"hardware" entries

Matthew Berggren on making electronics accessible

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Better ways to design electronics.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

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In our new episode of the Hardware Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Matthew Berggren, who at the time the interview was conducted last December was senior director of product at Supplyframe. (Berggren is now director of Autodesk Circuits at Autodesk.)

Our discussion focuses on the need for abstracted modules and better metadata in electronics. Berggren gets to the root of it here:

There are 30 software developers for every hardware engineer in the world. That’s not only a tremendous bottleneck, but if you accept the premise that the next generation of products are going to be some hybrid of hardware and software—and really, hardware is the means to interact with the real world, and I want to write software applications that will interact with the real world—then there is this massive blue ocean out there that should present tremendous opportunity to semiconductor manufacturers, or anyone else who wants to get into that space.

Read more…

Four short links: 22 January 2016

Four short links: 22 January 2016

Open Source Ultrasound, Deep Learning MOOC, Corp Dev Translation, and Immersive at Sundance

  1. Murgen — open source open hardware ultrasound.
  2. Udacity Deep Learning MOOC — platform is Google’s TensorFlow.
  3. CorpDev Translation“We’ll continue to follow your progress.” Translation: We’ll reach back out when we see you haven’t raised more money and you are probably more desperate because of your shorter runway.
  4. 8i Take Immersive Tech to Sundance8i’s technology lets filmmakers capture entire performances with off-the-shelf cameras and then place them in pre-existing environments, creating a fully navigable 3-D VR movie that’s far more immersive than the 360-degree videos most have seen.
Four short links: 19 January 2016

Four short links: 19 January 2016

Spermbots, Reputation Risks, Lab Robot, and Stack Expansion

  1. SpermbotsResearchers from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences at IFW Dresden in Germany have successfully tested tiny, magnetically-driven power suits for individual sperm that can turn them into steerable cyborg “spermbots” that can be remote controlled all the way to the egg. But can they make an underwire bra that the washing machine doesn’t turn into a medieval torture device?
  2. What’s Eating Silicon ValleyIn 2014, more Harvard Business School Grads went into technology than into banking for the first time since the dot-com era. […] another reason Wall Street had trouble maintaining goodwill was because of some of the attributes above—hard-charging, too much too soon, parallel reality, money flowing everywhere, rich white guys, etc. The Wall St comparison was new to me, but I can see it as a goodwill risk.
  3. OpenTrons — $3,000 open source personal lab robot for science, with downloadable/shareable protocols.
  4. Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy — you’re more likely to succeed if you expand down (to supplant your suppliers) than up (to build the products that are built on top of your product) because you’re a customer of your suppliers, so you know what good product-market fit will look like, but you’re just fantasizing that you can supplant your downstream value.
Four short links: 13 January 2016

Four short links: 13 January 2016

Object Lessons, Data Programming, Generational Adoption, and Product Observations

  1. Object Lessons — Bogost and Schaberg edit a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from advocates to attendants, heresies to shares. For anyone who cares about products.
  2. A Data Programming CS1 Course (PDF) — We have found that students can be motivated to learn programming and computer science concepts in order to analyze DNA, predict the outcome of elections, detect fraudulent data, suggest friends in a social network, determine the authorship of documents, and more. The approach is more than just a collection of “nifty assignments”; rather, it affects the choice of topics and pedagogy.
  3. Cars and the Future (Ben Thompson) — This generational pattern of adoption will, in the history books, look sudden, even as it seems to unfold ever so slowly for those of us in the here and now — especially those of us working in technology. The pace of change in the technology industry — which is young, hugely driven by Moore’s Law, and which has largely catered to change-embracing geeks — is likely the true aberration. After all, the biggest mistake consistently made by technologists is forgetting that for most people technology is a means to an end, and for all the benefits we can list when it comes to over-the-top video or a network of on-demand self-driving vehicles, change and the abandonment of long-held ideals like the open road and a bit of TV after supper is an end most would prefer to avoid.
  4. CES 2016 Observations for Product PeopleThe big challenge is no surprise. Software development is unable to keep up with the hardware. What is going to separate one device from another or one company from another will be the software execution, not just the choice of chipset or specs for a peripheral/sensor. It would be hard to overstate the clear opportunity to build winning products using stronger software relative to competitors. Said another way, spending too many cycles on hardware pits you against the supply chain for most products. The whole piece is solid.

Charles Fracchia on a new breed of biologists

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The merging worlds of software, hardware, and biology.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

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In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast—which features our first discussion focusing specifically on synthetic biology—David Cranor and I talk with Charles Fracchia, an IBM Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the synthetic biology company BioBright.

