With smartphones becoming the center of many people’s universe, there is a growing need for the ability to connect them to normal monitors for easier viewing, especially among older users. To facilitate this, Analogix Semiconductor offers its SlimPort technology to interface smartphones and tablets to any nearby display.   SlimPort uses the DisplayPort open standard, which has been adopted by many computer makers because there are no royalty fees for the high-definition multimedia...

To make it easier for programmers who work with high-level languages to take advantage of the capabilities of programmable logic devices, Altera has launched a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) and supported third-party production boards. This ties in with Altera’s recently announced Preferred Board Partner Program, which allows third-party board vendors to work closely with Altera to design optimized production boards based on Altera’s programmable...

The compact computer boards offered by the open-source BeagleBoard organization support a variety of Linux distributions and provide laptop computing power in vest-pocket format. The latest member of the family, dubbed “BeagleBone Black”, has credit-card dimensions and features a 1 GHz AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 3D graphics accelerator, NEON floating point accelerator, 512 MB SDRAM and 2 GB flash, as well as Ethernet, USB Client and Host, MicroHDMI and MicroSD ports....

It doesn’t matter if you’re just beginning to scratch the surface of PCB manufacturing, or an accomplished engineer looking to expand their repertoire: this guide to Eagle v6 offers a comprehensive, accessible introduction to CadSoft’s PCB design software package.   After learning how to navigate the main modules of Eagle’s user-friendly interface, readers will go on to apply that knowledge to a variety of small projects while developing a better understanding of how Eagle relates...

RS Components (RS) is celebrating the first anniversary of the launch of Raspberry Pi with the unveiling of a special limited edition of the low-cost, credit-card-sized computer board. Just 1,000 Raspberry Pi Model B, Revision 2 boards have been produced by RS in an exclusive blue color. Each limited edition board is stamped with a serial number and is supplied in a special presentation box together with a crystal blue user case and a certificate of authenticity signed by Eben Upton,...

Esteco, a provider of numerical optimization and modeling solutions, brings hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) capabilities to LabVIEW projects with m4LV. This enables LabVIEW users to improve product performance and reduce testing time. The innovative integration solution, a light version of modeFRONTIER, helps engineers and scientists to quickly arrive at a desired response from the hardware or system under test.   The advanced algorithms in modeFRONTIER, a multidisciplinary environment for...

STMicroelectronics has rolled out innovative Java development software and microcontrollers aimed at making simple, low-cost, high-tech equipment easy to use. STM32Java provides a toolbox for building advanced graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for products such as kitchen appliances, office machines, industrial tools and medical instruments, based on STM32 microcontrollers. Following up on the STM3220G-JAVA Starter Kit introduced in May 2012, the new toolbox provides customers with everything...

Location is a fundamental service for mobile computing. Typical GPS receivers, although widely available, consume too much energy to be useful for many applications. Observing that in many sensing scenarios, the location information can be post-processed when the data is uploaded to a server, Microsoft researchers designed a Cloud-Offloaded GPS (CO-GPS) solution that allows a sensing device to keep its GPS receiver unpowered most of the time while logging just enough raw GPS signal for post...

A flexible tablet design created by Queens University  (UK) in collaboration with Intel Labs and Plastic Logic offers innovative control features, according to the development team. The PaperTab tablet is built around a flexible 10.7-inch plastic display developed by Plastic Logic (Cambridge, England) and is powered by a Core i5 processor. Early prototypes are based on Plastic Logic's monochrome display. The PaperTab project was developed at the Human Media Lab at Queen's...

Do you have an Android smartphone or tablet? Would you like to use it to control your espresso machine, your toaster or to improve your animated Christmas decorations? Do you have an idea for a cool game or some other useful app? If you answered yes to these questions then you may have to do some Android application programming. For those who do not know where to start we have the solution: our brand new Android Apps programming book. This book takes you step by step through the Android...

Rakshasa is malware buried deep inside the firmware of an Intel motherboard granting backdoor access to any outside party who knows what to look for. Rakshasa can replace the original boot firmware at time of manufacturing and is extremely difficult to detect. You could be buying a computer -or any hardware for that matter- with a backdoor already installed.   Developed by security expert Jonathan Brossard the Rakshasa code was demonstrated at the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas last...

UK based DSPRobotics released Version 3 of their FlowStone graphical programming language. This version marks a cornerstone in the company’s development as it now includes the entire feature set from their sister software SynthMaker as well as a host of new features, developments, and expanded Ruby Code support.   As of today both products will live on under the FlowStone brand and continue to support an ever expanding market including rapid software development, engineering, robotics,...

Intel has reported positive results from a year-long test of a novel system that cools servers by immersing them in mineral oil. A cooling power usage effectiveness (PUE) figure of 1.02 to 1.03 was measured with no impact on the performance of the seven dual-socket Xeon servers. This means that the oil vats needed only two to three percent more energy than the servers themselves. By contrast, a typical data centre has a cooling PUE as high as 1.6, meaning that non-IT equipment in the data...

Manchester (UK) based software engineering services company Codethink has developed a Linux build system for the development of embedded, industrial or bare-metal server-based Linux systems built on server technology. The company launched Baserock Embedded Linux as an open source release codenamed ‘Secret Volcano’ and the Baserock.org support site.   The Secret Volcano release provides virtual machine images for developers and a sample base image to demo a Baserock-generated small system...

The French company Saphir develops add-on libraries for National Instrument’s (NI) graphical programming language LabVIEW. Two of the company’s most important products are the ModBus and MySQL toolkits. ModBus is a ubiquitous standard that provides a convenient way to communicate with a wide variety of industrial devices. Almost twenty years ago, in 1994, Saphir started working on its ModBus toolkit for LabVIEW and the company has been improving it ever since. Recently support for LabVIEW...