Anablog

Audio guru Steve Williams, who has a talent for finding obscure and outrageous things on the web, sent a link to a fellow selling 40-dollar duplex outlet covers. Yes, you read that right. The site claims they “produce a remarkable degree of focus, detail and presence” And be sure to use them on the non-audio and unused outlets in the room as well. Now Steve thinks this must be a joke. Look a the other things on the site — bags of pebbles that you tape to your cables, orange chunks of plastic that you glue to your CD tray. But the scary thing is that there are reviews from supposedly serious audiophile sites. But when I read that link I wonder if they are a joke site too. I have many engineer friends that love au...Read More

I just wrote an editorial complaining about sites that run java and JavaScript and require Flash animations to work. Reader Kevin Szabo noticed the editorial and sent me a link to an article that points out that Flash animations are not just annoying, they can send you to malicious sites that take over your machine (second story). Kevin writes:

I use firefox+flashblock and I now have flash blocked for most sites.  I can re-enable the rectangle with a single click (just for that page view) works great!  Browsing is much faster now that I don't have to have flash ads with animated rain inflicted upon me. 

Just another reason to love Mozilla and Opera web b...Read More

Web Editor-in-Chief Matt Miller got a note from Nicola Asuni about allpinouts.org. This is a wiki that uses the same engine as Wikipedia. They are collecting all manner of cable and connector pin-outs—hand stuff when you are trying to use a video card DAC to make modulated RF or some other fun project.

Now that TV stations and the press are announcing that analog TV is going to die next year, it is obvious that there is a lot of consumer confusion. I read one article where a reporter seemed to think the converter box was where the signal came from. Wrong, the death of analog TV affects people like me that use an antenna. They are mostly low-income people that cannot afford cable or satellite. You still need the antenna, it is just that you need a converter box, really a tuner, to demodulate the digital TV and then send it as an NTSC signal to your TV. You don’t need a big old yagi VHF antenna, a little loop will do. There is also some confusion about if all TVs are affected. Wrong, only TVs that use the NTSC modulation scheme need a converter box. My 5-year-old Sharp 45 inch LCD has an ATSC tuner and will not need a converter box. The same goe...Read More

Back in the 1980s I designed a bookbinding machine using a Hitachi micro-controller part that used a Motorola license. Motorola was mad at them for some other issue and pulled the license and I could no longer get the part. In 1998, not having learned my lesson, I used an Atmel AT90 microprocessor in a point of sale terminal. Atmel decided to obsolete that product and my design and all the software development was wasted. So I am always delighted to see some standard parts develop that have 20-year lifetimes. From the Tekmos press release:

The TK68HC05B6 provides 256 bytes of EEPROM, 16 bit timer, two PWM, watch dog timer, 8 channel A/D converter, 24 bit bi-directional I/O lines, on chip oscillator with crystal/ceramic resonator and serial communications capability. The TK68...Read More

EETimes had an interesting article about Supply Frame, an outfit like iSupply that provides info on semiconductor companies. Supply Frame may interest working engineers more since it focuses on part information. I would link to the EETImes article, but since they changed the name of it between print and web, and it took me 10 minutes to find it (by searching EETImes site for the author), I will, in protest of bad web practice, just link to the Supply Frame ranking. Be aware this is only what companies people get information for on Supply Frame’s website. If people are coming to a third-part site to get product info, it may be a ranking of bad semiconductor company web design more than anything else. I still am delighted to see that most every company is an analog design powerhouse. I guess I am going to be busy in this job.

There is a nice article in former Reed Business publication ECN magazine. The title: Software-only simulation: Fact or Phony? really caught my eye. The author, Shelly Gretlein, from National Instruments makes a pretty good case to counter outfits like Cadence and even my beloved Altium when they talk about going from simulation direct to design. All those claims do is show how completely removed from the real engineering world those companies are, and it is not a good sign.

