iPhone 3G S Specs

The new iPhone 3GS has just been introduced in a few different models. Here is a brief feature comparison to the iPhone 3G. 3GS Features include:

• 3 megapixel camera
• 30 fps video with third-party application integration
• photo and video geotagging
• digital compass
• proximity sensor
• ambient light sensor
• accelerometer
• assisted GPS
• 7.2 Mbps HSDPA (not available from AT&T until later this year)
• OpenGL ES 2.0 3D
• hands free voice control

Here are the full iPhone 3GS specifications and iPhone 3G specs. The 3GS release date is June 19. Prices are $199 for the 16GB 3GS and $299 for the 32GB model with new $99 price for the 3G. The 3GS specs are close to those leaked a month ago on a Chinese website according to this article on Brighthand. A few more specs that were leaked are a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM, these were both on the Chinese site and an accidental post to a T-Mobile spec page in the Netherlands.

Electronic Prototype Power Supply

I have had great success bringing up new hardware with this small bench-top power supply from Lascar Electronics. The PSU 130 is inexpensive at under $90 US on Amazon.com or direct from the manufacturer (which gives quantity discounts). It is powerful enough to handle most electronic devices that I work on, and is small enough to fit underneath my computer monitor. The backlight is great for working in dim lighting and the large display is easy to read. I have unintentionally tested the short-circuit protection when I powered up a new prototype with a wiring mistake, and the supply suffered no damage. The only problem I have had is that one of the plastic tabs underneath the unit has broken, these are similar to what you find underneath most keyboards. This prevents me from easily raising it slightly for a better viewing angle (as shown in the picture). On the electrical side I have never had a problem. The current display is very useful working on prototypes, I can see when the SDRAM is initialized by the increase in current, I can see a short circuit condition and can easily measure power usage in different operating modes.

Link to a review on ThomasNet.com

Kindle 2 Outperforms Smartphones

Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

With a 500+ MHz Freescale ARM11 the newly released Kindle 2 is faster than many smartphones including the iPhone according to a teardown at ifixit. It also uses a 32MB mobile DDR SDRAM and 2GB moviNAND both made by Samsung. Also improved are the display, battery life, ergonomics and wireless (3G) to allow book title browsing and download without a computer. Free internet access is limited to Wikipedia, magazines and blogs are available in the kindle store.

Qt Now Available Royalty Free For Embedded Linux

Nokia owned Qt Software (formerly Trolltech), is offering a royalty-free license for the latest release of its windowing system Qt 4.5. The Linux port of Qt was formerly called Qtopia, now called Qt for Embedded Linux. It is advertised to be optimized for embedded and includes features to aid embedded developers. These include C++ class libraries, built-in support for hardware-acceleration, a free cross-platform IDE and the ability to simulate the device display on your development workstation. Also available for consumer electronics development are Qt for Windows CE and Qt for S60 on Symbian OS.

getopt() for windows

On most embedded projects, I find the need to write utility applications that run on a PC. I have written programs to emulate TCP/IP clients and servers, test USB communications, test protocol implementation in firmware, and automate GPIB testing. Since most Linux (Unix, FreeBSD, etc.) utilities use getopt() for command line processing, I find it very useful when creating these utilities on Linux. I just found that I can do the same for Windows with this getopt port for Win32 and MFC development by Hans Dietrich.

New Electric Guitar Uses DSP to Emulate an Acoustic

An electric guitar is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that simulates a full sized acoustic guitar using a wooden insert and digital signal processing (DSP). The wooden insert is interchangeable to simulate different Acoustics. The newest version is going to use the Freescale DSP56371 with the Symphony SoudBite Development Kit.

MIT News Feature Story EETimes story

Scilab for Embedded

 Scilab is an open-source mathematical package similar to Matlab. These applications are commonly used in embedded development to prototype DSP or control algorithms on a PC before porting them to the target hardware. There are several embedded projects using scilab.
"hArtes aims to lay the foundation for a new holistic (end-to-end) approach for complex real-time embedded system design, with the latest algorithm exploration tools and reconfigurable hardware technologies."
The Evidence Scilab/Scicos code generator uses a graphical interface to program a Microchip dsPIC DSC micro-controller board.

New FPGA Processor Embedded Linux Kit

This new evaluation kit from Altera includes a color LCD screen with touch panel and development tools for the NIOS II processor for only $449. Multiple demos can be run from an SD card including uCLinux and graphic GUIs for NIOS.

Intel's New Embedded Processor

Intel launched a new processor for targeting high-end embedded products called the Intel Atom processor. This will be Intel's smallest and lowest power processor, but not a direct competitor to ARM processors which have lower power and cost. Intel's primary market for the new Intel Atom processor is mobile Internet devices (MIDS) and a new class of low end Internet computers and laptops. The Z5xx Series Atom processors are designed for embedded applications in markets such as automotive, medical, point-of-sale kiosks, industrial and gaming.

FTP Bounce Attacks in Embedded Servers

A potential security risk in the FTP protocol can complicate embedded systems designs. If your device implements an FTP server that strictly conforms to the FTP protocol (RFC 959), your system could be used to attack other hosts on the network. Strict FTP conformance in your product can also generate a security alert like this one for Canon multifunction printers.

The security vulnerability in FTP is known as the FTP bounce attack. If successful, it allows unauthorized access to a third party host using an intermediate FTP server (by misusing the PORT command). The attack will only occur if the intermediate server is configured to allow anonymous FTP access. There were valid reasons to allow third party access in the FTP protocol, such as sending a file from a server to a printer (FTP print server), or transferring between two servers remotely, so this security vulnerability will be present in any conforming FTP implementation.

The Canon printers in the alert already allowed you to disable anonymous ftp, or disable ftp altogether, but Canon still decided to provide a firmware upgrade through service centers that will implement a safer, but non-conforming FTP implementation. This is similar to what the OS vendors and open-source projects chose to do when the FTP bounce attack was first discovered in 1997. They still allow strict FTP conformance with a change in configuration, but the default is to prevent third party access.