Category Archives: News

Microchip expands 8-bit PIC® microcontroller lineup with new 20-pin chips

Microchip Technology Inc., today announced an expansion of its existing 28-/40-pin PIC16F72X microcontroller (MCU) family with two new 20-pin devices—the PIC16F(LF)720 and PIC16F(LF)721. The new MCUs feature low power consumption, making them suitable for various low-power and battery-powered applications. These MCUs offer up to 7 KB of self-write Flash program memory, a temperature-indicator module, an […]

Xilinx releases ISE Design Suite 13

Xilinx has released version 13.1 of their ISE Design Suite. including a number of new features. This software is used to develop programs from Xilinx CPLD and FPGA products, including the CoolRunner-II chips found in our development boards. The suite includes the free Webpack ISE. Note that this is a ~4 GB download. However, Xilinx […]

Short notice: AVR Studio 5 webinar

Atmel is presenting a free webinar on March 17, 2011 on AVR Studio 5. This one hour presentation will begin at 8:00 AM PDT and will cover the Visual Assist Solution Explorer project manager, the AVR Software Framework for AVR XMEGA and AVR UC3 and more including many example projects. You can download your copy […]

Trends: microcontrollers outsource interrupt handling

In this article, Chris Edwards highlights the reasons behind moving interrupt handling from the main microcontroller onto to low power companion chips. In order to conserve electricity and processor power, the growing practice is to have the bulk of the microcontroller powered down most of the time, only waking up for brief periods for necessary […]

Pi day

Much to the delight of many eccentric math teachers, today is PI day. Probably organized as a way to interest kids in math, many of us may have at some point in our lives have been involved in the celebration of this important number. We would love to hear about your experiences, or how you […]

Openstack: open source, open standards cloud

Openstack is celebrating its six month anniversary! OpenStack is a collection of open source technologies delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system. OpenStack is currently developing two interrelated projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. OpenStack Compute is the underlying cloud computing fabric controller for the OpenStack cloud. This means that all activities within the […]

FPGAs used to trade stock

Here’s an example of FPGAs being used in a serious application: high-frequency trading (HFT), the execution of computerized stock trading strategies. The device pictured above is the HFT-X Development Kit by Stone Ridge Technology. Under the hood this device sports one Xilinx PCIe Bridge FPGA, one Xilinx Virtex-5 Processing FPGA, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 1G, 10G, […]

Atmel announces new CryptoAuthentication chip

Atmel today announced the release of the ATSHA204 the first turnkey, optimized authentication device to include a 4.5Kbit EEPROM and a hardware SHA-256 accelerator. Fully tested ASF software libraries are available for Atmel AVR® and ARM®-based microcontrollers and are integrated within the new AVR Studio® 5. Contemplated uses include industrial, consumer, energy metering, home automation, […]

Updated Fritzing release

We previously highlighted Fritzing, an open source GUI based program that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, show them in a presentation, and create a pcb layout for professional manufacturing. The developers have released an updated version, which contains a number of improvements including a completely new autorouter, improved footprints for […]

TI intros first 2-channel, simultaneous-sampling ADCs with independently controlled internal references

Texas Instruments today introduced the industry’s first two-channel, simultaneous-sampling successive approximation (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with two independently controlled internal references for simplified system-level design. The 16-bit ADS8363, 14-bit ADS7263 and 12-bit ADS7223 are pin-for-pin compatible and provide twice the per-channel throughput of similar ADCs, supporting speeds up to 1 MSPS for industrial and energy […]

Modkit beta released

The first public beta of Modkit, an in-browser graphical programming environment for microcontrollers, has been released. Modkit allows you to program Arduino and Arduino compatible hardware using simple graphical blocks and/or traditional text code. Modkit’s graphical blocks are heavily inspired by the Scratch programming environment developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media […]

Testing the Seeeduino Stalker in extreme conditions

Seeed Studio is torture testing the Seeeduino Stalker, all-weather data-logging device: To survive in the weather like “2012″ or “the day after tomorrow”, this is not enough. We want to find the limitation of Seeeduino Stalker. Interesting project. What’s the most extreme conditions your projects have faced?

Sensor + microcontroller = smart sensor

Sensors are commonly used in conjunction with microcontrollers which read the sensor’s output and make decisions based on it. Now a new class of smart sensors is being introduced which will integrate the sensor and microcontroller in one unit. One example is the Freescale MMA9550L, the industry’s first intelligent high precision motion sensing platform that […]

Short notice: Free Atmel Webinar

Atmel is offering a free webinar on Designing with Atmel 6-pin tinyAVR Flash microcontrollers TODAY (February 24, 2011) at 8:00 AM PT. The purpose is to present an advanced feature overview of the Atmel tinyAVR 6-pin family of Atmel picoPower® devices, highlighting the key benefits and design techniques for reducing your system size requirements and […]

Free Oreilly workshop – Processing and Arduino in Tandem: Build a Mixer

Oreilly is offering a special follow-up to their earlier Processing and Arduino course. “Processing and Arduino in Tandem: Build a Mixer” will be presented free online by Instructor Joseph Gray on two successive Fridays. The course makes use of the projBox, a control box with installed potentiometers, switches and LEDs, which interfaces with the Arduino […]

TI launches video repository

Texas Instruments has announced a new video website: TI recently launched a new video repository which really takes us to the next level in online video. This new system (which can be found at http://videos.ti.com) creates a one-stop-shop for seeing all the video content, High quality video streaming with full screen capability. Share functionality which […]