Open Source Community Boards

The open source community has now extended into embedded hardware.  We have seen this growing for the past few years but now we are starting to see documentation around the solutions so that even the novice can start improving their skills on these embedded processors.  A few of the suppliers I know that are popular out there are Broadcom with the Raspberry PI, TI with its line of DaVinci and Sitara Processors, Atmel with the Arduino, and now Samsung with the Arndale.  Being a hardware guy by background it gets overwhelming to have to delve into the world of software with all the jargon out there. Sometimes I get frustrated and want to throw my hands up. I did decide to pick up one of the boards and see how far I could get.  I ended up choosing TI's Beaglebone and successfully drove a 17inch display.  What I still struggle with is all the ins and outs of porting code from the target development environment to a custom board.  Has anyone found any good training, books, websites that help walk through this?

Google Voice

I have been searching around for a new mobile phone and finally made my decision.  I decided on the Motorola Droid Razr M.  The biggest reason has nothing to do with the phone but I wanted to support the engineers that I know from Motorola who work very hard on the hardware design.  The phone is great but in this blog I wanted to review the voice features.  This is very important to me as I am constantly on the road. 

The things that impress me most are the "navigate to" command and the "go to" command.  The "go to" command opens up a webpage based on what you are saying.  If it can't find an exact match it does a google search and gives you the results.  I have found this to be a much better way to navigate web pages than typing in the address.  The "navigate to" feature lets you say a location or an exact address.  The first time I tried it with my home address it worked like a charm.  I was shocked.  This is my first experience with expanded voice features.

The downsides of the voice were the calling and emailing options.  I think this largely has to do with my contacts being in my Good application and not through google.  However, I have not investigated this further.  If I try to call someone it never finds them on my phone and then tries to do a google search for this person.  That rarely ends up succesfull.  For the email options, the message dictation is great, but I can never get it to send to the correct person. 

Overall I am impressed with the voice features that have evolved in the past few years since my last phone.  I hope this trend continues.

Best Design Tools

I was hoping to get some feedback from readers on what they use for schematic capture, code development, and any other handy tools that are out there that you find useful.

For schematics, I really like DesignSparkPCB for free software.  For a paid version, I would love to get a personal copy of Altium. If anyone is willing to donate, I would gladly accept.

For code development a good editor like VIM or gVim is my default.  I do like eMACs.  The integrated IDEs are nice but I don't usually need the features or the cost that they provide. 

I do hope more silicon vendors provide free tools as I do feel this is the best way to provide a barrier free entry to developing with their devices.

What do you think?

Promoting Technology

Every day I get inspired by some of the great engineers I meet on a day to day basis.  We talk about new innovative ideas and sometimes it gets left at that, just a great idea.  Well what if you could take that idea and work with people who share a similar passion?  If your work allows you to do this, than definitely keep that job!  :) If not, I wanted to share a few links that I thought might inspire you.  Both of these events / groups are in the Wisconsin area, but it might be time to check out if there are groups near you:

1.) Sector 67 - This is a non-profit group in Madison that promotes prototyping of your ideas.  I love the concept and plan to visit on a road-trip soon:

http://www.sector67.org/

2.) Start Up Weekend - Coming to Milwaukee on November 9th is a great event for technologists, artists, marketing, and financing people interested in that next big idea.  You can work with a stellar group of people who might share the same interest:

 http://milwaukee.startupweekend.org/

Blogs and Sites That I use

I really enjoy reading about new products and releases of new silicon devices.  Does anyone subscribe to websites, blogs, RSS Feeds that they get good information from?

Here are the sites I constantly monitor:
http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/ 
http://www.engadget.com/ 
http://gizmodo.com/
http://www.eevblog.com/
http://hackaday.com/
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs

I use Google Reader to subscribe and learn more.  Are there any blogs you use?