Embedded Systems

Two Raspberry Pi computers are to be taken into space. British Astronaut Tim Peake will take the Raspberry Pis to the International Space Station as part of a school coding competition organised by UK Space and the European Space Agency. School students will be asked to devise and code their own apps or experiment to run on a Raspberry Pi ...

Microchip has released the fourth-generation of its JukeBlox multi-room audio platform. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module is based on Microchip’s DM920 Wi-Fi network media processor, which has 2.4 and 5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 and Ethernet. It has dual 300MHz DSP cores, and a PC-based graphical user interface gives access to a library of speaker-tuning DSP algorithms, including a 15-band ...

Infineon has announced two shields for the Arduino design community. The shields target RGB lighting and motor control.

With the blessing of Sir Clive Sinclair, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum could return through a crowd-funded project on Indiegogo. To be called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega, it will come pre-loaded with 1,000 Spectrum games. It is the brainchild of a Luton-based start-up called Retro Computers, which has been formed by: chairman and friend of Sir Clive Sinclair, Dr David ...

Processor developers ARM, Freescale and Texas Instruments have joined the Qt Partner Programme. This will significantly expand the availability of Qt-verified reference boards. Qt is a pre-configured embedded device development environment with an optimised software stack which can be deployed on reference boards for the development of user interfaces (UIs) and applications.  The new partners include ARM, Boundary Devices, Freescale Semiconductor, ...

Intel’s Edison embedded computing development platform which includes a board for Arduino is now being sold by RS Components. The Intel Edison module is built around a dual-core, dual-threaded 500MHz Intel Atom CPU and a 100MHz 32-bit Intel Quark microcontroller. “The Intel Edison platform represents an important advance among ready-to-use compute platforms available today,” said Simon Duggleby, semiconductor category marketing manager ...

Yesterday it was announced that Newbury Electronics is to start a new electronic design services division called Newbury Innovations, and that the team transferring to the new entity had already designed some interesting electronics, including tags for tracking wild animals. Here is some more on those tags. They were created for the Swansea Live Animal Monitoring (SLAM) group, led by ...

Texas Instrument hopes to simplify the programming of the BeagleBone Black embedded computing board. It has introduced the PRU Cape as a BeagleBone Black add-on board that gives designers access to a Programmable Real-Time Unit (PRU) core. The PRU is a low-latency microcontroller subsystem integrated in the Sitara AM335x and AM437x family of devices. The PRU core is optimised for ...

Symtavision, which specialises in timing analysis solutions for planning, optimising and verifying embedded real-time systems, has announced the release of SymTA/S 3.6 delivering up to 20x faster system distribution and worst-case analysis runtime performance.

Ingenic of Beijing has introduced an asymmetric dual-core MIPS-based chip for wearables, and tiny (15x13mm) development kit to go with it. The development kit, Newton2, integrates the application processor, eMCP memory, power management controller, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n), Bluetooth (4.1), 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis magnetometer, and seven micro connectors on the back for peripherals including: display, audio and camera. Stand-by consumption ...