Apple’s latest magic trick was upgrading their previous A4 chip into a dual core variant, the A5. This chip powers the recently announced iPad 2 and is likely to be in the upcoming summer release of the iPhone 5 (4s?) The folks at Chipworks have done some reverse engineering (which may be using actual magic) to see what the inside of the A5 looks like… all 2.9Million gates of it.
Coming Q3 of 2011, ST-Micro will begin selling a Single-Chip GPS IC called the Teseo II. It has an ARM core integrated into it, which should help reduce the time it takes to get a fix, and simplify integration into any hardware project.
Pricing is set at $6 in volumes of 500k, so for hobby work it may be a cost/time trade-off.
ST selling single-chip GPS IC. – 1/27/2011 – Electronics Weekly.
On the Janurary 15, 2011 edition of Adafruit’s “Ask An Engineer” live video chat, I heard LadyAda mention something about “Arduino Amnesia.” After investing the situation a little further, it turns out there are some Issues with the new Arduino UNO Smd edition.
A bug in the new bootloader can be triggered on power-cycle causing the SMD version of the board to not load the previously stored sketch. The good news is there is already a fix for the bug. Either return the board to your Official Distributor or use a ISP to program the new bootloader.
Issues (if I could even use that word) like this makes Open Source Hardware fun!
After learning how to flash a single LED on your Arduino, you are probably looking for a way to make cool patterns, but feel limited by the use of delay(). If you ask in the forums, you get told to look at the “Blink Without Delay” example. This example introduces the idea of replacing delay() with a state machine. If you’re confused how to use it, this tutorial is setup to take you from blinking two LEDs with delay, to using an alternate method, right down to how you can use millis().
From the company that brought us, “There is a worldwide need for no more than 5 computers”. IBM is announcing 5 Innovative Technologies we will see over the next 5 years.
In summary they are:
