How to get started with FPGA DSP designs.
We live in a very business oriented society. As a result, new products are subjected to market driven specifications such as time to market and cost. Many of these products require computer systems that also have to take these specifications into account. For this reason embedded systems are far more applicable than pc type computing solutions. An embedded system is basically a fully customized computer system which is optimized for its specific function. It can usually be developed and produced at a lower cost than a traditional computer solution.

Linux is a Unix-type operating system which uses the Linux kernel. The name - Linux- comes from the Linux kernel, written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The following article presents some boards that are running on Linux.

"A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, or traces, etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. Alternative names are printed wiring board (PWB),and etched wiring board." from Wikipedia - Printed Circuit Board. In its more pure form it is simply a normally flat plastic or ceramic substrate in which alternative layers of insulators and conductors are grown sequentially to form isolated conductive paths to transfer signals and current in and out of electronic components.

I will focus on DSP (digital signal processing) on FPGA to see the advantages and disadvantages.DSP (digital signal processing) is implied in some specific applications where the necessary filter order is too high or the computation scheme is too complex for analog circuit implementation. Analog signal filtering in the discrete domain can be done with the use of a simple processing chain, containing an analog-digital converter (ADC), a computation unit that can be a DSP, an FPGA either a personal computer, and a digital-analog converter. In this article I will concentrate on a processing chain with an FPGA and describe the advantages and disadvantages of it.

KiCAD a free and open source EDA tool was designed and written by Jean-Pierre Charras, a researcher at "Laboratoire des Images et des Signaux".
The EDA tools are usually under commercial licenses and very expensive. That increases the investment of electronics engineering and brings many other issues. One of my friends used the hacked EDA tools for his projects. Unfortunately, one of the tools was infected by CIH virus and all of his projects on the hard disk were in vain on that big day. It is important to get free (or low cost) EDA tools for electronics engineering.

Amazing DIY, hacks, DIY projects and mods.
Do It Yourself takes a big deal of many people free time.
Call it Kite Building, PC Modding, Car Tuning, Playstation Hacking, many people are totally committed to their own hobby.

T-Mobile G1 phone was finally launched!
While surfing the web, in the very last days I couldn't help noting an increasing amount of news concerning this new device developed by T-Mobile featuring Android by Google. I watched several video clips, including the T-Mobile ad, read comments, post on several blogs, previews, info leaks.

How to select software or hardware floating point depending from your ARM Microcontroller.
Recently I started to collect the open source robot projects from the Internet. The SRV1 robot from Surveyor LLC seems to be very funny. The company hosts two open source projects, one is based upon 60MIPS NXP2106 ARM7 microcontroller, the other one is developed on 500Hz ADI Balckfin MPU.

The purpose of this article is how to do serial port communication using C#.
The serial port of the PC is a very important resource both in industrial environment and in home-made electronics, due to the wide popularity of the UART interface which is to be found on many microcontrollers or on many test and design instrumentation (programmable power supplies, multi-meters, oscilloscopes etc). Even if modern-day computers tend not to have a physical serial port anymore, this obstacle is overcome by the appearance on the market of USB to UART converters (like the FTDI chips for example) which can emulate serial ports. Thus, from a computer application point of view, writing to such a device is as easy as writing to a regular serial port.

HDTV (high definition television) is digitally broadcast because digital TV requires less bandwidth. HDTV or High-Definition Television is a digital television system with greater resolution than analog or standard definition (SDTV) television systems. There were early attempts to develop analog HDTV and the most successful was Japan’s MUSE which was launched in the 1990s. It requires bandwidth greater than the traditional systems and was eventually turned off in 2007.

PCB (printed circuit board) layout optimization to avoid EMI (electromagnetic interference). A PCB layout should not only strive to prevent the emission of noise but also have good noise immunity from outside sources. One should have an understanding of potential sources of noise and have a strategy for dealing with these problems.

A SSD (solid state drive) is a data storage device and uses solid state memory to store persistent data.
Intel launched its new family of solid state drives claiming a significant performance advantage over its competitors. Solid state drives are small, lightweight and durable but they come with a high price tag and are typically slow. However, researchers in Korea have found a way of making these storage devices faster. The technique involves mixing two types of memory to increase the overall speed without also jacking up the price.

Beagle board, an ARM Cortex OMAP3530 based and USB powered SBC, is a low-cost, high performance, low power development platform. It is only 3 inch square in size, and powered by a USB connection. It is possible to design a Linux based application with web browsing, or multimedia functionality without the large development board that is typically needed. The board is designed by Beagleboard.org community members and solely sold by Digi-Key.

After merging the code from different projects, some of which use open source compilers, I can build my own project with GCC for AVR. The first project consumes 12KB ROM and 1K RAM. I believe the RAM size can be reduced after some optimization. However AVR offers big enough memory size than my expectation. Now I am adding the OTA (Over-the-Air) command parser to the project.

The purpose of this article is how to generate analog voltage with digital circuit.
Many times, designers are faced with the need of generating analogue voltage levels in purely digital circuits. Although the market provides today a very broad range of dedicated digital-to-analogue converters, putting such a device in the schematic has a negative impact on the overall cost of the system. There are however, cheap methods of creating the required voltage levels, and even of generating pseudo-analogue signals, using purely digital means.

OpenAVL is an AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location)open source project.The OpenAVL is one of my on-going open source projects. This project is written in ANSI C. The prototype board is made up of a low cost GSM M2M module (MC39i) from Siemens/Cinterion, a GPS OEM module from Leadtek and an AVR microcontroller (ATmega128L) from Atmel. It will be ported to Emcelettronica's IperSMS board, which has a PIC18 and a Telit M2M module. I will share my development experiences in these blogs.

Stopped by a Datasheet (a Freescale microcontroller)! I just can't believe that M68HC08 family of 8-bit microcontroller did this to me!
A few weeks ago, I was asked to modify a project developed previously by another designer.
This device, among other things was battery operated, had a matrix keyboard, and was managed by a Freescale (read and download the Datasheet).

The most popular programming languages for embedded systems are assembly language, C and C++. This article is a presentation for EE Software Development book - a project collection about how to program hardware in high level languages and alternative approaches. Better call it Rapid Hardware Programming with High Level Languages. This book is trying to help the programmers who have only programming experience in PCs, rather than the embedded systems. These programmers are software experts on the PC platform, but they do not know how to light a LED at all, because they have not sufficient background in electronics engineering.

Increasing cable length in precision video applications - this is the purpose of this article. Traditionally, the physical environment for transmitting video signals over long distances has been the shielded coax cable. Its quality and advantages are well known, and many times designers looking for off-the-shelf solutions do not know that long distance video transmission can be achieved with the same quality but for a much lower price.