This year the GNU Tools Cauldron was hosted by Google at their California headquarters and the Embecosm team were there in strength. While a cauldron typically implies heat, this was in many ways very much a cool place to be: the talks were leading edge, the venue had great facilities, and the temperature was much more pleasant than back in the UK Read More
A couple of weeks ago, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) held its own festival for all those involved in making things. Simon Cook and I went along to promote the activities of the UK… Read More
I am not a fan of patents. I see companies of all sizes racing to patent new ideas, not because they particularly want or need to, but to give them a bulwark against law suits from other patent holders. In… Read More
Powerful FPGA development boards are now easily within the price range of the hobbyist. The Terasic DE0-Nano is around £65/$100, yet capable of running a complete Linux-capable SoC. Last weekend, to coincide with Hardware Freedom Day, a group of us ran a hands-on workshop, Chip Hack, to introduce complete beginners to FPGA development Read More
Big science is important, not just because the questions it asks define what it is to be human, but because experiments of such magnitude have the potential to change all the fields of science around them Read More
Not often do you listen to a lawyer speaking and wish he had talked for longer. But then Andrew Katz is no ordinary lawyer. He's an open source IP specialist, and recently he's been turning his skills to hardware licensing, notably with the SolderPad and CERN Open Hardware Licenses… Read More
On 27th October 2012 Adapteva Inc successfully raised almost $900,000 via the Kickstarter crowd funding website. It's not the largest amount ever raised on Kickstarter, nor is it the most over-subscribed offering. What makes it unusual is being the first such funding success by a chip design company … Read More
The Ericsson T95 launched in 2001. It had a 720 mAh Li-Ion battery, a standby time of 300 hours and a talk time of 11 hours. A decade later the Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10 mini was launched. It has a 910 mAh Li-polymer battery, and using 3G, a standby time of approximately 285 hours and a talk time of approximately 3.5 hours with 3G … Read More
Bare-board computers are not new - they've existed almost as long as microprocessors and until recently were a geek specialism and fairly expensive. But things are changing. Hobbyists have been using Arduino, based on the 8-bit AVR microcontroller from Atmel for some time … Read More
