Aasemoon'z Cluster

A Product How-To on building a unified control environment using architectures such as TI’s Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3-based MCUs or Cortex-A8-based Sitara AM35x MPUs.

CHESS is a tool for disciplined testing of concurrent programs. CHESS requires users to develop concise concurrent tests for that explore one concurrency scenario—or a few scenarios—in their programs. Given such a test, CHESS systematically enumerates all behaviors of the program being tested to find concurrency errors, data races, deadlocks, and livelocks.

A transistor that emits light and is made from organic materials could lead to cheaper digital displays and fast-switching light sources on computer chips, according to the researchers who built it. Small displays made from diodes of the same type of materials (organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs) are already in commercial production, but the transistor design could improve on those and lead to applications where OLEDs can’t go. The new organic light-emitting transistor (OLET) is much more efficient than previous designs. It has an external quantum efficiency—a key measure of how much light comes out per charge carrier pumped in—of 5 percent. An OLED based on the same material has a quantum efficiency of only 2 percent. Previous OLET designs had an efficiency of only 0.6 percent.

One challenge designers face is the need to translate their algorithms into code for use in embedded targets. The task has proven to be long and prone to error. This article examines how the use of high-level design tools and C code generation capabilities improves the design flow by exploring different use cases and how to reduce the amount of embedded technology expertise required to program embedded targets.

Building a dynamic PHP site requires you to understand how CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functions work. There are a variety of ways to implement these functions include databases, and most commonly through mySQL.  With these functions you can add new entries to the database (registration), view existing entries (retrieve users or fields), update the entries to your table or delete users (who may unsubscribe or permanently delete their accounts.) For a user account based sites, these functions are essential for keeping your user and information database up to date.

Scientists from Columbia University, Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a robot that’s just 4 nanometers wide. And no, it doesn’t have flashing lights, video cameras or wheels. It does, however, have four legs, and the ability to start, move, turn, and stop. Descendants of the molecular nanobot, or “spider,” could someday be used to treat diseases such as cancer or diabetes. The team built the spider by starting with a protein called streptavidin, that conveniently has four symmetrically-placed binding pockets for a chemical called biotin. The legs were made from four strands of biotin-labeled DNA, which were bound to the pockets. Three of the legs were made from enzymatic DNA, which is a type that binds to and then dissociates (cuts away) from other particular sequences of DNA. Its fourth leg was made from what the researchers call a “start strand” of DNA - it keeps the spider tethered to its starting site, until it’s released.

With the GA release of Scala 2.8 getting very close, David Pollak, the creator of the Scala-based web framework: Lift, has announced a Scala community initiative that  will have an equally large impact on Scala developers.  The Fresh Scala Initiative aims to address the issue of version fragility in the ecosystem.  You may have heard that Scala 2.8 is not binary compatible with the 2.7 branch.  Therefore, some community members have banded together to maintain a repository and provide nightly builds of popular Scala library collections to build against Scala 2.8.  

“CMS” stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, a general-purpose particle physics detector built on the Large Hadron Collider. The CMS project posted a few comics which provide a nice, simple (if somewhat cheesy) explanation of what the CMS/LHC does. The LHC generates massive amounts of data of all different varieties, which is distributed across a worldwide grid. It sends status messages to some of the computers, job monitoring info to other computers, bookkeeping info still elsewhere, and so on. This means that each location has specialized queries it can do on the data it has, but up until now it’s been very difficult to query across the whole grid. Enter the Data Aggregation System, designed to allow anything to be queried across all of the machines.

On June 23, the new Xtext version 1.0 will be released as part of Eclipse's annual release train. During the last year Xtext has grown from a tiny DSL editor generator, to a full-blown language development framework. With Xtext 1.0 you can develop complex programming languages and you not only get an advanced editor, but a complete integrated development environment (IDE) based on Eclipse. The new workspace indexer and the builder infrastructure enable sophisticated IDE features, as we will demonstrate in this webinar. The new JVM-types allow you to link to and integrate with any Java element and Eclipse's JDT. During the webinar we will give a short overview on Xtext and how it works behind the scenes. We will demo different aspects of the framework’s features and show how to implement an interpreter for arithmetic expressions. The 60 minutes will be a great opportunity for you to get in touch with the Xtext core committers, ask questions and learn about the new and noteworthy features in version 1.0.

