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RKE fobs are usually made by different manufactures that use 315 MHZ (for North America). The one I tested with was made by Texas Instruments which I assume most Ford vehicles use. The signal usually consist of 3 parts; small amount of Bits for the manufacture code, followed by a large security code which is encrypted and rolling, and another small amount of Bits for the function (unlock, lock, panic, trunk). The rolling code only cycles so many times and would not be easy even if you had a device that was able to brute-force it. Since they are using the passenger's side door they are probably using a new method exploitable to flawed vehicles or just people doing insurance fraud. I would assume this method involves overloading the circuit. If anything I would reach out too Texas Instruments and see what they have to say, since they probably created most of the technology behind the RKE fobs. Below I posed a link to an example of a RKE fob made by TI and a link to a video I made in 2009. http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/slws011d/slws011d.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l24mgY2Ro8g

Actually it's not an OMAP, but I get confused about the supposed differences between TI's ARM based SoC families (OMAP, da Vinci, etc.) anyway. I think TI does too. However, not all versions of the OMAPs and other families have DSP's on them. I don't see one on the data sheet.

I do a fair amount of home and work microprocessor/hardware dev. and every time I research I keep coming to the conclusion that the Arduino and it's expansion shields from the usual vendors are WAY OVERPRICED.

An Arduino and Ethernet shield costs more than a 2nd hand dual core PC box with windows licence.

The RasberyPI by comparison seems very well priced, though I haven't had need for one. The OP is correct, if he needs a screen , user input and portable nature a (2nd hand) cell phone (android) is a good basis. Since the USB OTG IO expansion costs as much as a budget (2nd hand) android cell phone again it is not a great deal.

I would suggest a TI Stelaris launchpad kit that has USB host / slave functionality for $13 (!)
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=stellaris-launchpad&HQS=stellaris-launchpad
this little guy has "80MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 CPU with floating point, 256Kbytes of 100,000 write-erase cycle FLASH and many peripherals such as 1MSPS ADCs, eight UARTs, four SPIs, four I2Cs, USB & up to 27 timers, some configurable up to 64-bits. "

Another item of interest for projects that I have developed is this Bluetooth to serial TTL for $9:
http://www.mdfly.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=63

For all most of my (PC based) projects to date I have gone with:
A) the (cheaper) MSP430 launchpad:
http://www.ti.com/tool/msp-exp430g2
B) Or for "medium" speed / quality analog I/O use a national instruments usb I/O card ($170): http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/201986
C) And for something a bit faster use a Rigol Osc. starting at $300 with usb and Ethernet interfacing.

I do a fair amount of home and work microprocessor/hardware dev. and every time I research I keep coming to the conclusion that the Arduino and it's expansion shields from the usual vendors are WAY OVERPRICED.

An Arduino and Ethernet shield costs more than a 2nd hand dual core PC box with windows licence.

The RasberyPI by comparison seems very well priced, though I haven't had need for one. The OP is correct, if he needs a screen , user input and portable nature a (2nd hand) cell phone (android) is a good basis. Since the USB OTG IO expansion costs as much as a budget (2nd hand) android cell phone again it is not a great deal.

I would suggest a TI Stelaris launchpad kit that has USB host / slave functionality for $13 (!)
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=stellaris-launchpad&HQS=stellaris-launchpad
this little guy has "80MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 CPU with floating point, 256Kbytes of 100,000 write-erase cycle FLASH and many peripherals such as 1MSPS ADCs, eight UARTs, four SPIs, four I2Cs, USB & up to 27 timers, some configurable up to 64-bits. "

Another item of interest for projects that I have developed is this Bluetooth to serial TTL for $9:
http://www.mdfly.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=63

For all most of my (PC based) projects to date I have gone with:
A) the (cheaper) MSP430 launchpad:
http://www.ti.com/tool/msp-exp430g2
B) Or for "medium" speed / quality analog I/O use a national instruments usb I/O card ($170): http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/201986
C) And for something a bit faster use a Rigol Osc. starting at $300 with usb and Ethernet interfacing.

TI has a working implementation of FRAM, they use it in their ultra-low-power MCUs.

