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.

Storage Start-up Promises Revolutionary Hard Drive

DataSlide is publishing 160,000 IOPS and 500MB/s transfer rates for its new Hard Rectangular Drive technology. The technology has been proven in prototypes according to an article in the Register. ZDNet gives a few more details and mentions a similarity to IBM's Millipede project.

DataSlide is also promoting this as green tech when comparing IOPS/Watt to other drive technologies.

NXP ARM7 Processors

I have developed on a few different NXP (formerly Phillips) ARM7 processors in consumer electronics products. NXP has a great selection of processor families with a variety of feature sets in each family. This makes it possible to reuse code on different products or to design-in a new processor without changing vendors. For example, on a product using the LPC21xx we were able to change to a processor with more memory during software development without any problems and with a very minor schedule impact.

I just returned my LPC21xx development board to a client last week now that their product is in production. I was thinking about purchasing a replacement when out of the blue, I received a skype from NGX Technologies about a new low-cost LPC214x evaluation board they have developed. I haven't had a chance to evaluate it, but at under $50 (depending on exchange), it is much cheaper than any of the LPC214x boards I find online at the very useful LPC Tools website.

Open Hardware Projects

The concept of open hardware is not as mature or well-defined as open software, but that hasn't stopped the development of some very interesting embedded systems. Some are inexpensive designs for the hobbyist that resemble electronic kits like the Arduino. Other are very polished and expensive consumer electronics like Chumby, with a 1GHz Marvell PXA168 processor and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi. Another is Bug Labs ARM11 based BUGbase with swappable BUGmodules available for a variety of applications. Of course, with open hardware you can build your own module too. Make magazine has a huge list of open hardware projects. The one thing they have in common is free access to the schematics and layout and should use only open source software, so you are free to build the entire design yourself.

Intel's New Embedded Strategy

In 2006 Intel sold the mobile XScale processor business to Marvell "to focus its investments on its core businesses." Now they are re-entering the embedded market by acquiring embedded software company Wind River as "part of Intel's strategy to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices." Links are to Intel press releases.

There is a lot of speculation about this acquisition and Intel's next embedded move, such as Intel looking to buy Marvell to re-aquire the mobile XScale, or an Android Linux smartphone that outperforms Google's.

One area that may be affected by the acquisition is the newly available embedded OS virtualization technology, Wind River Hypervisor. It is currently only available on Intel and Power-PC processors, but support for other non-Intel processors is planned. This article at LinuxDevices.com claims that might change and gives an overview of the technology. Hypervisor currently only supports Linux and VxWorks, both Wind River supported OSes.

New Embedded Processor Benchmark

CoreMark is a new free benchmark for embedded processors from EEMBC. EEMBC is using this to promote its other benchmarks and to compete with free benchmarks like Dhrystone.

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.'