Living the pipe dream at Design West

From guest blogger Randy White: Remember that animated video of the pipes and balls with synchronized music? The video is called “Pipe Dream” and was made about 11 years ago. Below is a screen shot from the video in case you’re not familiar with it.

Last week at the 2012 Design West show in San Jose, attendees were treated to a “live” version of this video. This project was designed by Intel and Sisu Devices, a company well-known in the industrial-controls industry. Check out the video showing the real-life version of this musical and electronics extravaganza.

The “Pipe Dream” demo was certainly one of the highlights of the show, but there were many others. For those of you into Star Wars and radio-controlled vehicles, here’s a video demo of a cool “high-tech” RC truck in action. Not only will you see NXP’s 32-bit microcontroller but you’ll also see built-in RFID, LED lighting, front camera, and more.

One of the highlights at the Tektronix booth was an embedded RF design challenge with the MDO4000 mixed-domain oscilloscope. The challenge involved finding the delay of when an SPI command was sent to change a VCO output frequency to when the actual RF signal reaches its steady state. Even our booth neighbor (Android mascot) got to try it out.

Have any big adventures at Design West yourself? Be sure to add your highlights in the comments section below.

Randy White is the Serial Applications Technical Marketing Manager at Tektronix. Randy has worked with various aspects of test and measurement solutions at Tektronix over the past few years. He has given seminars on high-speed serial measurements and is actively involved in many working groups for high-speed serial standards. He holds a BSEE from Oregon State University in Corvallis.