Nishanth' tech rambles

Cortex-A15 MPCore - Welcome to the next generation!! update: 20100910: more of the TI story slashgeared !

found this article pretty interesting

High time I "ported" my posts from facebook back here.. so here it goes Some really bad code stories: shared by rob clark - how bad can some code go?? http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Shenanigans-Handler.aspx Aint this cool: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/09/horrifically-bad-software-demos-become-performance-art.ars Techno Curios: Tired of fullspeed, highspeed, lowspeed?? how about superspeed?? tired of acronymns already?? http://www.pcworld.com/article/172757/wheres_usb_30.html Search for my cheap oscilloscope goes on: http://www.micahcarrick.com/06-06-2006/pc-sound-card-oscilloscope-linux.html http://www.fpga4fun.com/digitalscope.html Hacks 'nd bytes: PS3 back with Hulu.. http://www.ypass.net/blog/2009/06/got-a-ps3-want-hulu-back-easy-enough/

here are the sessions in the conference: http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_europe09/sessions.html Includes Sascha and my personal fav - u-boot v2 .

Been feeling guilty of not blogging the last few months.. anyways, here is something of interest. For all those interested, see here LinuxCon takes place on Sept 21-23 -> registration is running if you like to take part in. there is also bunch of parallel conferences happening. see the list here what would really be interesting for OMAP is the linux plumber's conf and Han's new V4l2 plan Be there if you would like to see a new architecture for OMAP3 and beyond taken care in new spec of V4l2...

beagleboard.org has already a pretty active community in linkedin.. the following news items were picked up from the groups' Cloumnist update ( ;) thank you.. great job by the way): GL to GLES converter announced http://code.google.com/p/gl-wes-v2/ Good for Pandora, the OMAP3 based gaming platform Recommend Link: http://code.google.com/p/gl-wes-v2/ White paper: Power-management techniques for OMAP35x From: E-R: RSS Columnists | May 26, 2009 TI's OMAP3 application processors address the need for low power without sacrificing performance. Static power management idles a system in a power-efficient state until processing is required, while active power management adjusts More » White paper: Power-management techniques for OMAP35x Link: http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/gencontent.tsp?co...

Gumstix guys have been a fun bunch known to create tiny little boards at low costs.. Overo seems to be their solution for OMAP3! check it out here . lots of the linux guys hacking are in the beagle community too.. you can find many(such as Steve Sakoman) in the beagle irc also if you are interested..

Jack Kilby invented IC this very day 50 years back :).. And guess what? in his memory, Texas Instruments has started Kilby Labs . We have come some way in the last 50 years.. and beagleboard is one of the shining lights of what our technology really is :)

It has been a hectic few weeks recently.. couple of more weeks to go before i get enough time to get to opensource again.. but it has been interesting few days, some real cool new devices to play with, pretty short challenging timelines, and yet, things seem to go fine.. Some interesting news: Sacha did finally put out a branch on u-boot v2 for i2c I still need to look at that. this is required for getting u-boot v2's USB mode working talking to TWL4030/5030 transciever is over i2c. Dirk has been reminding me to put out patches I had been stocking the last few days: nand, etc.. I was hoping I could do it today, but i am worn out :( (sorry Dirk.. I break my promise yet again.. ).. And guess what? I finally did get my Head mounted display last week.. kinda low res at 640x480.. and composite video.. should be fine though for beagle. Khasim did say that he got USB camera streaming working on Angstrom, + Koen reports having Sphinx voice recognition and festival text to speech working...

PWM dimming is done on certain LCD displays. here is an article which gives some fundamentals on this. and here is an article on modulation. Now here is some data on JESD204 std for serial comm. on cellphone front, this article speaks about energy scavenging phones. I guess it'd be interesting to convert body heat, body movement back into energy, thinking of it, there are multiple opportunities: a) body movement (peizo) b) body or component heat/ temperature differences(thermocouple) c) light (e.g. sunlight) (photovoltaic) d) pressure (peizo) e)(ok this is a bit fetchy..) crossing magnetic field of earth.. f) electromagnetic noise (I mean there are tons of devices throwing out wireless energy around rt? what if other devices can convert that back to useful energy if the signal is not meant for them?) g) barometric pressure differences? Ok I seem to have run of ideas for the moment, but hell yeah! why just cellphones, probably is energy scavenging or energy "recycle" g...

This article was pretty interesting PowerQuicc Dual-core, 4 Watt consumption and they also speak of a 8 core consuming

David Woodhouse (MTD) and Paul Gortmaker (Windriver, Network dev) More here and here The usual flow for OMAP patches has been: dev -> Tony -> Russel -> Linus . How does this new flow change it? there is a new mailing list . interesting musings.. As the quote goes: The maintainer's job would involve an architecture independent appraisal of the embedded code and generally keeping the code in good working order. Just like a big bunch of guys in this thread , I wonder how does is it all going to work...

Thanks to Dirk Behme, this news is very interesting. Here is the link to the discussion and here is the link to download .

Quote: Memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit element, joining the other three -- resistor, capacitor and inductor. ... It is as fundamental to electronic engineering as a chemical element is to chemistry or an electron is to physics http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/145365/hp_researchers_build_intelligent_memory.html Slashdotted here Tempest Declassified: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/topheadlines/~3/280951697/nsa-releases-se.html Indian economy given a respite: Given the "state" of economy today, this is not a bad news.

Voice contributions: encouraging an open source speech recognition: http://www.voxforge.org/home/read

interesting ..

And I thought 45nm is bleeding edge? take that! 32nm from IBM!!! http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9918278-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5 Darn.. what is the life time of a fab in this fight?? This is kinda interesting Opera following Android foot steps: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/opera_android/ Found this funny: missing five minutes for morons (that includes me;) ). http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/14/linux_manual/

Embedded and Intel.. http://embedded.intel.com/ (funny to see flash, Lia welcoming us around..).. If you are interested.. Embedded Systems Conference is to shoot off in Mid April in San Jose.. will probably add more info later.. Checkout this weeks' newsletter for more articles.. some papers are pretty interesting.. I am duly interested in UML for embedded sytems, static code analysis (yet to see something better than lint) - but there is some interesting security aspect as presented here..

Mebbe I am seeing this late.. searching for something else.. hit this link: http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbudocumentcenter.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12667 then I see this: OMAP34xx Wireless Technical Reference Manual (swpu114g.pdf, 47 MB) 03 Apr 2008 Download

--Chip industry confronts 'software gap' between multicore,programming--The industry is just starting to address what's being called asoftware gap between a rising tide of multicore processors and a lackof parallel programming tools and techniques to make use of them. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBICQ0FyTZ10FrX0FwvC0As --ARC, Toshiba extend licensing deal--ARC International and Toshiba have extended their partnershipdeveloping configurable multi-processor technology and, as part of thedeal, the Japanese chip maker has also extended its license to use theARChitect Processor Configurator. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBICQ0FyTZ10FrX0FwvE0Au --Consolidating the MCU market around the ARM architecture--It's inevitable. ARM's Cortex-M3 processor core is going dominate theMCU market - so says Jean Anne Booth of ARM microcontroller companyLuminary. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBICQ0FyTZ10FrX0FwvF0Av I am curious about multi cor...