MIDI Hack Competition at NAMM 2021

The MIDI Innovation Awards, a design competition for MIDI hacks, DIY projects, or innovative MIDI products is now open with final judging at NAMM 2021.  This competition was announced by Music Hackspace, the MIDI Association and NAMM.

The first prize includes an exhibition booth and free advertising at the 2022 NAMM show.  Other prizes to be announced.  Submissions of existing commercialized products and art installations are also eligible.  For more details see the Music Hackspace Innovation Awards page.

CADSTAR Express 15

Express is a set of free PCB design tools limited to 300pins and 50 components.  It has the same functionality of CADSTAR, a PCB design suite from Zuken optimized for small and mid-size design teams.

An interesting new feature of CADSTAR is the CADSTAR Touch App for Android and iOS devices.  It links to the CADSTAR IDE to turn your tablet or smartphone into an input device.  For example, you can pan, view all, and run Macros you have defined in CADSTAR.  The Android version also supports voice commands.  See the video below for a demo.

I have been a user of CADSTAR Schematic since version 13, I find it is a professional quality, low-cost solution.  The yearly maintenance cost is very affordable and entitles you to download the newer versions which are released about once a year.  I receive great support from my distributor, Algozen, who helped organize a local CADSTAR User's Day I attended last week.

Google Reimagines the Development Board

The ADK 2012 platform is packed with innovation and usable code for Android accessory development.



They advertise that all of the code is open source and with a less restrictive license like BSD so you can include it in your products. Here are the main libraries:

• Bluetooth stack (BSD license) with libraries for RFCOMM, A2DP,L2CAP, SDP
• Multimedia library including an ogg player
• MicroSD SD/SDHC driver with FAT12/RAT16/FAT32
• USB Host stack with Android open accessory protocol implementation

All of this runs on the Atmel SAM3X ARM Cortex-M3 processor with 512kB flash, 100kB RAM, and bluetooth is provide by a Texas Instruments CC2564. There are also sensors for light, proximity, acceleration, magnetism, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and other toys like a capacitive slider and buttons, RGB LEDs including the 7 segment display, a transducer speaker, and an NFC tag.

For more info, here is the developer's guide from google Accesory Development Kit 2012 Guide. A little more info about the Arduino IDE (for an ARM processor) it uses on the Arduino blog.

The surprise at the end of the video is that an ADK 2012 was given to each attendee of this talk, and the device is not for sale (yet). If you really want one, try e-bay, currently the best price is an auction at $400 US. If are lucky enough to have one here is the Android app from google play.

CES 2012 Videos

If you want to see what is happening at CES, there is an official youtube channel for the 2012 CES conference where you can see booth interviews and attendee videos.  Here is a video from OLogic showing a robot they call A.M.P. for Automated Music Personality.  OLogic is a design house for toys and consumer electronics, the A.M.P. isn't for sale yet but has been shown for a few years as a showcase of their engineering abilities.

Embedded Linux Conference 2012

If you are an embedded Linux developer who maybe missed out on CES you might try the  2012 Embedded Linux Conference which runs from Feb. 15-17 just North of Silicon Valley in Redwood Shores, California.  This is co-located with the Linaro Connect Q1.12 conference which runs from Feb. 6-10.  Linaro Connect covers Linux on ARM development.  Another co-located conference is the 2012 Android Builders Summit from Feb. 13-14.  For a retrospective of Linux, see the Linux Foundataion video commemorating 20 years of Linux.

Photo by the Linux Foundation, available under a Creative Commons License.

Consumer Electronics Conference Seeks Startup Prototypes

"Technologies and Applications for Connected Consumers" is the theme for the 34th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium being held May 2011 in Princeton, New Jersey. Free exhibition space is offered to startups and students that can demonstrate consumer prototypes and applications.  Cash prizes will be offered for the best exhibits.

Microsoft embeddedSpark Summer Challenge Opens

The Microsoft embeddedSPARK 2010 Challenge is now open with designs due June 8. The winner will receive a cash prize of $15000, $5000 for second and $1000 for third. The top three will present at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this Fall.

Embedded Linux Conference 2010

The CELF Embedded Linux Conference is coming up on April 12th-14th, 2010 in San Francisco. Topics include Android, security, debug and real-time development. Here are a few titles:

Android: A Case Study of an Embedded Linux Project

Using a JTAG to Debug Linux Device Drivers

Creating a Secure Router Using SELinux

Effective Use of Scripting in Embedded Devices

FSCE: Reducing Context Switching Time on ARM

Understanding Threat Models for Embedded Devices

Experiences in Android Porting, Lessons Learned, Tips and Tricks

Case Study - Embedded linux in a Digital Television STB

Understanding and Developing Applications for Maemo Platform

PIO: Talking to the Outside World

Linux Without a Boot Loader?

