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In order to "jam" GPS, you really only need to produce a signal at 1.57542 Ghz. So, don't do that. Don't go to
http://archive.chipcenter.com/TestandMeasurement/ed030.html and don't build the circuit. Don't build these devices and apply them liberally.

Really, that would be a very anarchistic thing to do.

Most cellphones coming out now (with the notable exception of smartphones (except for Blackberry)) are Java enabled. If you've purchased a game on your cellphone is it likely written in Java.
Motorola was among the first to adopt Java in all their new phones: http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/columns/oct2000/mobd ev13.html

Since then most other cellphone manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-268154.html, http://archive.chipcenter.com/knowledge_centers/wi reless/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10800173

As for hardware execution of bytecode, what's happening now is not the original approach that Sun attempted (i.e. integrating a bytecode interpreter right into the CPU). What is happening now is that several vendors are selling "accelerator" chips that sit between the CPU and the SRAM and execute the bytecodes for the CPU. This modular design has made it easier to integrate these accelerators into existing designs. The Nazomi JA108 is one of the more successful models from what I can gather.

You still have to run a virtual machine, however with the accelerator chip actually executing the bytecodes you get vastly improved performance and reduced battery drain.

Some of these accelerators are even finding their way into other technologies as well, not just cell phones: http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?AD=1& ArticleID=1916

I could polish up this list a little but Google is your friend too :)

Syndrome: You have a Compact Fluorescent lamp powered through an X10 Appliance Module (Am486 or equivalent). You command the X10 module to turn off power to the CF lamp, and it does, but, after a second or two, it turns right back on.
This is repeatable, consistent behavior when the CF lamp is the only load on the X10 module, but things behave properly (off means OFF) when you plug an incandescent lamp into the module in parallel (low-wattage, 7W and up, will fix this behavior, but that's 7W of power wasted on heating up a resistor until it glows). Oh, and, to limit this to something about which I have direct knowledge, your local power mains are 110VAC, not 220VAC, although all of this except for the module model number may directly apply to the 220VAC version as well for all I know.

Cause: The X10 module has a "local sense" feature intended to allow you to command the module to turn on by physically switching the controlled device off-and-on; the CF lamp is triggering this feature.
The Compact Fluorescent lamp, as a load, does not behave like a simple resistor, instead its loading fluctuates at its own flash rate. It contains an electronic circuit in its base which rectifies and filters mains power to feed an oscillator, which then flashes the fluorescent lamp at a rate much higher than 60Hz. When the power is switched off, there is enough power stored in the filter's capacitor for the oscillator to trigger the local-sense circuit in the module.

Cure: Disable the X10 module's "local sense" feature.
There are several writeups on this around the Net; a quick search ("Am486 local sense") turned up this pageand this one, both of which discuss several forms of X10/CF misbehavior and point to how-tos specific to the Am486 module. If your module is different, search using its nearest-equivalent X10-brand model number (Radio Shack, for one, sells house-branded X10 modules with different numbers but obvious similarities).
Remember, you are dealing with mains power, which can kill people and set fire to things if abused; use caution, patience, and the right tools here.

Circuit Cellar has an article on building an Ethernet board here.
The CS8900 is capable of being used with an 8- or 16- bit cpu. Perfect for interfacing with small computers.

Low-k? Welcome to the ballgame. IBM rolled out low-k, SOI, and Cu three years ago ... on 0.13 micron. See here and here. So did Intel.

Low-k? Welcome to the ballgame. IBM rolled out low-k, SOI, and Cu three years ago ... on 0.13 micron. See here and here. So did Intel.

Well, if you're planning on doing real-time encryption of that much data, odds are very good you're planning to use a hardware encryption widget of some kind. For example, according to this article, Xilinx has developed an FPGA that implements DES at 10 Gb/s. 'course, I'd imaging there are ASICs out there with even better performance (I only performed a cursory search).

Yeah right, have a look at this this site

Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are optoelectronic devices based on small molecules or polymers that emit light when an electrical current flows through them. They are being developed for applications in flat panel displays. A simple OLED consists of a fluorescent organic layer sandwiched between two metal electrodes. Under application of an electric field, electrons and holes are injected from the two electrodes into the organic layer, where they meet and recombine to produce light.

Or have a look here

Polymers by such tongue twisting names as polythiopene (red), polyfluorene (blue) and polyphenylenvinylen (green) consist of aromatic benzene rings which are pearl strung via carbon double bonds. As in conventional light-emitting diodes, the benzene electrons are excited by an exterior voltage of 3 to 5 Volt. In returning to their original state they emit light in a colour specific to their material which is exceptionally brilliant and soft.

Uh... The americium only acts as a radiation source. The smoke alarm still needs a battery (or mains connection) to actually do anything useful with the detected radiation levels. The deep space probes have used radioactive fuel cells driving thermopiles - it's the grey cylinder sticking out of the side in this picture. On a smaller scale, there's this little wonder, which just about fills your gap.