You would be forgiven if you thought the "F" in F# -- which made its debut as part of Visual Studio 2010 -- stands for "functional." After all, F# (pronounced "F sharp") is a functional programming language for the .NET Framework that combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET. But Don Syme, inventor of F# and leader of the team that incubated the language, has a different, truncated, and entirely whimsical definition. "In the F# team," says Syme, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, "We say, 'F is for Fun.' F# enables users to write simple code to solve complex problems. Programming with F# really does make many programming tasks simpler, and our users have consistently reported that they've found using the language enjoyable." Indeed, F#, which has been developed in a partnership between Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Developer Division, is already popular with the .NET developer community. The language is widely known in the academic community and among thought leaders, and the list of admirers will only increase as Visual F#, the result of a partnership between Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft's Developer Division, becomes a first-class language in Visual Studio 2010.

Menta SAS and LIRMM have taped out what they believe is the of worlds first MRAM-based FPGA which has patent-protected circuitry enabling compact integration of MRAM and embedded-FPGA solutions. Researchers at the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM), in France, claimed in October that they had developed a FPGA circuit based on non volatile resistive memory cell.

Engineers aim to deliver within a year a broad suite of standards needed to build smart electric grids. They reported on their stepwise progress at the end of Connectivity Week here. Beyond the standards, the industry needs to create new regulations and business models and show consumers the benefits of a smart grid to make the transition to a digital, networked grid happen, said attendees and presenters at the event. The good news is the standards are underway.

An all-optical integrator, or lightwave capacitor, is a fundamental building block equivalent to those used in multi-functional electronic circuits. Associate Professor David Moss, a senior researcher within the Institute for Photonic and Optical Science (IPOS), leads an international team which has developed the optical integrator on a CMOS compatible silicon chip. The device, a photonic chip compatible with electronic technology (CMOS), will be a key enabler of next generation fully-integrated ultrafast optical data processing technologies for many applications including ultra-fast optical information-processing, optical memory, measurement, computing systems, and real-time differential equation computing units.

National Instruments has released a vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs which are used to process and analyse an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. The FPGAs can be used to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. They can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering.

Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, or RoMeLa, has created robots with the most unusual shapes and sizes -- from strange multi-legged robots to amoeba-like robots with no legs at all. Now he's unveiling a new robot with a more conventional shape: a full-sized humanoid robot called CHARLI, or Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. The robot is 5-foot tall (1.52 meter), untethered and autonomous, capable of walking and gesturing. But its biggest innovation is that it does not use rotational joints. Most humanoid robots -- Asimo, Hubo, Mahru -- use DC motors to rotate various joints (typically at the waist, hips, knees, and ankles). The approach makes sense and, in fact, today's humanoids can walk, run, and climb stairs. However, this approach doesn't correspond to how our own bodies work, with our muscles contracting and relaxing to rotate our various joints.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

One of the biggest commercial applications of spintronics in computing to date has been the use of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), the material phenomenon that makes possible the huge storage capacity of today’s hard disk drives. In the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, GMR was cited as the first big commercial application for nanotechnology. But extending the commercial application of spintronic-enabled systems beyond read heads for HDDs has proven to be a difficult task. One need only look at the seemingly endless travails of NVE Corporation, which in its financial results still shows it greatest revenue growth in contract research as opposed to product sales. While recent research from a team of researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Hamburg in Germany may not turn around the fortunes of spintronics in the short term, it does provide a way to better characterize the spin of electrons and thereby promises better ways of exploiting it for electronics applications. The researchers are reporting in Nature Nanotechnology that they have for the first time been able to create images of the spin direction of electrons.

Tigal announced the VoiceGP family of products under its VeeaR brand of voice and speech recognition products. The product family consists of the VoiceGP module and two development kits with bundled development software. It combines all the hardware and software required for easy and cost effective development and implementation of speech synthesis and multi-language speaker independent and speaker dependent speech recognition capabilities to virtually any application, says the manufacturer. The VoiceGP Module is based on Sensory's RSC-4128 mixed signal processor. Its 42x72mm footprint and two 28-pin connectors with 2.54mm pin spacing make the module breadboard friendly and suitable for prototype boards.