Make you own PCB

I recently created a printed circuit board for a raspberry PI design i’m working on. By the past, when I did such things, the cost to make it was not accessible for a home made design. In 10 years things have change a lot and now, you can do it for less than 100€ for a 10×10 two layer board. 4 layer is also something accessible.

I want to share with you this experience, because, I had a good and an bad experience to share.

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Draw your circuit with a pen – electronic for fun & childs

You can imagine a lot of use cases for a such thing : a pen able to create electrical conductivity over ink. The one I found really interesting this morning is to make electronic a fun activity for my daughter. That’s the reason why I backed on this product.

This is a kickstarter project accessible for a couple of euros. I let you have a look to the project itself here .

 

 

New arduino Galileo ready for orders

Galileo is an Intel platform compatible with arduino ; more of that it is an embedded Pentium class platform. With 400MHz and 800mA and 55€ with Ethernet but no video out, I’m not totally sure this platform provides a real new thing in the embedded world.

By the way, it have some interesting advantages :

  • Compared to usual arduino platform, you have a really more powerfull system for the price of a small arduino + ethernet shield. Making this board interesting.
  • Compared to ARM based board, for a couple of Euro more, you have a full x86 compatible platform (32b) where you can run most of the existing x86 code.

I let you have your own advice, to take a look to the detailed description here and buy it here (actually 9w delay)

 

 

Feed back from Oracle OpenWorld 2013

I some may mentioned, I was at Oracle OpenWorld conference last week. The main points I retained regarding my point of interest are listed in the following prezi :

http://prezi.com/c1vlmudi2dh2/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Lots of activity around radio embedded systems (Internet of things)

We all know that Internet of things is going to be the next revolution and it’s on the way, we also know that this revolution will not come from some main existing IT leaders as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon … ( I won’t say Google, because they are good player here) but from a lot of non existent companies/startups. It’s really interesting to see what is happening on crowd founding place like kickstarter (Ok, Amazon is part of it) these days : for sure we can see Internet of things in creation with a lots of connected gadget founded. But you can also found all the raw material used by the future companies to make this revolution real.

A year ago we had a lot of buzz around Raspberry PI ( and it continue to grow even if I think the reality of this environment is under its promise ) which is an interesting platform like BeagleBoard Black coming this month is. In my opinion these platforms are good to do geeky stuff but suffer of two issues : not natively wireless and consuming too much power. I assume Internet of thinks is mostly mobile and wireless : because I won’t put many cables in my house to connect these objects : I want wifi/battery stuff!

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Idea of the day – Camera companion

After a long period without any idea commit, I propose to imagine a Digital Camera companion, compatible with the main reflex system canon and nikon. This system would be connected to the camera using the USB channel or eventually a dongle type on usb connector, or eventually a wifi memory card system. This is for the camera side. On a tablet side, all the taken photo would be received and transform. The idea is to add GPS location and easily apply filter like in instagram. This can also be use to make panorama automatically or create HDR.

The choice of an USB direct connection could help to automatically configure the camera like for HDR.

As all the idea in this category, feel free to comment, and develop, if you become rich with it … don’t forget to help me paying my house !

Valentine Day

valentine-2010

Idea of the day – automatic highway payment

The purpose to this idea is to save time at highway toll. Actually if you want to save time (at least in France) you need to have a specific and rented device detecting you and billing you. The current technology could allow the highway company to detect you car registration plate with a camera. This ID could be linked with a registration you have made online of different car you own and a credit card + a phone number.

Car would pass through the toll, be billed and this could be confirmed by an SMS sent to the user.

As a consequence, the system could be faster, not attached with a monthly payment and easier to manage (no hard device to move car to car, return, maintain …)

As all the idea in this category, feel free to comment, and develop, if you become rich with it … don’t forget to help me paying my house !