Now most of you know how down on SPICE analog guru Bob Pease is. I have participated in flame wars with him and Analog Devices fellow Barrie Gilbert. Barrie thinks SPICE is just the cat’s m...Read More

EETimes has a nice article about a new chip that speeds the response of e-paper. Although e-paper has been around for a while we aren’t seeing the huge rush of applications that they produced 5 years ago. One issue with e-paper is that changing it from black to white takes up to a quarter second. While it was never intended that e-paper have moving pictures like an LCD, it does have to change whenever you flip to the next page. By using this Epson chip the paper can redraw the page much faster. Let’s hope this cool technology keeps moving forward.

It seems that lithium ion batteries are the only possible chance for practical plug-in hybrid vehicles. I wonder if there ever will be practical pure electric vehicles meant to replace your family car. It is only by reading in between the lines that you can see what a problem li-ion batteries are in cars. This article in the great Wards Auto World alludes to the headaches presented by li-ion batteries. Note how they talk about how this new li-ion battery, which is not in production, will fix all the existing problems. Oh, there are problems with li-ion? I guess so, and the problem is liability. Note how the article talks about how the improved ceramic-coated plastic separator in the battery is less susceptible to letting the battery go into thermal runaway. They also talk abou...Read More

Maxim applications engineer and eFlea aficionado Eric Schlaepfer sent me a link to some pictures of a 1000-watt light bulb I gave him at the last Electronics Flea Market. Of course, he fired it up, just like he did the carbon filament one he got at the eFlea last year. He writes:

I've attached some photos of the light bulb you gave to me at the flea market. In the second photo (1480), you can see a rather interesting and subtle piece of design. The glass stem that holds up the filament is actually divided into two pieces, and these are held together by the split metal sheath. T...Read More

TI has announced the annual $150,000 Engibous Prize. The downside is you have to be a senior in college to enter the Analog Design Contest that may get you a chunk of that cash. Now I remember the name Engibous. He was the TI chairman that just retired. It was under his watch that TI had the sense to see how the Speak and Spell toy could use a DSP and indeed, there are a lot of DSP applications. This came at a time when TI and National and IBM and everyone else was trying to take on Intel in the CPU business. Bad idea. By stopping the chase against Intel and developing a leadership in DSPs, TI became a major force in all kinds of imbedded systems. Then to top things off, they bought Unitrode/benchmarq and then Burr-Brown bec...Read More

FAE extraordinaire and good ol’ boy Jon Dutra sent a link to this video of a gasoline-powered robot. This thing is really great. It shows what I have been saying all along—when it comes to energy density, it is hard to beat liquid fuels. Gasoline has 36 kWh per gallon. Even if an internal combustion engine is 33% efficient in converting heat to power, it is still 11 kWh of energy and that is way more than any battery pack of the same size and weight can supply. Check out the video, it is really cool. Be sure to watch long enough to see the guy kick the robot and have it recover. Class act, Boston Dynamics.

On a similar note I see the head of powertrain engineering...Read More

Microsoft has developed a spy device that plugs into a computer’s USB port and then sucks out all the passwords and decrypts them. That along with histories and caches and all the other things that might implicate you in anything the government does not like. Yeah, Microsoft, Windows, and Security are three worlds that never went together too well. Other than yet another reason to despise Microsoft, this raises some very interesting issues. Remember when the Justice Department had Microsoft dead-to-rights on antitrust and non-competitive behavior? Remember how Microsoft was proved in court to have licensed Java from Sun and then in blatant violation of the license and the very intent of the...Read More

Maxim makes some great parts but their web site used to be a little lacking. For a while all they did was list all the parts of one type— you looked at the datasheet title to see if it might work. This was not too useful for people that did not have the time or interest in meeting their friendly neighborhood well-dressed Maxim field application engineer. Now they have created a parametric search tool. Click on “Operational Amplifiers 143” for example, and it will take you to a web page where there are sliders to change the various parameters you are interested in. It works pretty fast, at least on a 3 meg DSL line.

Audio guru Steve Williams tipped me off to what may be the first video-disk, except I guess it is a video-drum. It is a combination of an Ediphone Dictaphone and a narrow-band television player. Actually it both records and plays the narrow-band TV signal, so I guess it is VDR—video drum recorder. As Steve says: “Analog ... you want analog?”