Barnes and Noble Announces Nook

Barnes and Noble has released details and some specifications of its new electronic reader, Nook.

Barnes and Noble will release electronic reader

Gizmondo and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Barnes and Noble will release the Nook, an electronic reader to compete with Amazon's Kindle. It's reported to sell for $259, and run Google's Android OS. Gizmondo has pictures but no specifications yet.

Google Recognizes Nobel Prize Winners with Bar Code Logo

Today's google logo is a bar code that scans as 'google' and displays 'invention of the bar code' as the roll-over. Today is the anniversary of the bar code invention and yesterday the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 was given to inventions that enabled technology such as bar codes, fiber optic communication and digital cameras. The Nobel press release is titled 'The masters of light' and describes "two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today's networked societies."

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.

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.