National Instruments/Tektronix Embedded Seminars

Measurement and Analysis Techniques for Embedded System Designers will be presented by National Instruments and Tektronix in 10 U.S. cities and Toronto starting March 2010. The half day session will include talks on automated control of measurements, advanced analysis tools, and examples of enhancing embedded system testing. They will showcase Tektronix test equiptment and National Instruments LabVIEW and LabVIEW SignalExpress software. Both analog and digital techniques will be presented.

Texas Instrument's OMAP and Inexpensive BeagleBoard Excel with Embedded Linux

Attending the TI Tech Days Toronto 2009, I was impressed with the capabilities of the BeagleBoard, an OMAP3530 single board computer that sells for only $149. It was on display serving video to a tiny DLP projector that is also available as a development kit from TI.

The BeagleBoard is a reference platform as well, with all schematics, gerbers and even design files available online. This allows third-parties like TinCanTools to develop a peripheral add-on board an an adaptor for their USB-JTAG board to support the BeagleBoard.

The OMAP is a great platform for Embedded Linux development. The OpenEmbedded project, the Angstrom distribution, and Android all have been ported to the OMAP, and there is a great community of BeagleBoard Linux users and a wealth of information online at BeagleBoard.org. In addition to the BeagleBoard, there are OMAP development boards from gumstix and Logic. Each of these boards also have embedded Linux distributions and online resources for developers.

At the Conference, the room was full for the OMAP embedded Linux presentation by Nuvation, and it could have lasted much longer if time permitted. Developers had many questions on each slide and the presenter had to rush to finish. You can tell that there are a lot of products in development with the technology or at least considering OMAP and Embedded Linux as a solution.

There were a number of development companies at the conference (including Aaron Clarke Consulting) offering support for OMAP development. bSQUARE was giving away copies of Microsoft's Windows Embedded CE Evaluation Kit that also runs on the BeagleBoard. They support both WinCE and Embedded Linux development. They are headquartered in Bellevue, Washington with offices around the world including one near me in Rochester, NY. bSQUARE, who aquired Vibren Technologies in 2005, also offers an embedded flash for Linux and porting services for Adobe Flash Lite.

You can see the BeagleBoard in action either at one of the remaining TI Tech Days or at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston. TI will have a number of workshops featuring the BeagleBoard including Android development.

iPhone Vulnerable to Text Message Attack

Researchers at the Black Hat USA 2009 Technical Security Conference have shown how to use an SMS message to attack the iPhone. Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner gave the talk 'Fuzzing the Phone in your Phone' (full text link here). They presented techniques that can be used for the iPhone as well as Android and Windows Mobile phones. The Authors demonstrated the iPhone attack for Elinor Mills of CNET before the talk. She reports there is no patch at this time but Apple was notified of the problem 6 weeks ago.

ARM TechCon3 2009

The former ARM Developer's Conference is now billed as an engineering-oriented technical event and will focus on three areas

• Energy Efficiency
• MCU & Tools
• Internet Everywhere

ARM TechCon³ is still being held in October in the Santa Clara Convention center. The deadline for paper submissions is July 14, with the conference on October 21-23, 2009.

Game Developers Compete to Give Mario Intelligence

As part of the IEEE Games Innovation Conference, there is a competition to build the best AI to play the classic Nintendo Super Mario Bros. game. You don't need to attend to enter the contest, just join the Mario competition google group and you can download source code to create your AI (called a controller or agent) that plays the game. The organizers want to use the competition to compare different methodologies so be creative. They are calling for submissions based on

• artificial evolution
• evolutionary neural networks
• genetic programming
• fuzzy logic
• temporal difference learning
• human ingenuity
• hybrids of the above

This reminds me of the Terminator TV series where a computer designed to compete in chess acquires an artificial intelligence that eventually threatens humanity. If you enter watch out for cyborgs and time travelers.

IEEE Gets in the Game

The IEEE Consumer Electronics Society is holding its first Games Innovation Conference in London on August 25-28, 2009. Focusing on both technology and creativity in games this international conference is for almost everyone involved in creating and studying games including 'researchers and practitioners'...'from different disciplines in acedamia and industry.'

Microsoft's New Portable Game Platform

Microsoft announced support for gaming on its portable music player, Zune, yesterday at GDC 08. You won't be able to start developing games for the device until the next version of Microsoft's game SDK is released in Spring 2008. With XNA Game Studio 3.0, you will be able to develop games targeted to a PC, Xbox 360, and now Zune. There has been speculation about gaming on Zune for some time because of its powerful processor and origins in the Microsoft Xbox team. A few caveats are that Zune will have a reduced API (reminds me of flash-lite), it will be some time before we see actual games released for Zune and according to a Zune team member at Microsoft, 'Zune is a wireless music and video player first and foremost.'

Embedded Systems Conference 2008

The 2008 Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley is coming up April 14. Early bird registration ends Feb 18th, but you can get a free pass to the exhibits, keynotes and sponsored sessions until April 9.