share your experiences with the rest of us in the comments below.  

Typically, medical devices are not supposed to smoke. You don't have to be the United States' Surgeon General to realise this. Early in my career, I was a newly hired engineer at a large medical device company. The first week my manager, Bernie, gave me full responsibility for supporting an existing product. I'll call it the Smoko-2. In my first week, I was invited to a "tear-down" session on the Smoko-2. The meeting started out great—the lead mechanical engineer praised the design, which used just one exposed screw to hold together the case and circuit boards. Things are looking rosy. People are smiling. Even the young ladies who assembled the units on the production line are smiling. Bernie himself isn't sweating and fidgeting as much as usual. Life was good. Then things turn ugly. One of the more experienced women on the repair line says, "Oh yeah, but we do get back some Smokos with melted and smoldering power cords." You could see the enthusiasm leak out of the room. I look around and the other engineers and managers look as bewildered as I am. Nice how they spring this on us at a very public meeting! There wasn't much sparkle or eye contact after that bombshell and the meeting quickly winds down. Bernie's forehead is glistening. He's playing the imaginary drums with two pencils. The discussion peters out to random monosyllables and the group quickly disperses, with some of us on the engineering team slinking away quietly as if hoping we're invisible. As the new engineer, I get the hairy eyeball from Bernie, and I don't need any further impetus. I go to pull the main Smoko-2.pdf drawing, and I see the problem right away. "Hmm, how did this ever happen?" I ask myself. The design required 9V at up to 2 amps be sent through a connector with 15 pins rated only at 1.5 amps each. So no problem, right? Since only 9 pins are needed for data, the designer allocated the remaining pins as follows: three to carry plus, three to carry minus. That is absolutely okay, in the theoretical plane. Plenty of current capability, 4.5 amps theoretical, 2 amps actual, a huge safety margin you think, sitting on your theoretical cloud. But in reality, this decision is a disaster waiting to happen. The connector mostly relies on gravity, the weight of the device on its charging stand, to make firm contact. And it expects the connector pins to be clean and perfectly straight and the device and base to be exactly perpendicular. None of these situations happen in the real world. Emergency rooms can be hectic, devices are not always carefully set down perpendicular into their chargers, and bits of crud and cleaning fluids can get into things. All it takes is a speck of a foreign object to interfere, and then we have 2 amps trying to go through not three pins, but maybe just two or even one. Push 2 amps through a 1.5 amp contact, maybe add a little smudge of medical salve or a speck of bandage cotton, and we have Smoke City, Utah. Bad show. At $880 for each Smoko-2, customers would expect it to not smolder. In an ideal world we would just redesign the whole thing—but that would be a huge deal—there is a real shortage of off-the-shelf connectors with nine or so data lines plus two heftier power lines. We might have to get a custom connector designed, new cases and charging stands and circuit boards and user guides made up, plus FDA clinical trials, easily a quarter-million dollar and year-long project. And we'd have to recall all the devices in use, a many-million-dollar hit. And the nice people on the production line will not be smiling at me in the future as they'd have to increase their build rate 20-fold to replace all the units out in the field. And poor me, I've been here two weeks and I have to tell my manager that "my" device needs a couple of million dollars in bandaging. I was downcast for several days, even considering going back to my first job, shoveling coal into a greenhouse boiler. While dirtier, it was nice warm work, and even if the worst happened and the boiler exploded, it wouldn't hurt as much as having to run through the view-graphs in front of the managers, especially the bar chart showing $2M of unplanned expenditures on my project. When a boiler explosion starts sounding like a good thing, you know you're in a pretty dark place. Fortunately, our dog Beau came to the rescue. He needs frequent walks to empty his output queue, if you know what I mean. During one of these long walks when I had plenty of time to think, an idea popped into my mind. No, not a perfect solution, but keeping with the medical genre, a band-aid, inexpensive, and just good enough to work. As luck would have it, there was just enough room inside the power connector to put a simple CMOS Schmitt-trigger to sense power abnormalities and a flip-flop to shut down the power. Another Schmitt-trigger could be coerced to act like an astable pulse generator, trying to turn on the flip-flop every few seconds to retry the power-on situation. Not a perfect solution, but one good enough to prevent major smoldering and a multi-million dollar recall. Bernie gave his go-ahead, I got to keep my job, C. Everett Koop stopped appearing in my dreams, I got a good job review six months later, and lived happily ever after. Well, until the next debacle. This story was submitted by George Gonzalez for Frankenstein's Fix, a design contest hosted by EE Times (US). George Gonzalez is by day, officially, a Software Guru, using his ancient degree in Computer Science, plus 35 years of experience, stirring up commercially useful mixtures of C, Delphi, Python, and assembly language. While his father and brother are both accomplished EE's, George just attacks hardware with some general principles learned at the school of hard knocks (and with safety glasses). At home George fawns over and repairs old tube radios from the 30s thru the 60s. At work, when there is no software to do, he is occasionally allowed to use his instincts to keep somewhat less ancient (designed in 1995) products in production.

