What would you say about 25$ single board computer ? Now it has become a reality with Raspberry Pi, a low ARM GNU/Linux box.
It has a quite impressive set of features considering its price. It’s based on BCM2835 SoC which contains a 700 MHz ARM processor and a Videocore 4 GPU capable of HD video Continue reading
A few years ago it was expensive and almost impossible to manufacture custom mechanical parts at home. Recently we have seen the rise of the low cost 3D printers (usually under 1000 $), allowing you to have your own factory at home.
In the last period, the software defined radio starts to become more and more popular, due to it’s obvious advantages over the analog radio. With SDR, basically you can do almost everything, no matter how complicated the modulation and demodulation techniques are used.
This concept is not new, but the high performance electronics available for low prices have rendered practical many things. Now, it costs only 20$ ! Continue reading
ZPU is a very interesting soft core processor designed to take as little FPGA resources as possible, leaving you a lot of space for peripherals and hardware accelerators. It’s a modern stack based 32 bit CPU, the implementation is independent of the FPGA model and it can also be used in other technologies (e.g. anti-fuse, ASIC).
I have seen a very interesting 8-bit family of microcontrollers, recently launched by Microchip: the PIC16F178X 8-bit advanced analog flash microcontrollers. What’s cool about those microcontrollers, it’s the fact that they have all kind of analog peripherals: