Some micros are easier for one and harder for the other. If you're doing more software, are you going to be using a compiler, or will you be teaching them assembly? How critical is timing? If you're doing more hardware, you might think of what kind of microcontroller peripherals (i.e timers, UARTs, PWMs) will be useful to you.
I prefer 16-bit micros because they're easier to program on, and thus easier to teach to beginners. If you go 8-bit, you will be dealing with pointers in weird ways which will distract from the real task.
I like the MSP430 a whole lot, but it doesn't have 5V tolerant I/O so it will be a pain for novices to hook it up to interesting things.
If I had a time machine, I'd choose a 68000 variant. It has a nice architecture that is easy to program.
Avoid anything from Microchip. Their architecture is hideously evil and will cause your students to give up technology and go to law school.
The Renesas M16C line is very pleasant to program and simple to interface. It's easily available, but not as popular as others. Unfortunately, there's no GCC port.
ARMs are nice in a lot of ways. They're fast, cheap and and have lots of tools available, but they require quite a bit of setup and are not simple to program for. If you're going to program in C and you're willing to hand your students a starter environment, an ARM could work quite well.
Laser-based displays suffer from speckle patterns which can be very annoying. The speckle itself actually happens in your eye so the problem is difficult to mitigate.
I've seen a prototype color laser projector in action. It had a lot of nice features but I kept being distracted by the speckle.
The makers of "Real Genius" has some good technical consultants. The equipment used was accurate for the era and setting. The lab computers were from HP and were showing numeric data and HPGL graphs. The crazy hacker in the sub-basement was using Symbolics equipment and some homemade stuff.
Our heroes actually had to penetrate physical security and reprogram an EPROM on the system they were trying to compromise.
Any Slashdot readers who haven't seen this movie are missing an important piece of geek culture.
LCDs are making them obsolete, but CRTs (which we all know and loved) work by accelerating electrons to a few keV. The electrons are moving at a not insignificant hunk of the speed of light and produce X-rays as they slam into the front of the tube.
Next time you're sitting in front of one, remember that there's an unlicensed particle accelerator a couple of feet from your brain.
Rental car companies have gotten into trouble for trying to fine drivers who exceed some limit.
The first teen driver monitor I saw was from Autotap and was code-named "narc on Lisa" because the inventor wanted to make sure his daughter Lisa wasn't doing anything bad. This one plugged into the car's OBDII port, monitored various vehicle parameters such as speed, ignition state and the current time, could sense if it had been disconnected and record that fact.
The "invention" in the original article is neither original nor noteworthy.
That was part Edward Tse's demo. DiamondTouch tables come with a library that handles gestures, but have no inherent hardware or software support for voice.
First, the video you link to is not from Apple but from Jeff Han at NYU. It uses the technique of frustrated total internal reflection to allow arbitrary multi-touch gestures. It can detect touches on the screen in a fully pixelized manner. This technique does not, however, distinguish between the touches of different users. More information is available here. This is a very cool work.
MERL's DiamondTouch is a multi-user system and can tell distinguish between the touches of several users. If you're touching in one place and I'm touching in another, not only does the table detect both touches, but it can tell which of us touched which spot. Current DiamondTouch prototypes use an X-Y grid and so do not detect touches and gestures in a fully pixelized manner. This is a limitation of the current hardware, not the fundamental technology. You can read the original DiamondTouch paper here.
Also note that MERL DiamondTouch predates Jeff Han's work by about four years.
The Qprox devices use a switched capacitor technique invented by James Clerk Maxwell in the late 19th century He dubbed it the "method of intermittent currents" and it can usefully measure capacitances in the sub-picofarad range.
DiamondTouch uses capacitive coupling, but has a very different sensor architecture. It is closer to a radio receiver with a synchronous demodulator. See the following MERL technical report for more information.
I recently got an inquiry about jamming wireless LANs from a professor at a very famous law school. She was upset that her students were not only staring at laptops during her lectures, but were ignoring her and surfing the web. I told her that deliberate jamming was illegal under federal law and that she should probably just tell her students not to use laptops.
Surfing the net instead of listening to talks is very common at professional conferences which I attend. High tech conferences and many venues now consider WLAN access a necessity, and even I have been guilty of reading e-mail instead listening to a dull talk.
Forbidding laptops in classes is difficult these days because they are very handy for note taking. My personal view on lectures is that there should be no note taking at all: no laptops, no paper, no nothing. The students should be watching and listening to the professor who then hands out good, printed notes at the end of the lecture. It is more work for the professor, but provides a better educational experience for the students. I also think some subjects are better taught in front of a blackboard than with PowerPoint slides. For a high-tech professional I can be such a luddite.
