Location services used to mean one thing: applications that leveraged GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to fix your location and then… do stuff with that information. Of course, GPS isn’t reliable indoors, so there were holes in the system, but, for its time, it was pretty spiffy.
Meanwhile, in a separate corner of the technology world, MEMS hit high gear, and … Read More → "Collocated Location Technology"
IEEE published a sensor-related standard recently. And, depending on what headline or report you read, you may end up with a wide variety of conclusions as to what it’s all about. The original press release linked it to an eHealth memorandum of understanding (MOU) between IEEE-SA and the MEMS Industry Group (MIG); NIST issued a press release regarding their participation; and various stories described it as a “sensor hub” standard.
All of which surprised me, because I was only … Read More → "Just What Is the New IEEE Sensor Standard?"
InGaAs is one of the new wunderkind semiconductors, favored for high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) and for optical designs (more about that in a future post). But, as with other more exotic materials, it isn’t silicon, and therefore it doesn’t benefit from silicon’s economics.
The problem is the lattice: to grow single-crystal stress-free InGaAs, you have to use a substrate with a similar lattice (you have some flexibility by adjusting the quantity of indium, which tweaks the lattice). Three III/ … Read More → "Turning InGaAs on its Head"
This is for those of us that maybe haven’t been paying attention.
The most important concept that turns Things into an Internet of Things is communication. And there are lots of ways to communicate, the favorites of which are wireless. We’ve looked at short-range wireless like WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. And we’ve looked at Read More → "M2M in Orbit"
Sometime back, we took a look at Econais’s WiFi modules. We mentioned their ProbMe capability, which simplifies connecting these devices to the WiFi network.
This function has apparently gotten some traction, and they’ve made some improvements that they announced in early August. So I wanted to dig in a bit more to understand specifically how this thing works – and get clarification on what seemed (and possibly still seem) like possible complications.
First, why do this at all? This … Read More → "ProbMe Simplifies Thing WiFi Connection"
I was keyed into the concept of the “proximal network” by the AllJoyn network, conceived by Qualcomm and managed by the AllSeen Alliance. I started poking around to learn more about proximal networks and to see which other ones might exist.
What I found was that there are two different senses of proximal network, although they share a conceptual basis.
Once concept is what you might call a mesh network for cellular. That concept notes that, if you make a cell call or send a text to a person 20 feet away from you ( … Read More → "Proximal Networks"
A new report has said that the emerging standards for the Internet of Things (see IoT Standards: Is the Time Right to Calm the Chaos? http://techfocusmedia.net/archives/articles/20140908-iot/) are failing miserably in not considering security.
The concern of the authors of the report, from Beecham Research, is that while a number of bodies are looking at CyberSecurity generally, the architects developing devices and systems are generally ignoring the issue and this could have dire consequences. The CIA triad refers to an information security model made … Read More → "Is the IoT Secure?"
A while back, we took a look at a couple of new resonant wireless charging approaches, including PowerByProxi. Their charging pad consists of multiple coils, allowing them to energize only the coils underneath a device being charged, and allowing multiple devices to charge independently and aiding efficiency.
To help drive adoption, they’ve released an evaluation kit consisting of a transmitter and two receiver modules. It will allow testing of device charging up to the rate of 7.5 W.
Read More → "PowerByProxi Eval Kits"
This was originally going to be simply an update on something we discussed before. But it may be slightly more than that.
You may recall that, when it comes to local wireless for the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s largely a battle between WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee (not counting proprietary networks). And that WiFi and Bluetooth have an edge, being in phones.
But Zigbee, despite its … Read More → "Enabling CSR… or… Microchip?"
While multicore took a while to take root in the embedded world, it’s now relatively commonplace. But the most accessible style of multicore is homogeneous: all cores the same. Combine that with a shared memory configuration, and this becomes easy because you can use a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) solution out of the box from your favorite OS. It treats the multiple processors as a group as if they were a single processor. It can do so because the processors are all the same and they all have the same view of memory.
But that’ … Read More → "Mentor Does Heterogeneous Multicore I"
