36 results found for Lab Bench, displaying items 1 - 20
October 9, 2008 Will Getting Closer To Flash Be Cheaper? Faster? Better?
Solid-state disk drives are all the rage, with two flavors for embedded solutions: hard-disk form-factor devices and USB devices.There’s also a complement of flash cards, from Compact Flash to Sony’s Memory Stick, but they tend to be single devices. They often require specialized interfaces, and their capacity usually is limited due to physical constraints. Yet a third form factor may offer an opportunity, especially in embedded environments via another...
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William Wong
September 25, 2008 This Computer Thinks It's A Phone
The Neo FreeRunner looks like an innocuous device on par with a typical cell phone (see the figure). Yet this pocket package from OpenMoko is open to all comers—literally. Its software is all open-source, and even the CAD packages and schematics are available for download. Designers can also use them to create their own products, but why do so when OpenMoko is a source already? The phone...
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William Wong
September 11, 2008 LEDs Hold The Key To DLP Advantages
The driving forces behind Samsung’s 50-in. HL-T5089S display are Texas Instruments’ MEMS-based Digital Light Processor (DLP) Discovery Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) and Luminus Devices’ Phlatlight LEDs (see the figure). The HL-T5089S delivers a great HDTV picture for less money and uses less power than large-screen LCDs and plasma displays. It’s surprising that the core of this large-screen rear-projection...
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William Wong
August 28, 2008 MILS, MSL, MLS: Figuring Out All Those Secure Acronyms
Few embedded designs are isolated these days. Still, most users and quite a few developers only think of names and passwords when it comes to security. Yet there’s much more, and it really needs to be incorporated throughout the design process. It also means you need to grok security. I thought I did until I had to complete a more complex installation of multiple Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) systems running as virtual machines (VMs) on a Xen server. I ...
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William Wong
August 14, 2008 The Challenge: Handling 1000 Cores Wirelessly
Intel and other companies are forecasting a single chip with 1000 cores. Programming these chips will be a challenge, but there is another arena with similar challenges. Cores are proliferating in the wireless sensor and control arena, with 802.15.4 being the underlying protocol of choice. Wireless chip vendors like Ember, Freescale, and Texas Instruments are churning out an array of options that often incorporate a compact 8-, 15-, or 32-bit core to handle...
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William Wong
July 24, 2008 What Will You Do With 1 TFLOP Of Double-Precision Power?
Don’t look now, but you may have a supercomputer on your desk. It’s hiding in your video card. While it won’t make your word processor faster, it may improve the transcoding speed when you’re moving movies to your mobile Internet device. Intel and AMD have been pushing multicore in the 64-bit x86 realm with only four-core chips at this point. Intel’s 80-core Polaris is designed to push the envelope, but AMD and NVidia have other ideas, at least when it ...
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William Wong
July 10, 2008 DSP Pumps Up The Performance In High-End Stereo Speakers
Even in this age of tiny earbud music players, audiophiles want high-end stereo systems that provide perfect acoustics and fidelity— and technology is making these systems less expensive than ever. In fact, I recently received a letter from a reader asking about some of these developments: “I heard that Emerald Physics has a set of $3500 speakers that outperforms more expensive, $20k to $50k systems using a DSP. Is this possible?” asked S....
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William Wong
June 26, 2008 Micros Find Their Way Into Blue-Ribbon Science Fair Projects
Held last month in Atlanta, the Intel ISEF 2008 brought together more than 1500 students from around the world as they presented their award-winning projects from state and regional science fairs. Individuals and teams competed in more than 17 categories, including a healthy showing in the Engineering: Electrical and Mechanical (EE) division. A number of students used development kits in their work. Chris King’s Electromagnetic Levitation: A Digital Control ...
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William Wong
June 12, 2008 Simple Is Better For C And Your Lawn
It’s almost summertime, and I’ve been watching the neighbors put all sorts of chemicals on their lawns. I recommend an organic approach that includes corn gluten meal (CGM) instead. CGM is a natural preemergence herbicide and fertilizer (9-0-0) that is a natural weed suppressant. It is better for the lawn, the environment, and your pocketbook. CGM prevents weeds by stopping the germination of the weed seeds, so you need to start using it at the beginning of ...