I was at an X windows technical conference many years ago when someone gave a presentation on X with Ada. When the speaker mentioned that it was for an air traffic control application, there was a sharp intake of breath all around the audience, most of whom had flown in for the meeting.
Bad move. These guys may sue them for trademark infringement/dilution, etc. In any case, if I were Intel, there's no way I'd want people to associate my high-tech processors with the above computers.
The local Puerto Ricans were worried that the Arecibo radiotelescope had a military purpose, and they did indeed call it "el radar". That part of the movie "Contact" was based on real events.
Some thought that it was designed to steer Soviet bombers away from the U.S. and fool them into dropping their bombs on "less valuable" real estate, i.e. Puerto Rico. The observatory had to put up a big security gate to discourage possible vandalism.
I had loaned six foot aluminum parabolic dish to a church group a number of years back so that they could try to pick up some satellite broadcasts. They never did use it and I forgot all about it.
Along comes Google Earth with six inch resolution in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, lo and behold, there the thing is sitting upside down on their roof, next to the upright dish (which is casting a shadow) that they are currently using.
To see it, go to: 42d 22' 34.0" N 71d 07' 34.4" W and zoom in to about 50 feet.
The last time I was in Logan's terminal A, my laptop not only informed me of the Massport network, but also one run by the Burger King outlet in that terminal.
Nothing I could connect to, so maybe it's just for BK internal use. In which case, it would seem that Massport's complaint about other's WiFi messing with their systems is indeed a convenient excuse, and what they really want is a monopoly on internet access at Logan.
The Danes say the countries' history of friendly relations should not be subjected to periodic squabbles over a frigid rock barely larger than a football field just south of the North Pole.
At least it's accurate; they could have said something really stupid like "just west of the North Pole".
Slashdot Mirror
Some micros are easier for one and harder for the other. If you're doing more software, are you going to be using a compiler, or will you be teaching them assembly? How critical is timing? If you're doing more hardware, you might think of what kind of microcontroller peripherals (i.e timers, UARTs, PWMs) will be useful to you.
I prefer 16-bit micros because they're easier to program on, and thus easier to teach to beginners. If you go 8-bit, you will be dealing with pointers in weird ways which will distract from the real task.
I like the MSP430 a whole lot, but it doesn't have 5V tolerant I/O so it will be a pain for novices to hook it up to interesting things.
If I had a time machine, I'd choose a 68000 variant. It has a nice architecture that is easy to program.
Avoid anything from Microchip. Their architecture is hideously evil and will cause your students to give up technology and go to law school.
The Renesas M16C line is very pleasant to program and simple to interface. It's easily available, but not as popular as others. Unfortunately, there's no GCC port.
ARMs are nice in a lot of ways. They're fast, cheap and and have lots of tools available, but they require quite a bit of setup and are not simple to program for. If you're going to program in C and you're willing to hand your students a starter environment, an ARM could work quite well.
I've seen a prototype color laser projector in action. It had a lot of nice features but I kept being distracted by the speckle.
The makers of "Real Genius" has some good technical consultants. The equipment used was accurate for the era and setting. The lab computers were from HP and were showing numeric data and HPGL graphs. The crazy hacker in the sub-basement was using Symbolics equipment and some homemade stuff.
Our heroes actually had to penetrate physical security and reprogram an EPROM on the system they were trying to compromise.
Any Slashdot readers who haven't seen this movie are missing an important piece of geek culture.
LCDs are making them obsolete, but CRTs (which we all know and loved) work by accelerating electrons to a few keV. The electrons are moving at a not insignificant hunk of the speed of light and produce X-rays as they slam into the front of the tube.
Next time you're sitting in front of one, remember that there's an unlicensed particle accelerator a couple of feet from your brain.
Or does one big bubble not count?
Try google: http://www.google.com/search?q=gps+speed+monitor
Rental car companies have gotten into trouble for trying to fine drivers who exceed some limit.
The first teen driver monitor I saw was from Autotap and was code-named "narc on Lisa" because the inventor wanted to make sure his daughter Lisa wasn't doing anything bad. This one plugged into the car's OBDII port, monitored various vehicle parameters such as speed, ignition state and the current time, could sense if it had been disconnected and record that fact.
The "invention" in the original article is neither original nor noteworthy.
How many bad pixels before the unit is considered faulty and can be returned?
It's from the same group that brought you this project.
