Weightless, The Hopefully-not-vaporware Internet Of Things Chip

Weightless

Imagine a single chip able to interface with your Ethernet, USB, and serial devices, turn those connections into wireless radio signals with miles of range, able operate off a single AA battery, and costs less than $2. That’s the promise of the Weightless special interest group that wants to put several hopefully not vaporware radio chips in the hands of everyone on the planet.

Long-range wireless networks are a tricky thing; for home networks, Bluetooth and WiFi reign supreme. Venturing into the outdoors, or really any place more than a few hundred feet from a WiFi repeater is a challenge, though. If you’re trying to send data to a fleet of automobiles, track an endangered animal, or make a smart power grid, your only real option is a cell phone tower with very high costs in hardware and battery life.

Weightless hopes to change that with a small radio chip that includes a MAC, PHY, and all the components necessary to turn just about any digital connection into a wireless link between devices. The radio will operate in the spectrum left behind by UHF TV (470 – 790MHz), and the folks working on already have some reference designs etched into silicon.Don’t expect this to replace WiFi, cellular, or Bluetooth, though: according to the getting to know Weighless book, the designers are aiming for a data rate of only a few kB/s.

Still, it’s a great use of now unused spectrum, and would fill a huge gap in what is readily possible with homebrew Internet of Things things.

Tip ‘o the hat to [Mark] for sending this one in.

Yukikaze, Music Visualizations

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4HtUwAkVDg]

[Taichi Inoue] put together this beautiful visualization system called Yukikaze, japanese for “snow wind”. Basically a spectrum analyzer, Yukikaze is delightful to watch. We would love to see what kind of response he gets, as most of the footage shows very slowly changing smooth jazz. While we don’t think he gets crisp EQ visualizations out of this since it is a single large chamber, we still think it is amazing to watch.

[via MakeZine]

Turn Your Playstation 3 Into Linux-based Lab Equipment

In a two-part series called “PS3 Fab-to-lab” on IBM’s awesome developerWorks website, [Lewin] explains how to use the Cell Broadband Engine in a PS3 to create an audio-bandwidth spectrum analyzer and function generator. The set up consists of Yellow Dog Linux, an NTSC television, and an external USB sound card to provide the inputs of the spectrum analyzer and the outputs of the function generator. The sound card driver is written to simply capture or send the info in question (audio range only) and the NTSC television as the graphical interface. This hack involves a lot of coding with hardly any example code provided. The article is more of a guide than anything. If anyone gets this working, let us know!

[via Digg]

[photo: Malcom Tredinnick]

Spectrum ZX Laptop


[Jim] sent in this interesting laptop modding project. He started with a Spectrum ZX and a Toshiba Libretto 110. The libretto kept its brains, but the lower case and keyboard was replaced with the ZX hardware. Since both machines use matrix style keyboards (but different matrix layouts) he was able to create a passive adapter circuit to match things up.