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William Wong
May 22, 2008 Know Your Limitations Before Designing Your Next Robot
Nuance was the name of the game at last month’s Robo- Business show in Pittsburgh. This year, the aisles were populated not just by people and remote-control robots but also by a few autonomous robots— and some of these robots weren’t research projects but platforms that were for sale. During one of the last tech sessions of the show, CCS Robotics chief technical officer Anthony Diodato described the company’s SpeciMinder robots and how they have...
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William Wong
May 8, 2008 SUMIT Brings Big Improvements In Small Packages
Designing a small-form-factor system with interfaces like USB or SPI is relatively simple with a microcontroller and a custom board. But things get a little more interesting when you’re going between boards or starting with modules. Module standards like COM Express (see “COM Express: A New Standard” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online ...
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William Wong
April 24, 2008 A Visionary Passes, But The Dream Survives
The recent death of sciencefiction author Arthur C. Clarke has been noted widely by the conventional press. But I wanted to take the time to reflect on his impact on our industry. Clarke joins the ranks of sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, whose dreams remain alive because of their books. I’d bet only a few of you haven’t read at least one of his short stories or novels. Shades of the HAL 9000 supercomputer from his 2001: A...
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William Wong
April 10, 2008 Using Your Own Products Can Yield Some New Solutions
Flying to Dallas on my way to the Texas Instruments Developer Conference in February, I was reminded of the importance of using the products you design. This is much easier with consumer products, but hands-on experience is often the only way to see the advantages or flaws of a particular design choice. I have been using Samsung’s Q1B and iGo’s Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard for a number of months now, finding clear pros and cons along the...
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William Wong
March 27, 2008 Hollywood And Silicon Valley Both Love Remakes, Sequels, And Series
Do it once. Do it again. Even better, turn a remake into a series. They make lots of money. It works in Hollywood, and it works for the electronics industry too—sometimes. Just like movies, there are flops in electronics. But while the whims of the viewing public tend to have more of an effect on the success of movies, changes in technology can have a profound effect on whether a particular remake or series of products even makes sense. Some changes are...
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William Wong
March 13, 2008 Make The Universal Serial Bus Your Universal Power Supply
Why don’t all devices that draw less than 500 mA come with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) socket? Finding a charger these days hasn’t gotten any better, yet USB sockets are everywhere. Only a fraction of these devices, from cameras to cell phones to wireless headphones, has a USB socket, and it would be nice if that number would increase. So why bring the topic up here? Because you or one of our other readers will likely design or select the...
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William Wong
February 28, 2008 If Your Programming Language Doesn't Work, Give Scala A Try
Assembly language provides fine grain control. But it’s rarely used these days, with the exception of some operating-system hackers or 8-bit embedded programmers working on small modules. The performance of C compilers essentially blew the advantage out of the water ages ago. Yet in both cases, arbitrary memory access was the way to go. This worked well with single-processor solutions, and it works reasonably well with symmetric and asymmetric ...
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William Wong
February 14, 2008 Don't Touch That Dial
Server environments have needed secure communications for almost as long as computers have been around. But authentication and encryption often aren’t even discussion points when it comes to consumer devices. Take the lowly IR television remote. At last month’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a blogger used a small remote called TV-B-Gone to wreak havoc on a host of HDTVs (Fig....
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William Wong
January 31, 2008 Young Engineers Need You!
Welcome to my lab bench. Hopefully, my editorial antics here and in future installments will inform and entertain as well as provoke some controversy and insight. I’ll be taking this opportunity to rant about my favorite subjects as well as technical topics that are hot—or not. And, I’ll highlight some of the technology I come across in the hands-on projects and evaluations I do for my EiED Online column. Right now, though, I want to step onto the soapbox to...
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William Wong
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