FRAM Technology Overview
Welcome to the future of embedded memory

As the world demands faster and higher performance in every application, new memory technology is needed to enable smarter solutions. FRAM from Texas Instruments provides unified memory with dynamic partitioning and memory access speeds 100 times faster than flash. FRAM is also capable of zero power state retention in all power modes, which means that writes are guaranteed, even in the event of a power loss. And with a write endurance of over 100 trillion cycles, EEPROM is no longer required. All of this is possible at less than 100A/MHz active power consumption – a first for the semiconductor industry.

http://www.ti.com/mcu/docs/mcuproductcontentnp.tsp?familyId=1751&sectionId=95&tabId=2840&family=mcu

I had totally forgotten about the MSP430 --- thanks for the reminder; ordered one. I don't have an application in mind but it'll be fun to play with...

I'm particularly intrigued to see they do a bundle of two MSP430 LaunchPads and two low-power RF modules for $23.30. That looks like it would make a very interesting way to experiment with ultra-low-power radio at about $10 a node.

TI's got a lot of interesting stuff. The devkit in a watch looks fun. Pity it's (a) not a dot matrix LCD and (b) out of stock. It's also a pity their website is so broken...

I recently starting wanting to fiddle with Micro controllers for this or that and stumbled across the Texas Instruments Launchpad. For $4.30 delivered (yes including shipping world wide) you get a complete development board, 2 chips, some headers and the USB cable. TI have a free IDE you can program it with, or if you are on Linux you can use the MSPGCC command line tools, which I use. Its ultra low power - 3.3V - which means if you want to interface to 5V systems you may have to do a little homework, but other than that, their is no risk in ordering one to try out with the money you would have wasted on Starbucks. http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=stellaris-launchpad&HQS=stellaris-launchpad Order directly from Ti - https://estore.ti.com/MSP-EXP430G2-MSP430-LaunchPad-Value-Line-Development-kit-P2031.aspx

I recently starting wanting to fiddle with Micro controllers for this or that and stumbled across the Texas Instruments Launchpad. For $4.30 delivered (yes including shipping world wide) you get a complete development board, 2 chips, some headers and the USB cable. TI have a free IDE you can program it with, or if you are on Linux you can use the MSPGCC command line tools, which I use. Its ultra low power - 3.3V - which means if you want to interface to 5V systems you may have to do a little homework, but other than that, their is no risk in ordering one to try out with the money you would have wasted on Starbucks. http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=stellaris-launchpad&HQS=stellaris-launchpad Order directly from Ti - https://estore.ti.com/MSP-EXP430G2-MSP430-LaunchPad-Value-Line-Development-kit-P2031.aspx

http://www.ti.com/3dtof They aren't the only ones working on it. But this technology has a huge potential to impact the way humans interact with technology.

TI has a FAQ on their site:

How long does the charge last on the TI Rechargeable Battery?
For student use, the TI Rechargeable Battery is expected to last up to two weeks of normal use on a single charge. For classroom use,
the TI Rechargeable Battery is expected to last up to five days of normal use on a single charge.

They probably build them themselves, TI has a large chip collection they sell, including 'high end' OMAP chips for Androids, down to tiny flip-flops. Believe it or not, most of these calculators use old Z80 chips. Scroll down to the bottom of that page for some suppliers.

Why do you want a CAS if you're not prepared to use it. For each trig function, define another which takes an argument in degrees and calls the built-in one with the argument converted to radians.

The real problem is that he/she is spelling the word "degrees" incorrectly. The correct spelling is "* pi / 180" That is, when you want to type sin(30 degrees), you should instead type sin(30 * pi / 180).

In Forth, that's exactly what you'd do:
: DEGREES PI * 180 / ; (or the FP equivalent, of course. Then you just type 15 DEGREES and it does what you think it does.

That is how my TI-89 worked well over ten years ago. There were tons of built-in unit labels that convert to some standard unit in that measure, and you could create custom ones.

IIRC, a unit label could boil down to anything, real, imaginary, or just a symbol, and the solver would just deal with it. Like _km => 1000 _m, _m => 1000 _cm, _cm => ... just _cm.

I think in the GGP's example, sin(30_deg) would actually work in TI's software.
The submitter probably knows exactly how a good CAS should work, maxima just isn't up to TI's quality I'd imagine.