Generally, medical devices should not smoke. You don't have to be the United States' Surgeon General to realise this. Early in my career, I was a newly hired engineer at a large medical device company. The first week my manager, Bernie, gave me full responsibility for supporting an existing product. I'll call it the Smoko-2. In my first week, I was invited to a "tear-down" session on the Smoko-2. The meeting started out great—the lead mechanical engineer praised the design, which used just one exposed screw to hold together the case and circuit boards. Things are looking rosy. People are smiling. Even the young ladies who assembled the units on the production line are smiling. Bernie himself isn't sweating and fidgeting as much as usual. Life was good. Then things turn ugly. One of the more experienced women on the repair line says, "Oh yeah, but we do get back some Smokos with melted and smoldering power cords." You could see the enthusiasm leak out of the room. I look around and the other engineers and managers look as bewildered as I am. Nice how they spring this on us at a very public meeting! There wasn't much sparkle or eye contact after that bombshell and the meeting quickly winds down. Bernie's forehead is glistening. He's playing the imaginary drums with two pencils. The discussion peters out to random monosyllables and the group quickly disperses, with some of us on the engineering team slinking away quietly as if hoping we're invisible. As the new engineer, I get the hairy eyeball from Bernie, and I don't need any further impetus. I go to pull the main Smoko-2.pdf drawing, and I see the problem right away. "Hmm, how did this ever happen?" I ask myself. The design required 9V at up to 2 amps be sent through a connector with 15 pins rated only at 1.5 amps each. So no problem, right? Since only 9 pins are needed for data, the designer allocated the remaining pins as follows: three to carry plus, three to carry minus. That is absolutely okay, in the theoretical plane. Plenty of current capability, 4.5 amps theoretical, 2 amps actual, a huge safety margin you think, sitting on your theoretical cloud. But in reality, this decision is a disaster waiting to happen. The connector mostly relies on gravity, the weight of the device on its charging stand, to make firm contact. And it expects the connector pins to be clean and perfectly straight and the device and base to be exactly perpendicular. None of these situations happen in the real world. Emergency rooms can be hectic, devices are not always carefully set down perpendicular into their chargers, and bits of crud and cleaning fluids can get into things. All it takes is a speck of a foreign object to interfere, and then we have 2 amps trying to go through not three pins, but maybe just two or even one. Push 2 amps through a 1.5 amp contact, maybe add a little smudge of medical salve or a speck of bandage cotton, and we have Smoke City, Utah. Bad show. At $880 for each Smoko-2, customers would expect it to not smolder. In an ideal world we would just redesign the whole thing—but that would be a huge deal—there is a real shortage of off-the-shelf connectors with nine or so data lines plus two heftier power lines. We might have to get a custom connector designed, new cases and charging stands and circuit boards and user guides made up, plus FDA clinical trials, easily a quarter-million dollar and year-long project. And we'd have to recall