reflective interferometric modulation Qualcomm announces working displays which are an OLED / LCD / Plasma competitor: reflective interferometric modulation (IMOD). They offer: low power consumption, visibility in outdoor lighting, and no backlighting requirement
These things are based on DLP technology – ie. there’s a little mirror on each chip reflecting the RGB lasers to the required pixel. The mirror tilts and turns at insane speed in order to get the exact right colour mix to the place the light is projected to. Apparently the colours on this thing Read more about Mitsubishi Laser TV’s[…]
Tablet PC’s come in all shapes and sizes. This is a quick look at tablet PCs on the market without keyboards and without potentially breakable hinges. Electrovaya Inc. has the Scribbler SC-3100 Ace Asia Co., Ltd. has the T201 Fujitsu has the Stylistic ST5100 Itronix offerts the rugged Gobook Series Motion Computing offers 3 different Read more about Tablet PCs[…]
It looks like ASUS is onto a winner here: it has all the hype on its side, it has weight and formfactor on its side and most of all it has price on its side. Running from around $300 – $ 400 this is a very cheap laptop with a 7″ screen and a Linux Read more about ASUS Eee PC[…]
USBmicro is a USB electrical device interface. It comes in two flavours: the U401 and the U421. The main difference is the form factor. There’s quite a lot of documentation on the site how to program and install them Kadtronix sells the unit with interface software, making the programming quite a bit easier They also Read more about USBmicro Controller[…]
The little hypnotic dancing robot comes from here.
That’s nanoscale – offset printers go to around 1,500 dpi. Free licence to start printing bank bills?
These 5 tools are the kind you probably didn’t know existed, but once you know about them you’ll want them added to your aresenal immediately. They aren’t particularly expensive, but very very useful.
This is the latest in bionic hand technology: it’s controlled using the mind and existing musculature, you can manipulate the fingers independently and you have precision control over the power the fingers exert, meaning you don’t inadvertently crush things you’re trying to hold.
Yes, Intel has done it again – not the 1+1=1.999999999r float bug, but close enough. Read about it here…
El reg has a nice article on why development of intelligent / multifunctional robots is still stagnated and run by hobbyists. It runs through some of the real problems of software development for robot brains.
An Israeli team has created a tiny little robot that can travel up and down your veins and arteries, being manipulated by magnetic fields. It has a diameter of 1mm and crawls along your bloodstream using little arms.
Using nanowires assembled on glass and thin films of flexible plastic built using zinc oxide or indium oxide the transistors are not visible to the human eye. The researchers hope to create HUDs and displays on windsheilds, visors, spectacles, etc. Make my car look like the inside of an F-16 please!
Tom’s Hardware is running a great tutorial how to get a DLP projector, stereoscopic glasses and go all VR by turning your wall into a huge 3D display. They tell you what hardware to get and how to install it, and have reviews of several different types of games you can play.
Are CCD sensors now a thing of the past? The Samsung 8.4 megapixel CMOS Image Sensor uses only a tenth of the power of a CCD with the same fidelity and a high SNR.
Via is releasing a tiny motherboard/chip combo – the Epia PX (10×7.2 cm), a successor to the Pico-ITX (12×12 cm). It runs at 1GHz and has a whole scale of I/O for audio/visual and USB connectors.
The VoomPC2 ruggedized little thing comes pre-prepped to fit into your car. It comes with a 1.5 Ghz processor and a whole load of connectors: VGA and S-Video output, USB 2.0, FireWire, Ethernet, PCMCIA Type I and II, a CardBus interface for hooking up to GPS or Wi-Fi systems, and a 5.1 audio support.
Nickel Cadmium batteries lose their maximum charge after a while due to dendrite growth in them. Using an external power source, you can zap the battery and clear the dendrites, giving you a revived battery.
This new type of memory is 500 – 100 times faster than flash RAM and has half the power consumption. It’s non volatile, so it doesn’t need to be powered continuously. At the heart of phase-change memory is a tiny chunk of alloy that can be changed rapidly between an ordered, crystalline phase and a Read more about Phase Change Memory[…]
Samsung has unveiled their new hybrid hard drives (HHD) composed of storage in the form of partially platter based (rotating) storage and flash memory storage. The flash memory works like a prefetch cache, but because it’s much faster than platter technology there should be significant speed increases on bootup and with writing small files. Once Read more about Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk[…]
Using tobacco virusses, you can apparently create very fast switching transistors. These guys have done it, and now need to find a way to link up all the virusses. This means your RAM may soon (the researchers think in around 4 years) be alive.
This site has instructions on how to build your own astromech – with galleries for all the different types of droids people have built untill now.
Matrox released this some time ago, but I just found it, so here it is: The Triplehead2Go is a box you connect a single VGA (analog) out from your PC to and then connect 3 monitors to through it’s own VGA (analog) outputs. It’s not a graphics card – Matrox has decided to not compete Read more about Matrox Triplehead2Go[…]
The article here claims it’s light through the chip itself, but reading it, it looks more like they’ve managed to find a way to transmit data using light between the chips themselves, which is still pretty cool and will speed up the bus no end (which is a major limiting factor in PC speeds nowadays).
In order to put a PC into your car, you need to power your computer from the car itself. You also need software and they reccomend a 7″ touch screen LCD. Full instructions to be found.