So its illegal for me to buy this if I'm from China? http://www.ti.com/product/sm320f28335-ht It's a processor that runs at 210C. (You can buy this from TI's Asia distributor by the way)

No, the intro pricing is still available: see here. This is for the MSP-EXP430G2 - MSP430 LaunchPad Value Line Development kit. $4.30 total.

you'll need the MSP430 launch pad, a hosepipe, some electronic water valves, some simple electronics and a swingset to make one of these waterfall swings.

You could probably make one for less than $100, you would be one of the coolest aunt/uncles ever, bonus points when you get it to write his name in the air

http://hackaday.com/tag/ti-83/
http://www.ticalc.org/basics/calculators/index.html
http://www.ticalc.org/hardware/cables/serial.html
http://education.ti.com/guidebooks/sdk/83p/sdk83pguide.pdf
http://sami.ticalc.org/irlink/e_hard.htm
http://smallrobot.bizland.com/Instructions.pdf
http://www.mathinscience.info/public/mathbots_challenge/mathbot_chall_lesson.htm
http://www.razorrobotics.com/knowledge/?title=TI_Connect
http://www.free-scientific-calculator.com/texas-instruments-graph-link-connectivity-kit/
http://blog.makezine.com/2006/02/19/how-to-connect-a-ti83-to/

Can you provide a reference for your claim that the 4470 has 2 ARM11s?

The data sheet: http://www.ti.com/lit/ug/swpu270m/swpu270m.pdf

DSP may technically be a core, but it's certainly not general purpose.

There is a Linux port to it, so I don't think you can get much more general-purpose than that. It's specialized for certain kinds of tasks, but it can be used as a general-purpose processor.

The M3s are definitely not simply "peripheral controllers." In this application, I suspect Amazon is taking advantage of their power/cycle economy, and using them to build fill frame buffers slowly behind the scenes for the next page, while the user is reading the current one.

I think you are confusing the Fire and the Paperwhite.

Bus Pirate: good for looking at communication waveforms to debug problems. ($35)

Logic Sniffer: For more complex problems than the above, allows looking at parallel signals.($50)

Raspberry Pi: Tiny ARM11 700MHz CPU with powerful graphics, 10/100 ethernet, USB2.0 host (2 ports), HDMI out, and GPIO connector. Boots from SD card. ($35)

MSP430 Launchpad: inexpensive microcontroller development platform ($4.30)

STM32F4Discovery: Development platform for powerful microcontroller. ARM Cortex M4 with FPU, 168MHz (210DMIPS), Ethernet MAC, 2xUSB host/device/OTG, etc. etc. Board has stereo audio DAC with speaker driver, USB Micro-AB connector, 3-axis accelerometer, digital mic, 4 user LEDs, two pushbuttons (one is reset), and onboard debugger which is supported by open source tools. ($15) <--- take that, arduino

>He is fascinated that people can create chips to modify existing hardware.

Hook him up with some digital logic and HDL tutorials and get him a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA LX9 MicroBoard. It's a basic FPGA dev board the size of a USB stick and (relatively) inexpensive.

There are also USB stick microcontroller dev kits like the TI ez430 that he'd also probably have fun with as well.

It's not theoretical best case when it's already been done, and I was not cherry picking numbers. Here's some that are closer to the state of the art, for comparison: A 99% efficient BLDC controller - most of the controller inefficiencies are from band-gap voltage drop, which gets smaller as you use higher voltages (as does resistive losses in the wiring). Here's a 98% efficient motor, used on the CSIRO-UTS solar racer..

Are you really claiming that (for example) a modern 50kW motor would shed 5kW heat? Mid-90s efficiency is typical today for larger motors - it is not a cherry-picked exception!

90% is too conservative. Brushless DC motors (the sort you'd pair with a VFD in any electric car) are pushing 96%: http://www.ti.com/ww/en/motor_drive_and_control_solutions/motor_control_type_brushless_dc_BLDC.htm. Lithium Ion battery efficiency is, depending on your source, 95% or 97-99%. So your 27% figure could be 34%. More importantly, since you have a drivetrain capable of driving the car at highway speeds in pure electric mode (something current parallel hybrids lack), a series hybrid could potentially be cheaper to operate if charged at night, and you can recoup more energy through regenerative braking.

Outside of the webbrowser, what hand-held applications do you see needing a 4GB virtual address space in a single process?

