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Digikey and Freescale have created an interesting contest around a new HC12 chip. The chip is interesting as it's an SOC with ethernet, an HC12 16 bit cpu, ram and flash. It also has SPI and I2C ports. The contest is interesting in that you submit a proposal. The best 10 proposals are picked and given an eval board. They have 2 months to

This is not very exiting, but people have been asking me about it. I have a small collection of MPC 8xx (850, 823e, 860) HDLC drivers. Most present a network interface but one I hacked allows userland access to the HDLC frames and modloadable 'filters' in the kernel which can do basic protocol work. Here's the tar

I was reading an article in Electron Design (04/14/05, pg 46) about DRAM speeds ("DRAM Advances Splinter to meet many system needs"). I was amazed at the new speeds for DRAM. I thought things stopped at about 166Mhz. Apparently not so. There is now DDR, DDR-2 and soon to be DDR-3. The seeds go from a pedestrian 100Mhz up through 1.6GHz.

I want one of these. Apparently it's from Toyota. picture of 'walking foot' with person

Someone on a mailing list I'm on was asking about small o/s's. Someone else suggested "contiki". It's a nice small O/S with a user interface. Might be the right thing for a small handheld, who knows. I like the look of it. Someone else mentioned UniFLEX. That archive is amazing becuase there it's written for the 6809, has FORTRAN, Cobol,

Who would have thought that your cell phone would become the place to store your credit card? It makes perfect sense to me now, but just like cameras in cell phones, I didn't see it coming. NTT Docomo Inc. in Japan is testing contact-less card support in cell phones. The JR train lines in Japan have used contact-less cards (like those cards

Virutech, Inc. claims to have a product, Hindsight, which is a debugger which can run programs backward. Apparently it works with Virtutech's Simics product, which is a system level simulator. Batteries not included. And you have to use DML, their modeling language. Still, for some projects it could be a life

TI has announced a new ARM7 cpu, the TMS470. It's got built in flash and RAM as well a some interesting interfaces. While the smallest pin count is high (80 pin LQFP) it will fill a nice space between smaller 16 bit micros. The smallest part has 64K flash and 4kb of ram. This is a little small but workable. A larger 144 pin part has