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These people are being incredibly disingenuous... what they really want is to eliminate the disruption caused by phones ringing and students texting during class. If they were at all intelligent, they'd stop wasting time trying to legislate the problem away, and just install wallpaper Faraday cages in all of the classrooms.

Here is announcement of one such antenna... And here (PDF warning) is one of the many possible designs of fractal antenna - Sierpinski Monopole (scroll to the middle of the document). As you can see, the antenna with size of about 9 cm is resonant at 0.44, 1.75, 3.51, 7.01 and 13.89 GHz. Pretty cool stuff.

This is a rather old article but it explains the technology behind this type of 3d display compared to others.

Not a very difficult fix for any tech savvy person with surface mount device reworking equipment - or a soldering iron, a steady hand and a great deal of faith in their ability (or practical experience) to rework SMDs with the wrong kit.


Truly spoken by someone who hasn't tried to buy a programmed flash part for a made in China board. Hint, the replacement board can be purchased but the replacement chip containing IP firmware is a little harder to obtain. Custom parts on the board (flash memory) are not imported in a programmed state. If you can extract the image from the executable without the aid of the boot loader, many of these blank chips and flash upgrade don't come with any way to install the initial code to load the initial firmware.

A new blank BIOS chip doesn't contain enough firmware to boot a floppy, USB memory stick, or CD ROM to flash the BIOS. You need a BIOS image and device programmer. Since neither is supplied and both are needed, your chances of obtaining a BIOS image and installing the firmware are slim to none.

A Blank clock flash memory chip from Mouser does not make a bricked board bootable enough to flash the new BIOS firmware.

If you want to try it, Pick up a blank unit here; Good luck
http://www.epn-online.com/page/new56862/mouser-stocks-silicon-laboratories-c8051f9xx-line-of-mcus.html

Can you imagine the power consumption? Not to mention possibly needing a cooling fan (the thing would need some kind of internal processor). The whole thing would generate quite a bit of heat, too. This is your keyboard we're talking about! It's hot, noisy, you have to reboot it every now and then, too.

Very funny. I can imagine the power consumption. this OLED screen is about as big as I expect the Enter-key on the Optimus will be. The Optimus images show 140 buttons. Even if every button would be as big as the Enter-key, and they would all have 65k colors, and they would continuously show full screen white color, the power consumption would be ~50 watts. Calculating with an average size of a quarter of that (~14x14 mm) would give us a much lower number. Given that they will always show mostly black, I'd say an average of less than 7 watts is probable.

The keyboard would need "some kind of internal processor", yes (as does any USB keyboard), but it would do with your average microcontroller, well maybe a couple of them. My guess is that the power dissipation of each would be 1-2 watts. No need for fans. No more heat than the keyboard I'm typing on now (it's a laptop). No need for reboots of the keyboard - it would obviously be driven from the computer, the keyboard won't need to know anything about what it's showing.

I would *love* to have one of these and would happily shell out up to $300 for it *if* it were to be reliable.

There is prior *shipping* art:

http://www.martin.com/product/product.asp?product= maxxyz

Stage lighting control console with LCD legending in the buttons.

One manufacturer selling soft-legending buttons:
http://www.epn-online.com/page/14212/lcd-display-p ushbutton-switch-with-mono-or-multi-colour-functio nality.html

Given that the Martin console is basically a custom control surface for a PC, the keyboard concept doesn't seem patent-worthy as a distinct idea.

- AC

Can someone knowledgeable please comment on this?

Why not use FRAM instead of Flash for these things?

Is it enormously more expensive or something? Because FRAM incurs *no* delay when writing and supports practically unlimited write cycles...

The power isn't provided until after the port is probed. The probing specs look pretty mild. I find it hard to believe anyone was stupid enough to let PoE damage any standard ethernet ports when miss wired.