KiCAD a Free and Open Source EDA Tool

allankliu — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 01:38:37 +0200

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 is infected by CIH virus, all of his projects on hard disks are in vain on that big day. It is important to get free (or low cost) EDA tools for electronics engineering.

In my OpenAVL project, I try my best to use open source software products in the whole project. I found Kicad, which is maintained by Mr. Jean Pierre Charras, a researcher at LIS (Laboratoire des Images et des Signaux) and a teacher in IUT de Saint Martin d'Hères.(France), in the field of electrical engineering and image processing.

Kicad has been developed for years. It becomes a multilingual, cross-platform and complete independent EDA tool, follows GPLv2 license. It is a set of softwares and a project manager:

Speeding up Solid-State Drives

John Artiuch — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:34:26 +0200

Today 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. The main cause of low throughput in solid state drives is the fact that NAND flash memory which makes up the drives cannot override old data with new data but needs free memory space to store the new data. This means that if you want to update an existing block of data you need to save the old data to a new location, erase the old data, merge it with the new information and finally write it to its original location. This is not a huge problem when dealing with large files such as video clips however it becomes an issue when you need to frequently make changes and updates to small chunks of data.

GPS Applications

allankliu — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:26:16 +0200

There are many well known GPS based applications in daily life. Some applications can run independently, such as navigation, geo-tagging and passive track logger. The other applications have to connect to the complementary web servers as the backend sources of map tiles, local search services, landmarks sharing and routes planning. GPS is entering most of the popular mobile platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs, media players, and game consoles. The attached figure is a PSP with new released GPS module. It is a good reason that kids can use to convince parents to buy a PSP for them.

It is difficult to mention all of the amazing GPS applications in the world. Here we summary the hottest GPS applications in the following list. And we try to offer some open source projects so anyone can use them as starting point.

Breaking News - VIDEO

Emanuele — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:36:38 +0200

News on Semiconductors , Microcontrollers and Electronics Parts

Electronics Engineering Software Overview

allankliu — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:24:09 +0100

Electronics Engineering requires a lot of software. Here is an overview for it.