As far as "embedded RAM", just how embedded do you mean? The latest generation OMAP chips allow for "Package-on-Package" LPDDR, for example. There's plenty of phones out there today sporting 1GB RAM, and I'm sure it's a matter of time before that's in the same package or maybe on the same die as the processor if it isn't already on some devices.

(I admit ignorance of the absolute bleeding edge...)

What, does Intel need to hold your hand in creating operating system drivers? They invent the bus & concept, the chipsets and such are made by the market.
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/tps22985_thunderbolt/index.shtml?DCMP=hpa_int_thunderbolt&HQS=thunderbolt-bt1

Although you're making a "glass half full" kind of prediction, it's not hard to imagine that the opposite of your guess might occur in the US: All the other ARM licensees might see this as a fantastic coup for Broadcom, and follow suit with their own competing $25 - $35 boards.

After all, Texas Instruments already has their own $5 SoC available and used in their BeagleBone, so they could quite easily remove features from that board and release something into the Raspberry Pi price niche for education. (The BeagleBone's $89 places it far outside the Raspberry Pi's price niche.)

The Chinese will of course follow suit with boards based on their wildly successful Allwinner A10 ARM device, which is far better than Broadcom's SoC (on specs) and only costs $7 in production volumes. Expect a pile of competitors from that quarter!

This sort of technology already exists to an extent. TI's Hercules TMS570 microcontrollers have two CPUs that run in lockstep along with a bus comparison module. I think total fail-tolerance might take three CPUs....

This is just to detect when an individual CPU has failed. To build a fault-tolerant system you need multiple CPUs.

nb. The 'three CPUs' thing isn't done for detection of hardware faults it's for software faults. The idea is to get three different programmers to write three different programs with a specified output. You then compare the outputs of the programs and if one is different it's likely to be a bug.

This sort of technology already exists to an extent. TI's Hercules TMS570 microcontrollers have two CPUs that run in lockstep along with a bus comparison module. I think total fail-tolerance might take three CPUs, but this provides strong hardware fault detection in addition to the usual ECC and other monitoring/correction stuff.

Note that run-time fault tolerance is mostly needed for safety-critical systems. The customers who buy these products do not do so to get better yield, they do so to guarantee that their airbags, anti-lock brakes, or medical devices won't kill anyone. As such, manufacturing quality is very high. Also, die size is significantly larger than comparable general market (non-safety) devices. This means they cost a small fortune. The PC equivalent would be MLC vs. SLC SSDs. Consumer products usually don't waste money on that kind of reliability unless they need it. Now a super-expensive server CPU, maybe...

[Disclaimer: I am a TI employee, but this is not an official advertisement for TI. Do not use any product in safety-critical systems without contacting the manufacturer, or at least a good lawyer. I am not responsible for damage to humans, machinery, or small woodland creatures that may result from improper use of TI products.]

I expect these devices do need a CE mark for electro magnetic radiation compliance (that it doesn't interfere with other equipment and its own performance isn't degraded by other equipment) and the companies in question are rightfully stating they're not going to start selling something which would land them in the shit if it is out of compliance. The US is no different with devices requiring FCC certification.

No. Farnell is quite happy selling $4 msp430 Launchpads
http://uk.farnell.com/texas-instruments/msp-exp430g2/kit-dev-msp430-launchpad/dp/1853793

that dont meet a single norm, no CE, no FCC nothing. Ti just states in the documentation those boards are DEV experimental stuff and thats it. TI sold >100K of them easily.

http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/slac432a/slac432a.pdf

“Texas Instruments (TI) provides the enclosed product(s) under the following conditions:
  This evaluation board/kit is intended for use for ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT, DEMONSTRATION,
  EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY and is not considered by TI to be a finished endproduct fit for gene
  consumer use. Persons handling the product(s) must have electronics training and observe good engineer
  practice standards. As such, the goods being provided are not intended to be complete in terms of requi
  design, marketing, and/or manufacturingrelated protective considerations, including product safety a
  environmental measures typically found in end products that incorporate such semiconductor components
  circuit boards. This evaluation board/kit does not fall within the scope of the European Union directi
  regarding electromagnetic compatibility, restricted substances (RoHS), recycling (WEEE), FCC, CE or
  and therefore may not meet the technical requirements of these directives or other related directives.”

