What The Nest Learning Thermostat and Critical Link Have in Common
As an engineer, I’m always interested in tear-downs – dismantling a machine, a gadget, a device to see what’s in its innards. Most engineers, I suspect, start doing this when they’re kids. We want to know how things work – the clock, the motor, the radio – which is how we end up becoming engineers. […]
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Altera-Based Mity in the Works
Not sure if you saw our recent announcement that Critical Link is developing our first Altera –based module. Our new SoM, the MitySOM-5CSX features the Altera Cyclone V SX-U672, which combines FPGA logic and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor subsystem. We’ve added in NOR FLASH and DDR3 RAM memory subsystems. This is a great addition […]
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Get Smart
With the possible exception of humankind, everything these days seems to be getting smarter. A while back, I did a post about “smart” basketballs, which have embedded sensors that capture all sorts of data that helps coaches diagnose and correct player problems. Then there are cars that parallel park themselves. Watches that let you know […]
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Dream Job
As my friends (and wife) are all very well aware, I’m a car guy.I love BMW’s. I follow NASCAR. And Formula 1. On a recent business trip to Germany, I got to tour the BMW factory in Munich. I’m also an engineering guy. It’s what I do. It’s what I love to do. So it’s […]
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Critical Link at Design West
Last week, I spent three days in San Jose at Design West (the renamed Embedded Systems Conference). While the show seemed much smaller than it has been in the past, there were still plenty of interesting things to see, including a training session on how to “program your very own wireless mesh networked propeller beanie […]
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One More Reason I Wish I’d Taken Touch Typing
While over the years my keyboard skills have gone way beyond simple hunt and peck, there have been a few occasions when I wish I’d listened to Mrs. Crabtree in ninth grade when she advised everyone to take touch typing. One of those occasions was when I saw a piece by Andrew Liszewski on “invisible […]
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ASICs? Souped up FPGAs? You decide.
Rick Merritt had an interesting article over on EE Times a few weeks ago, and it’s a good springboard for any debate on whether FPGAs with cores for communications systems are replacing ASICs in the comms systems world. Rick’s article came on the heels of an early March announcement from Xilinx in which they talked […]
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Testing. One, Two, Three Testing
There was an interesting article by Anil Khitolia on EDN a few weeks ago on LTE Stress Testing. He started out with a fast fact that I found pretty shocking – a claim that 15-20% of smartphones are returned. Anil attributes this to lack of rugged testing: Current wireless industry standards require device certification or […]
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TI – Critical Link White Paper on Machine Vision
At Critical Link, we work very closely with Texas Instruments, and I had a recent opportunity to co-author a white paper with TI’s Asheesh Bhardwaj, a senior applications engineer. The topic is machine vision, a technology that is becoming increasingly important, and one we’re hearing about a lot more often from our customers and prospects […]
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H.265 is coming. What will this mean for encode and decode engines?
Earlier this year, Tech Crunch reported on the ITU’s approval of the H.265 standard for streaming video. The goal for the new standard – a.k.a. HEVC (for High Efficiency Video Coding) – is that, with better compression techniques, high quality HD streaming will be possible for those in bandwidth challenged areas, and/or relying on mobile […]
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