Imagine not needing a power button to turn on your phone, just pick it up. Imagine cheaper warranty as manufacturers will know when devices were damaged because of usage error such as fall or banging. Imagine new user interfaces that are much more relying on sensors as the new Freescale Xtrinsic sensors can measure stuff 2000 times per second (the bandwidth and architecture being better). Imagine also sensors combining their abilities through fusion, again, no need to wake up the main ARM processor of the device to do all kinds of things! Imagine the device knowing exactly how it is touched, how it is moved, how it is held, the touch is not anymore only on the screen! This means better battery usage, months maybe even years of seamless standby. The new Xtrinsic sensor only needs 12 micro amps of power to be turned on all the time!
Category: Freescale
Windows CE 7
So this is what Windows Compact Embedded 7 looks like! The unskinned version of WinCE7 looks basically quite a lot like WinCE6, but perhaps this new version of Windows CE has got some new optimizations to use ARM Cortex A8 and the more advanced hardware acceleration fully. And perhaps Windows CE 7 is meant to receive layers of customized user interfaces put on top of it, like Windows Phone 7 Series and like other potential UIs that partners of Microsoft surely are working on. Can this be considered an alternative to Windows 7 for ARM processors? I don’t know. How much can it really do?
Freescale automotive concept car
Freescale is one of the leaders in putting processors and technology into cars. Freescale has put as much technology as they can on this concept car to showcase what we might see in the future out of the automotive industry.
Freescale Automotive: 3 levels of instrument cluster solutions
Freescale shows what they think future car dashboards will look like. They will be fully LCD based with for example a wide 12.3″ Sharp LCD screen running Linux features on the Freescale i.MX51.
Freescale Power Management and Audio controls through USB
Micro/Mini USB switch which controls routing of the audio, usb and uart to the processor and also controls the battery charging. Basically this means all kinds of things can be done just using the Mini or Micro USB connector.
Flexible and unbreakable plastic E Ink screens
Sriram Peruvemba, Vice president of marketing at E-ink, presents the new flexible plastic based E-ink display. That new plastic e-ink screen technology will make it more usable for school children to use E-ink based devices to read all their textbooks and for all to access all books and texts ever written in the whole world.
E-ink is for full readability, outdoors, with reading lights indoors, it basically provides near paper quality, perfect for reading hundreds of pages. Something that is not possible on the current LCD based iPad.
SurfaceInk designs a 12.1″ capacitive Linux tablet
Here’s the prototype of a 12.1″ Tablet designed by SurfaceInk based on the Freescale i.MX51.
Freescale touch sensors on a guitar
As a demo, Freescale has put some capacitive sensors and combine them with resistive stings to thus combine the effect of a keyboard and of a guitar into an instrument.
Acceleglove by AnthroTronix
The AcceleGlove™ instrumented gesture recognition glove (“designated iGlove for DoD/NIH applications”) has been developed under SBIR grants from the U.S. Army and Department of Education. Find more informations at: http://www.acceleglove.com
$15 Android Computer presented by AllGo systems
AllGo is presenting what may be one of the lowest cost ARM9 i.MX233 based Android device solution. For Tablets, PMPs, intelligent screens. AllGo provides Android software integration on the Freescale processors. The full Tablet with a 7″ WVGA screen and a battery could have a Bill Of Material cost of as low as $35.
Microsoft Word on ARM Powered Laptop using Genesi and Citrix solutions
Genesi Americas is presenting this awesome looking ARM Cortex A8 based Smartbook design, presented by Genesi who designed the hardware in collaboration with Pegatron of this latest generation of this Freescale Powered Smartbook design. For fun, we are running Microsoft Office through a high resolution version of Citrix viewer on the latest version of Ubuntu 10.4 for ARM processors. This could provide a one click online based software as a service solution. Want to run any X86 application on your ARM Laptop? Just click through the Citrix virtualization stuff and you can have it all running and smoothly. In theory, the apps could be processed by a grid and delivered much faster than on a single x86 processor based device.
Genesi are providing the hardware and software integration solution, in combination with Future Electronics, they can provide the whole solution to carriers, distributors, with the full bill of material, setting up the manufacturing and making the whole thing work and be sold to the market.
Genesi’s main IP is their Aura firmware solution:
Aura, the Genesi Firmware offering, implements a run-time, re-entrant hardware abstraction layer supporting the industry standard IEEE 1275 (OpenFirmware) and UEFI firmware specifications, with significant added functionality.
These additional features provide cost reduction of systems and faster time-to-market of hardware. Genesi provides board bring-up services and firmware for other Power Architecture and ARM hardware suppliers, up to and including a Linux desktop, based on our firmware.
Genesi is an active Open Source supporter, having donated a lot of hardware over the years to Debian, OpenSuSe, Gentoo, Crux and many other Linux distributions.
Genesi are very active in optimizing software specifically for ARM Cortex by porting libraries to the NEON unit in these devices resulting in large speedups.
Genesi has a developer forum: http://www.powerdeveloper.org
Hugh Herr keynote at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando
Hugh Herr directs the Biomechatronics group at The MIT Media Lab.
Liquavista screen demonstrated outdoors
On a bright sunny day at the Freescale headquarters in Toulouse, Kurt Petersdorff of Liquavista shows us the Liquavista screen and describes some of how it works. Liquavista thus supports color outdoor readability and claims that this screen can be manufactured with little changes to the existing huge LCD manufacturing process.
Freescale QNX Energy Management Systems
Freescale and QNX Software Systems are showing their new smart energy reference, a pre-integrated software stack that makes it easier to design, deploy, and extend smart-home energy management systems based on the Freescale i.MX25, i.MX35 and i.MX51.
VGO active presence robot
Imagine a robot that represents you in a distant location – one that represents you in healthcare facilities, in manufacturing sites – even at conferences. With a remote control software, the robot is controlled with a mouse, a video camera and screen to enable videoconferencing that can take you where you need to go to get your job done more efficiently.
Self-driven slot cars powered by Freescale
You know the slot cars, you have two little electric cars on a track and two players have a button to decide how much voltage to send over to the car. Freescale has collaborated with universities in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania to use Freescale sensors and software algorithms to create an automatic self-driven car that is faster than most human drivers. As it learns the track on its first lap, it then speeds away at full speed, knowing exacly how much speed to use in each turn. You can watch this other official video showing the self-driven slot cars at Self-driven slot cars at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5_g5dVsaw
Ubuntu 10.7 Smartbook Edition coming for ARM!
Canonical is showing the Freescale i.MX51 Pegatron Laptop reference design running the latest version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition optimized for ARM for speed (could they be calling this the Ubuntu Smartbook Edition?). In this video, the representative of Canonical explains some of the things that are being worked on to optimize Linux as a full laptop experience on ARM platforms like the ARM Cortex A8 and the multi-core ARM Cortex A9 that are coming out soon. I will film another video with Canonical to try to get more details on how the upcoming ARM Powered laptops are going to look like and how Linux is being optimized for it.
Freescale low power small size low cost accelerometer MMA7660 for portrait and landscape detection
Featuring the popular ZSTAR3 (zigbee like wireless sensor demo).
Freescale new 12-bit digital accelerometer MMA8450Q
Embedded Innovative features like transient detection (High pass filter for gravity offset) and 32 FIFO samples associated with auto wake-up function.
A brief introduction to Freescale pressure sensors portfolio
Featuring the medical invasive blood pressure MPX2300DT1, the ultra small absolute barometric sensor MPL115A and the water level demo DEMOAPEX.