all the devices in use, a many-million-dollar hit. And the nice people on the production line will not be smiling at me in the future as they'd have to increase their build rate 20-fold to replace all the units out in the field. And poor me, I've been here two weeks and I have to tell my manager that "my" device needs a couple of million dollars in bandaging. I was downcast for several days, even considering going back to my first job, shoveling coal into a greenhouse boiler. While dirtier, it was nice warm work, and even if the worst happened and the boiler exploded, it wouldn't hurt as much as having to run through the view-graphs in front of the managers, especially the bar chart showing $2M of unplanned expenditures on my project. When a boiler explosion starts sounding like a good thing, you know you're in a pretty dark place. Fortunately, our dog Beau came to the rescue. He needs frequent walks to empty his output queue, if you know what I mean. During one of these long walks when I had plenty of time to think, an idea popped into my mind. No, not a perfect solution, but keeping with the medical genre, a band-aid, inexpensive, and just good enough to work. As luck would have it, there was just enough room inside the power connector to put a simple CMOS Schmitt-trigger to sense power abnormalities and a flip-flop to shut down the power. Another Schmitt-trigger could be coerced to act like an astable pulse generator, trying to turn on the flip-flop every few seconds to retry the power-on situation. Not a perfect solution, but one good enough to prevent major smoldering and a multi-million dollar recall. Bernie gave his go-ahead, I got to keep my job, C. Everett Koop stopped appearing in my dreams, I got a good job review six months later, and lived happily ever after. Well, until the next debacle. This story was submitted by George Gonzalez for Frankenstein's Fix, a design contest hosted by EE Times (US). George Gonzalez is by day, officially, a Software Guru, using his ancient degree in Computer Science, plus 35 years of experience, stirring up commercially useful mixtures of C, Delphi, Python, and assembly language. While his father and brother are both accomplished EE's, George just attacks hardware with some general principles learned at the school of hard knocks (and with safety glasses). At home George fawns over and repairs old tube radios from the 30s thru the 60s. At work, when there is no software to do, he is occasionally allowed to use his instincts to keep somewhat less ancient (designed in 1995) products in production.  

     USB有 “主设备” 和 “从设备” 之分。 “主设备” 通常写为 “USB HOST”或“USB OTG” ，而“从设备”一般写为“USB DEVICE” 。STM32F103系列的芯片只能做“USB DEVICE” ，STM32F105和STM32F107系列才可以做“USB OTG” 。         USB信号是差分信号， 信号线为D、 D-。  在USB HOST端，  D+、 D-各接一个15kohm的下拉电阻。          而在USB DEVICE端，这时就有高速低速设备的区别了。USB1.0、1.1、2.0协议中 都有定义高低速设备以满足不同情况的需求，这些在硬件上的区别就是： 高速设备：D+ 接一个1.5K的上拉电阻，D-不接； 低速设备则相反：这就是为什么板上的USB接口的D+上接一个1.5K的上拉电阻到3.3V的原因。    这样当USB DEVICE插入到USB HOST中时，如果是高速设备，则D+被拉高，D-不 变；低速设备则与之相反。这个上拉过程需要大概2.5us的时间，USB HOST在这个时间 内便检测到了该信号，即可判断有USB DEVICE plug in，和该device的类型，然后开始通讯、枚举等。 所以，USB协议虽然非常复杂，一般人不太好掌握，但USB硬件却是非常简单的：如果是USB HOST，例如PC机，那么在USB接口的D+、D-差分线上都接一个15K电阻到地就可以了；如果是USB DEVICE，例如我们的STM32开发板，那么在USB接口的D+接一个1.5K的上拉电阻到3.3V就可以。          另外，在高速USB传输时，需要考虑信号的完整性问题，即阻抗匹配。 阻抗匹配是指在能量传输时，要求负载阻抗要和传输线的特征阻抗相等，此时的传输不会产生反射，这表明所有能量都被负载吸收了。反之则在传输中有能量损失。下图中的 R55、R56的22欧姆电阻是阻抗匹配电阻。 Buddy Remark: 了解了以上原理，在编程的时候才知道来弄去脉。