Discussion points:

  • The blurring of the lines between biology, software development, hardware engineering, and electrical engineering
  • BioBright’s efforts to create hardware and software tools to reinvent the way biology is done in a lab
  • The most prominent market forces in biology today (especially healthcare)
  • How experiments conducted using Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices are impacting synthetic biology
  • Pembient’s synthetic rhino horns

Read more…

Four short links: 30 December 2015

Four short links: 30 December 2015

Bitcoin Patents, Wall-Climbing Robot, English 2 Code, and Decoding USB

  1. Bank of America Loading up on Bitcoin PatentsThe wide-ranging patents cover everything from a “cryptocurrency transaction payment system” which would let users make transactions using cryptocurrency, to risk detection, storing cryptocurrencies offline, and using the blockchain to measure fraudulent activity.
  2. Vertigo: A Wall-Climbing Robot (Disney Research) — watch the video. YOW! (via David Pescovitz)
  3. Synthesizing What I MeanIn this paper, we describe SWIM, a tool which suggests code snippets given API-related natural language queries.
  4. serialusb — this is how you decode USB protocols.
Four short links: 21 December 2015

Four short links: 21 December 2015

Anomaly Detection, Contempt Culture, Deep Learning Robot, and Compromised Firewalls

  1. Bro — open source intrusion and anomaly detection service, turns everything into events that you can run scripts against. Good pedigree (Vern Paxson, a TCP/IP elder god) despite the wince-inducing name (at least it isn’t “brah”).
  2. Contempt Culture (Aurynn) — for a culture that now prides itself on continuous improvement and blameless post-mortems and so on, we’re blind to a contempt culture that produces cults of criticism like “PHP isn’t a real programming language,” etc., where the targets of the criticism are pathways disproportionately taken by women and minorities. I’m embarrassed by how much of 2001-era Nat I recognise in Aurynn’s description.
  3. Deep Learning RobotBuilt for advanced research in robotics and artificial intelligence (deep learning). Pre-installed Google TensorFlow, Robot Operating System (ROS), Caffe, Torch, Theano, CUDA, and cuDNN.
  4. Juniper ScreenOS Backdoor — here’s the ssh password that’ll get you into any unpatched Juniper firewall, courtesy a backdoor that will be keeping network admins and CEOs alike awake and unhappy around the world. The interesting analysis with long-term effects will be “how the hell did it get in there?”
Four short links: 11 December 2015

Four short links: 11 December 2015

Probabilistic Algorithms, Copyright-Free, AI Hardware, and Autonomous Vehicle Policy

  1. Real-world Probabilistic Algorithms (Tyler McMullen) — This article addresses two types of probabilistic algorithms: those that explicitly introduce randomness through a rand() call, and those that convert input data into a uniform distribution to achieve a similar effect.
  2. Class of 2016those whose works will, on 1st January 2016, be entering the public domain in many countries around the world. Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot, Malcolm X, Bela Bartok, Winston Churchill, and W. Somerset Maugham among others. (Which person in which country depends on copyright term. Not for you, America. Nor us after TPP)
  3. Facebook to Open Source AI Hardware DesignBig Sur is our newest Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI computing at a large scale. Eight GPUs, and designs to be released through Open Compute Project.
  4. Driving Changes (PDF) — policy impacts, benefits, and considerations for autonomous vehicles. Written for Toronto but applicable to many more cities. (via David Ticoll)
Four short links: 7 December 2015

Four short links: 7 December 2015

Telepresent Axeman, Toxic Workers, Analysis Code, and Cryptocurrency Attacks

  1. Axe-Wielding Robot w/Telepresence (YouTube) — graphic robot-on-wall action at 2m30s. (via IEEE)
  2. Toxic Workers (PDF) — In comparing the two costs, even if a firm could replace an average worker with one who performs in the top 1%, it would still be better off by replacing a toxic worker with an average worker by more than two-to-one. Harvard Business School research. (via Fortune)
  3. Replacing Sawzall (Google) — At Google, most Sawzall analysis has been replaced by Go […] we’ve developed a set of Go libraries that we call Lingo (for Logs in Go). Lingo includes a table aggregation library that brings the powerful features of Sawzall aggregation tables to Go, using reflection to support user-defined types for table keys and values. It also provides default behavior for setting up and running a MapReduce that reads data from the logs proxy. The result is that Lingo analysis code is often as concise and simple as (and sometimes simpler than) the Sawzall equivalent.
  4. Attacks in the World of Cryptocurrency — a review of some of the discussed weakness, attacks, or oddities in cryptocurrency (esp. bitcoin).
Four short links: 25 November 2015

Four short links: 25 November 2015

Faking Magstripes, Embedded Database, Another Embedded Database, Multicamera Array

  1. magspoofa portable device that can spoof/emulate any magnetic stripe or credit card “wirelessly,” even on standard magstripe readers.
  2. LittleD — open source relational database for embedded devices and sensors nodes.
  3. iondb — open source key-value datastore for resource constrained systems.
  4. Stanford Multicamera Array — 128 cameras, reconfigurable. If the cameras are packed close together, then the system effectively functions as a single-center-of-projection synthetic camera, which we can configure to provide unprecedented performance along one or more imaging dimensions, such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, depth of field, frame rate, or spectral sensitivity. If the cameras are placed farther apart, then the system functions as a multiple-center-of-projection camera, and the data it captures is called a light field. Of particular interest to us are novel methods for estimating 3D scene geometry from the dense imagery captured by the array, and novel ways to construct multi-perspective panoramas from light fields, whether captured by this array or not. Finally, if the cameras are placed at an intermediate spacing, then the system functions as a single camera with a large synthetic aperture, which allows us to see through partially occluding environments like foliage or crowds.