hardware – Page 2 – Mattiesworld

DIY gadgets

I was quite astonished to read about this BUG platform: “an open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform”. This kinda says it all. 🙂 It’s still in beta, but they are targeting Q4 2007 right now to release their BUG-base, the core product, featuring an ARM microprocessor and all kind of interfaces you might desire (notice the MPEG4 HW encoding/decoding support!). Like this featurefest is not enough yet, you can extend the base station with all kind of modules: “GPS, Digital Camera / Videocam, Touch-sensitive Color LCD Screen, Accelerometer, Motion Sensor”, you name it! Before you stop drooling over the hardware specs, save some drool to drool on the software specs. 🙂 They have it nicely running on an OSGi framework! Extension galore. Judging by the screenshots, I have the impression they are running it on the eclipse framework which is an extension of OSGi (Paul, correct me if I’m wrong ;)).

This really seems the ultimate “toy for boys” or “Lego Mindstorms for adults” 🙂 at least in a geeky world 😉

Reminds me of this site/magazine where creating DIY gadgets is just daily routine.. 🙂

Where is SED?

This is one of my really old drafts. More than half a year ago I was looking for
a new monitor and had a hard time deciding whether it would be an LCD or CRT one.
Everyone buys an LCD these days, so what is my problem?
LCD advantages:
– weight
– less space needed

Do NOT read more

. 😉 Now, where does SED come in? I just wanted to spread the word. SED is for me the solution to my

Do NOT read more

here are some url’s for reference _1_ _2_

Raid

I updated my system page. Yup, I finally bought the 2 SATA drives I would hook up to my onboard RAID controller, like a few years ago. 😉 I picked the model carefully: a western digital 250GB with 16MB cache. The drive was so popular that I had to wait a few weeks before it became available again.
Continue reading Raid

Tom Cruise interface

Remember Minority Report where Tom Cruise handles some futuristic computer interface swinging things around using his both hands? That’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I first watched Tactiva’s tactapad in action 🙂 (thanks Peter ;)). Not as futuristic as in the movie, but very cool nevertheless!

Centrino cores explained

I never really got the difference between all the centrino cores. Within a few weeks, I’ll be having a centrino laptop at work, so it’s nice to know something about it ;).

Microsoft makes deals with hardware vendors

or so it seems ;). They really seem to be pushing new technology with Windows Vista. Of course, Windows Vista is far from released. An interesting read anyway about Windows Vista’s hardware requirements. Particularly, I wasn’t aware of Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which is standard in S-ATA 2 drives, and which will be (ab)used by Windows Vista.