“FCC WARNING
  This evaluation board/kit is intended for use for ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT, DEMONSTRATION, OR
  EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY and is not considered by TI to be a finished enproduct fit for general
  consumer use. It generates, uses, and can radiate radio frequency energy and has not been tested for compli-
  ance with the limits of computing devices pursuant to part 15 of FCC rules, which are designed to provide
  reasonable protection against radio frequency interference. Operation of this equipment in other environ-
  ments may cause interference with radio communications, in which case the user at his own expense will be
  required to take whatever measures may be required to correct this interference.”

For my own work on a C6711, I've been using the TI compiler under Wine.

Why? The Code Generation Tools (free registration required) all have Linux versions.

The TI C6X line of chips are not only VLIW, they are "DSP" chips, optimized for signal processing operations. Also, this chip has no MMU. Nobody is going to build a tablet computer or any other general-purpose device based on one of these.

I think for the near term at least, anyone using a TI C6X will be using the TI C compiler. TI has a whole IDE, called Code Composer Studio.

But now we have the possibility of running Linux on the chip.

The one time I worked with a TI DSP chip, I didn't really have an operating system. Just a bootstrap loader, and then my code ran on the bare metal, along with some TI-supplied library code. Now I'm working with an Analog Devices DSP chip and it's the same situation. For my current purposes I'm not using any OS at all. But Linux support could potentially be great; for example, if you were using a platform with an Ethernet interface, you could use the Linux networking code; if you were using a platform with USB, you could use Linux USB code and file system code and so on.

steveha

I also spent 4 years studying an EE degree, and although it was not especially focused on signal processing, I now work for a large pro audio company.

Some of the issues pointed to in this and other posts regarding oversampling and AA filters are not really relevant to the subject at hand, given the technology currently in use. A statement like 'oversampling at 192 kHz' shows a lack of knowledge regarding the kinds of audio converters that have been in use for a good while now. A Delta Sigma ADC running with an Fs of 48 kHz might often be oversampling at 3.072 MHz or 6.144 MHz. Anti aliasing filters that many people have mentioned are implemented digitally inside the converter (no need for external analog filters, which may well exhibit many of the problems mentioned), and actually have extremely good pass band ripple.

Look at datasheets for converters from manufacturers such as TI (burr brown), cirrus [page 36 here has detailed plots of 48, 96, and 192 kHz pass pand characterisitcs for the device, highlighting the fact that increasing the sampling rate does not improve pass band ripple for this device (also note the scale is 0.02 dB/div)], AKM, Wolfson micro You will find pass band pass responses that are flat to within less than +/- 0.05 dB over the audible range, and stop band attenuation in excess of 100 dB, whether sampling at 48 kHz or 192 kHz. If you can find anything in actual converter datasheets that points to better converter performance from selecting a higher sampling rate, I would be interested to see it.

All in all, the basics of sampling theory don't really help people to understant the real world issues in designing a moden high end audio device. And in the end, surely the proof of the pudding is in the blind tests, that never seem to show that anybody can tell any difference when moving to higher rates? Even if there were a few people who could hear this difference in some perfect listening envirmonment, would it really make sense for everyone else to go out and buy 192 kHz equipment?

This works for 'mundane' chips.
Not so much for ones that are either hard-to-use.
Yes, you may be able to get samples. But only if you qualify as a vendor likely to buy _large_ quantities.

http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12494&contentId=4711&DCMP=WTBU&HQS=PlatformGuide+PR+wilink_4 - for example.

Contains the boilerplate 'This product is intended for high-volume wireless OEMs and ODMs and is not available through distributors. If your company meets this description, please contact your TI sales office.' - and they mean it.

This is very, very common for higher performance more difficult to integrate chips, or ones aimed at certain markets.

In short - they don't particularly care about small designers, only about ones likely to build 100000 of them in. It takes more or less the same amount of product support to support a vendor making 100, as a million. Support is expensive.

http://www.ti.com/product/am3359 - Note the 20MB TRM that is the third PDF linked on this page. This is the sort of documentation TI provides for their products. This is the sort of documentation you need when hardware hacking.

Compare to:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835 - nothing but a marketing blurb

Kernel source code is not sufficient documentation - especially given Broadcom's tendency to put no useful comments into their code, making it impossible to answer questions such as "why the fuck is my CPU getting a 1 Hz wakeup interrupt from this stupid BCM4330's undocumented "BT-AMP" function?"

