NXP Microcontroller Design Challenge Winners

The NXP Cortex-M0 LPC1100 Design Challenge results are in.  The grand-prize winner is a flight logger that used text to speech to communicate commands over a walkie talkie.

See www.lpc1100challenge.com for details on the winning designs.  Over 10,000 LPCXpresso boards were shipped, and the contest encouraged NXP to port Linux to the platform.  Linux support will be available in time for a launch at ESC Boston 2010 in September.

Consumer Devices Use Adobe Flash With Open Screen Project Technology

The Open Screen Project was created by Adobe to increase design-in of the Adobe Flash Player on consumer devices like cell phones.  Many companies are partners in the project including ARM, Cisco, Intel, Google, and Texas Instruments.  Microsoft and Apple are not on the list probably because they have competing technologies. Intel subsidiary Wind River recently joined the initiative.  Benefits to membership include a royalty-free license to use flash device run-times, and permission to use the Open Screen Project and Flash logo.

This video shows a Flash player running on an Android phone.



There is an Open Screen Project Fund sponsored by Adobe and Nokia.  It awards grants to develop Flash  applications that run on Nokia devices.

Renesas Offers Free Evaluation Kit For High-Performance MCU

For a limited time you can get the Renesas RX610 Stick Renesas Demo Kit (RDK) for free. Register to become eligible for the RX-Stick and you will also be registered for the RX62N RDK to be released later this year.
The RX610 Stick includes some unique features like a 14x10 LED array, a slide volume potentiometer, and a 4-direction joystick.  It has an on-board debugger and you can download demo projects for audio, DSP, FPU, and benchmarking. Renesas has also created the RenasasRulz.com online community with a developer's forum and more information about  the RX610 Stick.  You can see the kit in action in the RX-Stick Demo Youtube Video below.



The RX600 series is at the high-end of the RX family which is the successor to the H8SX, R32C and 32-bit Renesas MCUs.

BatchPCB offers low cost for prototypes

BatchPCB is a service of SparkFun Electronics that provides low cost PCBs in small quantities for electronics enthusiasts.  There are some limitations and a slow turn-around with this service, but the idea is to make it cheap by batching your design with other orders. Here is a blog post about alternatives to BatchPCB if you find it too slow or need more than a few prototypes.  Here is a comparison of BatchPCB and a few other PCB Pooling services including MakePCB, and Eurocircuits. If you are new to PCB design, this article from IEEE Spectrum covers an engineer's first PCB design using BatchPCB.

You can sell your design at BatchPCB as well.  For example, you can buy a Breakout Board for the Maxim MAX3421E USB host controller designed by Oleg Mazurov of Circuits@Home.  You can find some open-hardware for sale as well, which seems like it could cause problems. One open-hardware company, AdaFruit Industries, requested one of its designs removed from the BatchPCB marketplace.

New Sample Projects for Microsoft Sensors and Location Platform

Microsoft released sample code for three new projects using the Sensors and Location Platform included in Windows 7.  The projects are Graphing Accelerometer Data in Windows 7, Sensor Video-Capture Solution, and Build Your Own Game Controller.   Each project contains a white paper, and sample firmware, driver and application source.  The game controller project uses the XNA Racing Game Starter Kit and a Parallex BASIC Stamp 2-axis accelerometer board.  The Sensor & Location Platform Team Blog also has a post about the game controller project.

TI Releases Free DSP Software Development Tool

TI is providing DSP developers C6EZFlo, a free graphical tool for use with C6000 DSPs.  You can find more information at the TI C6Flo Wiki, including and introduction, DSP block descriptions, and instructions to extend C6Flo by creating  your own blocks using C (and a little bit of Javascript).

TI $4.30 Microcontroller Development Kit Sold Out Fast

The Texas Instruments wiki for the MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) reports unprecedented demand for the LaunchPad development tool.  TI's servers were extra busy and stock was sold out within the first few days of availability.  For $4.30 plus shipping you get a development board with debug capability, a few MSP-430 devices to program and a mini-USB cable.

Microchip and Cymbet Offer Solar Energy Harvesting Kit

The Microchip XLP Energy Harvesting Kit is available exclusively from DigiKey for $195.  It contains a Microchip XLP 16-bit development board with a PIC24F16KA102 Microcontroller, the  Cymbet EVAL-08 solar energy harvesting  evaluation kit, and a Microchip PICkit3 USB debugger/programmer.

The Cymbet board manages and stores indoor or outdoor light energy with an EnerChip EH CBC5300 Module ($36 at DigiKey) to provide power for the Microchip PIC24F board.  The PIC24F16KA102 is a nanoWatt XLP (eXtreme Low Power) PIC Microcontroller.

Open Circuits Wiki for Electronics Design

At OpenCircuits.com you can find PCB footprints, electronic circuit building blocks, tutorials and general electronics design links.  This is an evolving resource and the members are looking for help from the community to improve the site.  The information on the site is not all related to open source.  For example, you can find PCB footprints for commercial EDA packages and a list of low-cost oscilloscopes.

Microsoft Forms Closer Partnership with ARM

Press Release: Microsoft Licenses ARM Architecture - ARM

Microsoft supports ARM in a wide range of products.

There is wide speculation about this new agreement between Microsoft and ARM.
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