Actually, Lee is a friend of mine...and he used to be my editor at ChipCenter, before ChipCenter set all of us free. He did work at NASA, he swears the story is true, he's never lied to me before, ergo, I believe him. :)

LEE GOLDBERG - Armed with a Bachelors in electrical engineering from Thomas Edison College, Lee spent 20 years deep in the bowels of the electronics industry before deciding to trade in his scope probe for a pen. During this time, he gained experience in designing and using microprocessor-based systems for everything from measuring the thickness of baby bottle nipples to monitoring and controlling solar and wind-power generating systems. An eight-year stint in the aerospace industry found him heavily involved with the design and test of scientific instruments for an interplanetary spacecraft.

http://www.chipcenter.com/networking/goldberg_bio. html

A CF to PIC interface was described in Circuit Cellar a while ago. A word of caution if you plan something like this is that the 8-bit ATA mode might or might not be supported on newer CF cards. (What! I NEEDED 256 MB)

I found the link att Jeff Frohwein's

What does this article have to do with the "anti-communist messages" that were found in Win 95? There is a one sentence blurb in this article. And after searching google all I came up with was a couple of board postings that were from an e-mail that was from a guy who has a dog....

Sorry for the cynicisism, but if there is any truth to this there is little credibility behind it.

http://www.chipcenter.com/columns/bmcginty/col002. html

I thought about this after my digital design class. I'd built a "single board" computer before with a whopping 2K of RAM and another 2K of EEPROM, so I wanted to make an expanded version with real I/O. Character LCD displays are really cheap, as in $7-$15 for small ones. Graphics displays might cost you $50-$100 for a small monochrome one. Check out Marlin P Jones for okay deals on surplus stuff.

For my own project, I decided that the display portion alone was difficult enough to merit an A in my lab, so I built a PIC microcontroller-based NTSC video game (Breakout -- check out the links at the bottom of the page for PIC Tetris!). Looking at Altera's UP1 FPGA evaluation board, displaying VGA at 640x480x60Hz with 16 colors isn't even very difficult (Altera UP1 at GA Tech). Try using a standard method of output like this, and you'll have a lot more fun and be able to do a lot more than with a $7 20x2 LCD module.

Input is pretty much the same. Sure, you could use a custom keypad, but why bother when you can interface with a PS/2 mouse or keyboard? Specs are widely available, and this will impress people much more than a row of DIP switches. This can be done on a relatively small FPGA (~20K gates) which Altera's university program sells on full development boards for $150.

For even more fun, try interfacing with compact flash for storage (Circuit Cellar Article). Then realize that you've just implemented a basic IDE interface, and expand it to do hard drives. Design a character generator for your NTSC or VGA output, write a simple filesystem, and have a whole computer with standard parts that you built yourself!

If that's still too intimidating, just look at company Application notes for ideas. You can find some strange ideas and take them all the way.

> Quite right. I'll be getting an XBox first thing on Nov. 8, and
> next thing I'll do is crack it open and get Linux running on it.

Then, stop feeding Microsoft and buy a real computer.

Want some nice platforms to hack on? Look here,
here, here, here, here and here.

Some are expensive, some are cheap, but I bet that all
of them will be way more interesting that any Microsoft
crap. And there are plenty of these around.

But, please, stop giving more money to Microsoft.

I agree, though I do understand it may seem silly to hook up a keyboard or mouse to a computer via firewire; easily done, but it kind of seems a waste of bandwidth (not that that really matters).

On the topic of FireWire, I just read this:
http://www.Chipcenter.com/networking/ieee1394/page 1.html

Page 2 is really interesting. It looks like FireWire is following this path:

800 Mbit/sec this year
1.6 Gbit/sec in 2001
h 3.2 Gbit/sec for 2002

The P1394B (Gigabit 1394) page has some good content too.

I agree, though I do understand it may seem silly to hook up a keyboard or mouse to a computer via firewire; easily done, but it kind of seems a waste of bandwidth (not that that really matters).

On the topic of FireWire, I just read this:
http://www.Chipcenter.com/networking/ieee1394/page 1.html

Page 2 is really interesting. It looks like FireWire is following this path:

800 Mbit/sec this year
1.6 Gbit/sec in 2001
h 3.2 Gbit/sec for 2002

The P1394B (Gigabit 1394) page has some good content too.

Go to http://www.chipcenter.com /circuitcellar/july99/c79su5.htm to see what's inside that beast:
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Peeking under the hood reveals the secret: a high-performance chip set combining the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer. The Emotion Engine, pictured in Figure 3, whose name aptly reflects its lofty ambition, might best be described as a single-chip Cray. It contains a beefy 64-bit MIPS CPU supplemented with two vector processing units with a total of ten floating-point multipliers and four dividers. Running at 300 MHz and exploiting 128-bit on-chip buses, the Emotion Engine blows through 3D graphics at a stunning pace. A floating-point matrix routine, consisting of 7 multiplies, 12 multiply-adds, and a divide takes only 7 cycles.

The image data is passed to the Graphics Synthesizer (see Figure 4), which integrates both the rendering engine and the 4-MB DRAM frame buffer using the latest embedded DRAM process. The reason for putting the DRAM on the same chip isn't to save a few bucks, but to achieve ultra-high 48-GBps bandwidth thanks to a 2560-bit (!) on-chip bus.
----------

Suffice to say, I want one of these on a graphics card for my PC...

-Adam

"Walking on water and developing software to specification are easy - as long as both are frozen" - Edward V. Berard.