The TI OMAP 4460 actually does use a full programmable DSP, and can decode and encode 1080p30 apparently.
http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12843&contentId=53243

The 1.8GHz OMAP 4470 should be out soon as well - that will surely perform even more comparably to the Intel Medfield offering coming in the same timeframe.
http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12869&contentId=123362

The TI OMAP 4460 actually does use a full programmable DSP, and can decode and encode 1080p30 apparently.
http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12843&contentId=53243

The 1.8GHz OMAP 4470 should be out soon as well - that will surely perform even more comparably to the Intel Medfield offering coming in the same timeframe.
http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12869&contentId=123362

Perhaps it does

What I'm seeing lately are water operators, IT people, and system integrators who are overzealous when it comes to connectivity and all the "neat" things that can be done remotely via technology.

Yes. Read "Access Your Embedded Controller with Ease through a Web Server", from Texas Instruments, which ought to know better. "The designer should also make it as easy as possible to change the settings on a piece of equipment, reconfigure its operation, or fine-tune the system. The more intuitive and explicit that activity is, the more likely the result will be what the operator desires. Losing the instruction manual can seriously impair the user's operation of many systems."

What that paper describes is a family of embedded controllers with a web server in each controller and no security. What's wrong with this picture?

"Not sure where the hate is coming from here."
Where's the TRM? Where's the datasheet? That's where the hate is coming from. That and years of bad memories involving Broadcom WLAN chipsets on Linux due to lack of datasheet access (and, in general, lack of access to any documentation at all)

Compare the following webpages:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835 - Marketing blurb, no block diagrams, no datasheets, no nothing

http://www.ti.com/product/am3358 - Block diagram, family parametric comparison, and an EXTREMELY complete datasheet

For someone like the OP who is planning on doing embedded computing (by necessity, more "low-level" than just using the device as an STB), having a processor datashete is an absolute and complete necessity

Since the BCM2835's datasheet is not available (in typical Broadcom style) - why even bother wasting board space on a GPIO/SPI/I2C header that no one who purchases the Pi is going to be able to be able to use?

Texas Instruments has 3 watch styles with low-power MSP430 microcontrollers. The $200 models have Bluetooth and the older $49 watches have a simpler digital display and ISM band wireless links.

https://estore.ti.com/Search.aspx?k=watch

http://www.metawatch.org/

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Digital-display-P2447.aspx

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT1000AD-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Analog-Digital-display-P2446.asp

https://estore.ti.com/eZ430-Chronos-433-eZ430-Chronos-Wireless-Watch-Development-Tool-P1734.aspx

Texas Instruments has 3 watch styles with low-power MSP430 microcontrollers. The $200 models have Bluetooth and the older $49 watches have a simpler digital display and ISM band wireless links.

https://estore.ti.com/Search.aspx?k=watch

http://www.metawatch.org/

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Digital-display-P2447.aspx

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT1000AD-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Analog-Digital-display-P2446.asp

https://estore.ti.com/eZ430-Chronos-433-eZ430-Chronos-Wireless-Watch-Development-Tool-P1734.aspx

Texas Instruments has 3 watch styles with low-power MSP430 microcontrollers. The $200 models have Bluetooth and the older $49 watches have a simpler digital display and ISM band wireless links.

https://estore.ti.com/Search.aspx?k=watch

http://www.metawatch.org/

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Digital-display-P2447.aspx

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT1000AD-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Analog-Digital-display-P2446.asp

https://estore.ti.com/eZ430-Chronos-433-eZ430-Chronos-Wireless-Watch-Development-Tool-P1734.aspx

Texas Instruments has 3 watch styles with low-power MSP430 microcontrollers. The $200 models have Bluetooth and the older $49 watches have a simpler digital display and ISM band wireless links.

https://estore.ti.com/Search.aspx?k=watch

http://www.metawatch.org/

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Digital-display-P2447.aspx

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT1000AD-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Analog-Digital-display-P2446.asp

https://estore.ti.com/eZ430-Chronos-433-eZ430-Chronos-Wireless-Watch-Development-Tool-P1734.aspx

1) Are the chargers "smart" like if I drop my wedding ring on the charger does it heat up/melt or does the charger recognize the inductance / current draw is way outta whack and shut off? If it shuts off does an indicator of some type turn on, or does it just not charge?

