April 2007 Archive of engeniusBLOG

I expect we all have things in our wardrobe that would appear to be bizarre to just about anybody else.

Being both a journalist -- to some extent or another -- and an engineer (also, arguably, to some extent or another seeing as I am so totally analog) I have a large number of corporate shirts in my closet donated during visits to the offices of the companies whose products I track. But some years ago my spouse gave me a T-shirt that had a circuit on it: which I would probably not allow myself to be publicly seen in.

Nice little circuit and the immediate thought is that, "this is obviously an FM ratio detector!"

Wrong…

The additional secondary on the input transformer (if it is a winding, and not an RF choke -- á la Foster-Seeley discriminator) has no dc path to ground and what's that series resistor all about? There is also no capacitor...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Last week I finally managed to track down a minor but annoying mystery involving a slowly-rising electric bill that's haunted my household for the past year or so. The 15% - 20% bump in the overall electricity use we'd seen was especially frustrating since I've been slowly upgrading most of the appliances, light fixtures and infrastructure in our suburban New Jersey ranch home as much I could, without arousing too many complaints from my wife -- or the neighbors. In the end, finding that slow leak took a bit of sleuthing, some persistence, and a bit of dumb luck.

The process of greening our home has been a slow but steady one, paced in equal parts by the limits of our free time and money. Instead of immediately putting solar panels up (an illogical place to start in any case), all the work we've done so far has been unglamorous and nearly invisible, but should have made a significant dent in our bill. Of course nearly all of the lights which that we use more than a couple ho...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

When you read this I will be, once more, in Las Vegas for Spring NAB 2007. It is not the show it was when I first went, with a BBC badge on, so many years ago. It is bigger, of course; it is now always in Las Vegas (where else could you get the kW-h needed?); and it shouldn't have the word "broadcasting" in the title anymore.

The not-for-profit lobbyist organizers of this handsomely profitable gathering tried, for a few years, to alter the perception of the conference and exhibits in terms of it all being a multimedia gathering. But that does not work any more, either. Go into any modern television studio's equipment areas and it is all about servers, microprocessors and software. Sure, the signal path starts with an analog pick-up on a camera and ends with an analog display but those digital guys have taken over the rest of the chain.

But, again and again, it seems to me that the designers who put these grand digital boxes together don't understand anythin...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I saw lots of hints that green power issues are on the minds of the industry's early adopters when I attended the Embedded Systems Conference where former Vice President Al Gore challenged the engineers attending his keynote with developing the tools to build a greener future. Mr Gore's inspirational talk -- and flashy demos, like the teardown of a Toyota Prius on the show floor -- are great ways to raise the average engineer's awareness about their potential role in designing more energy-efficient products; but it won't amount to anything without some solid follow-up.

That's why I'd like to challenge my colleagues David, Rich, Patrick, and the rest of the ESC team to move beyond the sizzle and start to give engineers some of the tools they'll need to build the energy-efficient technologies t...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I saw lots of hints that green power issues are on the minds of the industry's early adopters when I attended the Embedded Systems Conference where former Vice President Al Gore challenged the engineers attending his keynote with developing the tools to build a greener future. Mr Gore's inspirational talk -- and flashy demos, like the teardown of a Toyota Prius on the show floor -- are great ways to raise the average engineer's awareness about their potential role in designing more energy-efficient products; but it won't amount to anything without some solid follow-up.

That's why I'd like to challenge my colleagues David, Rich, Patrick, and the rest of the ESC team to move beyond the sizzle and start to give engineers some of the tools they'll need to build the energy-efficient technologies t...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Greetings from San José, CA, the home of Korean-Thai-Tex-Mex fusion cuisine, the million-dollar starter home, and the Embedded Systems Conference. The 2007 ESC West reflected the maturity of the industry and did not contain any blockbuster technical breakthroughs, but there were a few interesting trends that made the show worth braving the high hotel room rates and the usual Silicon Valley traffic.

While digital signal processors (DSPs) have been finding applications in embedded systems for a long time, 2007 probably marks the point where they are almost as common as the RISC cores and PICs that traditionally do the majority of computing in the embedded space. Dual-core chips that combine a RISC and DSP were in evidence everywhere across the show floor in applications ranging from multimedia cell phones to set-top boxes. Another sign that the embedded signal processing (ESP) market is maturing is the greatl...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I just received a notice from my previous cell phone carrier -- dropped a couple of months ago because they were in the wrong country and because we wanted a family phone plan, as I have explained before in these pages.

The notice was to inform me that the carrier -- Verizon Wireless -- is turning off its analog network on February 18, 2008 and it exhorts me to contact a customer service representative to arrange for a free digital phone today to upgrade to be able to use its "all-digital wireless network." I'm not going to belabor, in my horribly analog manner, the presence of the words 'digital' and 'wireless' alongside one another in the same sentence, but I was hardly impressed with the three major reasons why I should convert to digital now:

• Higher quality voice calls and faster data services
• Enhanced emergency 911 services
• Longer battery life fro...  -- Click Here to Read More >>