Flutterby™! : ESC

Rundown from the Embedded Systems Conference:

Ran into Brian Warner, we're going to have to get together and do lunch. We also need a way to get a critical mass of folks on Petmail for some application, if you can think of a place where strongly permission based replacement for SMTP mail would be apropos, give a holler.

Also ran into John "USPA87419" Lewis, whom I haven't seen since we worked together on the Toy Story Animated StoryBook. He's been building a cute little video player.

Products that I thought deserved a look:

• 36 channel 500MHz 1M sample logic analyzer for circa $3k. USB to a PC for display. From NCI.
• I've loved the service that I've gotten from ExpressPCB, but the folks at PCB-POOL seem like they might have a good deal when turnaround times aren't so critical but price is.
• Embedded Solutions AG had an ARM7 with 16 meg of SRAM and 2 meg of flash on a card that fits into a 48 pin DIP socket for circa $100 quantity 1. This and a few other projects got me to thinking that what a whole lot of these companies are lacking is better marketing. More on that in a future post...
• Ever since I discovered that the materials used to make EL wire were available in silkscreen form I've been wondering about using 'em to make a raster display. Twist Semiconductor does high voltage drivers. I think they're a fabless shop, but if I ever get to the point where I think that that'd make a good product and would be worth getting funding to do a couple of thousand devices they're worth having in mind.
• International Rectifier looks like they've got some good servo drive chipsets.
• Net Chip has a USB slave to PCI device, which might make a good way to build big devices that can talk to the host PC via USB. This would be a good alternative to, say, HTTP over TCP/IP because it's easier for your average MIS flunky to configure (yes, I, alas, speak from experience on this...)
• Among the many vendors with 802.11b modules was Lantronix(http//www.lantronix.com/), but with most of these devices, just as with the ethernet to microcontroller devices I saw last year, I couldn't shake the feeling that implementing your own protocol stack and building that part of the software into the device is better than layering in another stage.
• I got a demo disk for some simulation software from Vector CANtech for looking at CANbus networks, I'll have to see how helpful that looks.

And I'm thinking there'll be some really cool stuff to come out of ZigBee^tm. Transceivers for $4 in low quantities with antennas that can just be printed on to the boards, super low power consumption, lower data rate than Bluetooth, but a lot more range and plenty of throughput for many of the applications for which I find wireless interesting.