Here is a video of Liquid War running on a MERL DiamondTouch: ftp://ftp.merl.com/pub/bogue/DiamondTouch/3-Liquid Wars.mov
That was part Edward Tse's demo. DiamondTouch tables come with a library that handles gestures, but have no inherent hardware or software support for voice.
MERL's DiamondTouch is a multi-user system and can tell distinguish between the touches of several users. If you're touching in one place and I'm touching in another, not only does the table detect both touches, but it can tell which of us touched which spot. Current DiamondTouch prototypes use an X-Y grid and so do not detect touches and gestures in a fully pixelized manner. This is a limitation of the current hardware, not the fundamental technology. You can read the original DiamondTouch paper here.
Also note that MERL DiamondTouch predates Jeff Han's work by about four years.
DiamondTouch uses capacitive coupling, but has a very different sensor architecture. It is closer to a radio receiver with a synchronous demodulator. See the following MERL technical report for more information.
The only picture google found for me is here. Middle column, fourth one down in the photo gallery.
I recently got an inquiry about jamming wireless LANs from a professor at a very famous law school. She was upset that her students were not only staring at laptops during her lectures, but were ignoring her and surfing the web. I told her that deliberate jamming was illegal under federal law and that she should probably just tell her students not to use laptops.
Surfing the net instead of listening to talks is very common at professional conferences which I attend. High tech conferences and many venues now consider WLAN access a necessity, and even I have been guilty of reading e-mail instead listening to a dull talk.
Forbidding laptops in classes is difficult these days because they are very handy for note taking. My personal view on lectures is that there should be no note taking at all: no laptops, no paper, no nothing. The students should be watching and listening to the professor who then hands out good, printed notes at the end of the lecture. It is more work for the professor, but provides a better educational experience for the students. I also think some subjects are better taught in front of a blackboard than with PowerPoint slides. For a high-tech professional I can be such a luddite.
I was at an X windows technical conference many years ago when someone gave a presentation on X with Ada. When the speaker mentioned that it was for an air traffic control application, there was a sharp intake of breath all around the audience, most of whom had flown in for the meeting.
Bad move. These guys may sue them for trademark infringement/dilution, etc. In any case, if I were Intel, there's no way I'd want people to associate my high-tech processors with the above computers.
The local Puerto Ricans were worried that the Arecibo radiotelescope had a military purpose, and they did indeed call it "el radar". That part of the movie "Contact" was based on real events.
Some thought that it was designed to steer Soviet bombers away from the U.S. and fool them into dropping their bombs on "less valuable" real estate, i.e. Puerto Rico. The observatory had to put up a big security gate to discourage possible vandalism.
you can leave the "d" in and put a comma between the latitude part and the longitude part.
I wonder where these rules came from?
Use the below .kml file with Google Earth, or just paste the following line into the search box and then zoom in:
a rk>c on=0x317</styleUrl>, 0</coordinates>
42d 22' 34.0" N, 71d 07' 34.4" W
.kml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0">
<Placem
<name>Once was lost, but now is found.</name>
<LookAt>
<longitude>-71.12622070312499</longitude>
<latitude>42.37611007690431</latitude>
<range>13.45464104141381</range>
<tilt>2.462932646186065e-009</tilt>
<heading>-2.7879963396615e-014</heading>
</LookAt>
<styleUrl>root://styleMaps#default+nicon=0x307+hi
<Point>
<coordinates>-71.12622070312499,42.37611007690431
</Point>
</Placemark>
</kml>
You have to use Google Earth to get the nice six inch resolution which allows you to see the dish.
I had loaned six foot aluminum parabolic dish to a church group a number of years back so that they could try to pick up some satellite broadcasts. They never did use it and I forgot all about it.
Along comes Google Earth with six inch resolution in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, lo and behold, there the thing is sitting upside down on their roof, next to the upright dish (which is casting a shadow) that they are currently using.
To see it, go to:
42d 22' 34.0" N 71d 07' 34.4" W
and zoom in to about 50 feet.
The last time I was in Logan's terminal A, my laptop not only informed me of the Massport network, but also one run by the Burger King outlet in that terminal.
Nothing I could connect to, so maybe it's just for BK internal use. In which case, it would seem that Massport's complaint about other's WiFi messing with their systems is indeed a convenient excuse, and what they really want is a monopoly on internet access at Logan.
The Danes say the countries' history of friendly relations should not be subjected to periodic squabbles over a frigid rock barely larger than a football field just south of the North Pole.
At least it's accurate; they could have said something really stupid like "just west of the North Pole".
How about a liquid level sensor, perhaps in a beer mug?
So many projects, so few acronyms.