Google Recognizes Discovery of Electromagnetism

Google's latest logo art honors Hans Christian Ørsted via a direct link to a google search of his name. He discovered that electric currents can induce magnetic fields in 1820. This inspired electromagnetic theory, one of the most important (and hardest to master) electronics design concepts. Consumer electronics like the radio, television and cell phone (and Google Android) are all possible because of Ørsted's discovery, and the work of others like James Clerk Maxwell. He allowed us to understand (and therefore eventually create) these waves traveling through space with what are known simply as Maxwell's equations.

Mentor Acquires Development Firm Offering Android and Embedded Linux Solutions

Mentor's acquisition of Embedded Alley will allow it to offer a three-OS solution to device manufacturers. Mentor's Nucleus real time operating system (RTOS) is installed on about one third of mobile phones. Before the acquisition, Mentor's Ben Hookway blogged about Nucleus and Android.

Mentor has already updated its website to support developers implementing the multi-OS solution: Android and Linux Development Systems for Multi-OS and Multicore 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.

SDRAM Power Calculator

Need to estimate battery life for your next embedded design? With SDRAM systems that can be difficult but Micron has a few system power calculator excel spreadsheets you can download to help. They have separate spreadsheets for SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3 and RLDRAM II. They also have some useful tech note pdfs on calculating system power.

iPhone 3G S Tear-down

The first teardown of the iPhone 3G by Rapid Repair gives more details than the previously published specs. The Rapid Repair comparison chart shows the 3G has a 412MHz Samsung S3C6400 ARM11 and the 3G S has a Samsung S5PC100 ARM Cortex A8 at 600MHz.

Google Wave Changes Personal Communication

Google Wave is the second Google project for the developers of Google Maps. It attempts to combine e-mail and instant messaging into a single system, but doesn't stop there. They also aim to combine documents with conversations and allow networked collaboration to create a new electronic object called a wave. A wave doesn't have a true physical representation but that is part of the design according to the Google Wave post on the Official Google Blog. With an electronic form the wave allows dynamic features like playback and rewind that are hard to navigate with paper documents.

Another interesting part of Wave is that it has an underlying open protocol called the Google Wave Federation Protocol. By opening up the protocol, Google is enabling companies to develop interoperable systems that use waves. That could allow consumer electronic start-ups to invent new web enabled devices. This can also allow some apps to be developed and delivered across mobile platforms. In the video you can also see Wave running on Android and iPhone at the 25:26 mark.

Prototype PCB Calculator

If you want to compare prototype PCB costs without visiting every manufacturer's website try this javascript PCB design calculator. The author, Limor Fried, has a great page on finding parts and blog with many other interesting electronics projects and resources for prototyping. You can see her talk about open source hardware in a video at the O'Reilly OSCON 2007 website.

26 Year Old Bug Fix

"The new product design you are working on will end up in a dumpster in 10 years." I read that years ago in an engineering magazine. The point was to think about the environment, but I was more shocked to realize my hard work would soon be worthless. It made me strive to design products that will have value well beyond the warranty period.

An unlikely area for product longevity is computer games because of the continuous advance of graphics technology. It may be partly nostalgia, but classic games live on. Surprisingly, its not in remakes with modern graphics, but in ports of the originals to new platforms like flash or mobile. Here is a flash Super Mario (also see Game Developers Compete to Give Mario Intelligence) or this Pac-Man for your cell.

The use of emulators like MAME with the original code means even the flaws are ported. Usually cheats are added to give unlimited lives or invincibility but now the bugs are being fixed as well. That code review and test cycle that was skipped 26 years ago is being done by volunteers. Don Hodges found and fixed a huge bug in Donkey Kong shown in the video and another in Pac-Man.

Thanks to Paras for sending me the link.

Electronics Reference Designs

Before open hardware came along, the only schematics and layouts that were free to download were from reference designs like this capsense multimedia board from cypress or this potential handheld gaming board from Luminary Micro.

Surface Mount Hand Soldering Techniques

The Curious Inventor website has a great surface mount soldering video guide showing a number of techniques you can use to solder fine pitch surface mount components to printed circuit boards (PCBs).


A novel method of prototyping electronics that allows easy soldering is the Schmartboard. An example of this is shown 7:59 into the video. I just read an article about electronic prototyping in the latest issue of Electronic Design that mentioned Schmartboard was awarded patent 7,511,228 for this technology. I found the JTAG I/O SchmartBoard useful when I needed to create an adaptor to connect my prototype to a standard 0.1 inch JTAG cable. The RJ11/45 and USB connector board looks useful as well.