Assuming they're using the qi charging standard, yes. There is quite a bit of handshaking required before the charger will fully energise a coil.

3) Who can sell me an inductive receiver kit to power other stuff? I'm not talking about bolt and go, but ladyada / dangerousprototypes sort of places and products? Who makes this stuff, anyway? At a superficial glance the usual suspects in the analog power community don't seem to offer any specialized ICs for the task... unless the RX has no 2-way comm with the tx and literally is just any ole coil feeding a bridge rect and a switcher.

Texas Instruments makes it. They also have a devkit:
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/wireless_power_solutions/index.shtml?DCMP=hpa_pmp_bq51013_en&HQS=Other+BA+bq51013-bnc

4) I'm sadly picturing some kind of hideous DRM where the expensive charger and expensive device need to negotiate a RSA key across bluetooth to light up the charger... Please tell me it isn't so? A generation of interoperability would be awesome.

The standard is available online. From memory there's no crypto-based DRM but you will need a license from the QI consortium to implement the technology

The problem with that is that it limits the functionality of the device for such a small use of it's design life. I mean seriously, how many times are you going to take a standardized test?

On top of this, The Nspire has a test mode called Press to test that can be used to limit functionality. It even has a light on some models that blinks when it is active to tell proctors that the mode is activated. Now with this in mind, In theory they shouldn't need to cripple the calc with lack of programming functions so much because if you're taking a test, you just turn on press to test and the calc cripples itself for the duration of the test.

Of course with ASM level programming you could fake the test mode and lights so that the calc is live, but looks like it's crippled. But then Ti could just focus on hardening the press to test mode from attack instead of making their entire built up programming community of over 20 years stand up and beeline for the nearest Casio or HP calc they can find.

Yeah, even though it's more of a comment become story...

Then I think I will quote my own comment there...

Nice learning project!

However ferromagnetism is not for learning only. Check over at TI for FRAM powered uCs and their advantages.

The standardization brought in hardware and software tools by Arduino is good, but people should understand that a '90s Atmel microcontroller isn't everything that's out there...

a '90s Atmel microcontroller isn't all what's out there...

Indeed. I just bought a TI Launchpad for US$4.30 (with free shipping!). It's a complete development board for the MSP430 MCU, and you can download a free IDE (not open-source, but you can use mspgcc too). Nowhere near the third-party support the Arduino has, but it's a capable little chip and only costs a (US) quarter in quantity.

Nice learning project!

However ferromagnetism is not for learning only. Check over at TI for FRAM powered uCs and their advantages.

The standardization brought in hardware and software tools by Arduino is good, but people should understand that a '90s Atmel microcontroller isn't everything that's out there...

Nice learning project!

However ferromagnetism is not for learning only. Check stuff over at TI for FRAM powered uCs and their advantages.

The standardization brought by Arduino both in hardware and software tools is good, but people should understand that a '90s Atmel microcontroller isn't all what's out there...

There's a new fossil watch that's similar to that, and I believe it's the successor to the TI dev watch (as they're now being sold on the TI store).

http://www.metawatch.org/

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Digital-display--P2447C42.aspx

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT1000AD-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Analog-Digital-display--P2446.aspx

Seems like a neat toy to me. :)

There's a new fossil watch that's similar to that, and I believe it's the successor to the TI dev watch (as they're now being sold on the TI store).

http://www.metawatch.org/

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT2000D-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Digital-display--P2447C42.aspx

https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT1000AD-Bluetooth-Wearable-Watch-development-system-with-Analog-Digital-display--P2446.aspx

Seems like a neat toy to me. :)

I beg to differ about the graphing calculators being no more useful than a $10 calc. Though as a CS person... if I needed a machine to do something beyond the basic 4 functions... i'd use a computer running Matlab, or else, CAS such as Maple or Mathematica.

Math software, though quite expensive, seems to have a much longer lifetime and much greater versatility than a $100 calculator.

Graphing calculators are getting pretty advanced, there are Note applications for them...

The Ti-Nspire CX calculator, TI's new line of graphing calculators coming out have a WiFi unit available for it to connect to a remote Ti navigator unit. Gone are the days where calculators had no networking capabilities or required hardware hacking to add them.