January 10, 2007 at 4:35 pm
· Filed under GizmoNoise
(Note: This pic is proprietary & a property of Apple Inc. Reproduced here with no permissions sought.)
The long awaited iPhone is out. With this launch, Apple competes its own iPod product line, that is already selling like hotcakes. A few noteworthy mentions:
Well! It suprises anybody on its first look. This phone has no buttons. Even the hold button is a soft key! The phone renders all its keys on a touch-sensitive display. Mind you, there’s no stylus.
Its the 1st time OSX is being ported to a handheld device. Being OSX, all the goodies (safari, widgets, clean looks …) of it, comes to the phone also.
Sensors are aplenty. There is a gyro sensor, to determine the orientation of the device. A proximity sensor, to detect & switch off the display, when the phone goes near to the ear. A light sensor, to gauge the ambient light intensity & thereby increase the intensity backlit of the LCD.
The touch screen is multi-touch sensitive. There is a lot of research & inventions happenning in this tech. Very commendable achievement.
Now imagine these all being the features of a single (mobile) device. Qualcomm says so. Ok what else can possibly go into this wonder device?
A tiny printer. Capable of printing 1-bit images & great typography.
High sensitive, omni-directional Voice recorder.
A low-power torch light.
A weighing device.
A laser cutter. (JamesBond?)
The camera listed to operate in infrared mode.
Universal remote control.
A low power FM transmitter.
Air ionizer with no moving parts.
Nerve Pulse / Heart beat logger.
What else do u want to have in this wonder device? Your wish will be valid only if it requires additional hardware to be plugged in.
—————-
Continuing the series:
A high power vibrator. A gender neutral device, may be one can pound a nail on to a cardboard.
To have a frontal camera aperture, so that the device can be used as a Mirror.
A paired device - it shall be able to monitor the proximity of all RF tags that are paired with it. You may possibly get to know when your purse is pickpocketed!
F-35, the latest in its class, 5th generation, supersonic, multi-role stealth fighter in production for US & UK military. LockHeed Martin is the main contractor. F16 & F22 Raptor is built by them. Huuuh! And L-3 Display Systems will do the Panoramic Cockpit Display subsystem (PCD) for F35.
Ok. The news is, L-3 will use LynuxOS, a hard real-time operating system, to manage the PCD. Using an RTOS to manage a display? Sounds strange isn’t it. The display system in an aircraft is very crucial for a pilot to be aware of his surroundings & situation. There is lot many information to be conveyed such as general flight information, sensor data, communication, navigation, and identification systems.
Put yourself in this situation. You are in a hostile environment that is full of ridges. You are on a solitary mission. F35s can accomodate just one crew. You come across a bunker at a distant and want to destroy it. You suddenly realize that the weaponry you have isn’t very destructive when launched from a distance. You need to go closer to hit. At the same time, you are alerted of an oncoming surface-to-air missile. What will you do?
You need to go close to the target without deviating much. You need to maneuver along the ridges. You have to stay low to the ground to avoid radar signatures. Also you need to avert the missile assault. Ho God, please keep the Display system from crash, let it be time critical, be it a redundant system, let it show necessary information and let it keep you away from death. Hehe! Display systems show your fate.
In another news, the display systems of the planes & helicopters built indigenously are purely interrupt based. On an interrupt, manipulate the Frame buffer directly. So in that ISR, will the other interrupts be disabled? >:O Hopefuly, let these flyers be used only for rescue missions & reconnaissance activites.
BTW, can the LCD performance/operation be affected by gravity? Brainies to answer.
A nice article at Embedded.com discussing the security faults in an embedded device.
Says, “Set-top boxes are already a major target for hackers, …”
The question was ‘How to make devices safe from the hackers world?’. How Internet and device to device Connectivity can ruin? You can forget about the OSs used, no flame wars are there. There are also stories where a microscope became the full time spammer. How a Bluetooth enabled phone can access others phone books and stuff. A virus on ur pc can give-out rude music or make the flash lights on/off madly. This is for ur leisure time.
Sometime in Feb 2004, Dennis Kocera from Tektronix came to India for a workshop. I took some notes on his presentation. Happened to see it yesterday, why not blog and preserve it.
Standards:
1. MPEG 1 - ISO/IEC 1172 (Parts 1, 2, 3).
2. DSMCC Broadcasting Standard: Interactivity and Carousels - ISO/IEC 13818 (Part 6).
3. System Implementation Guidelines: Extension of 13818 (Part 1) - TR 101 154.
4. Service Information (SI) Specification - ETS 300 468.
5. SI Implementation Guidelines - TR 101 211.
6. SI Allocations for Broadcasters - TR 101 162.
7. Data Broadcasting Specifications - EN 301 192.
8. Globally Executable MHP (GEM) Spec - TS ETSI 102 819.
Learnt:
1. Symbol Rate = (Data Rate / (2 * FEC)) * (204 / 188).
2. Reduce the Video Bandwidth just by simply reducing the no. of columns transmitted.
3. In Video Editing carefully choose I or P as anchor frames.
4. Sarnoff’s CD contains Video Patterns to excite all the paths within a Video decoder either HW or SW.
5. I frames has only temporal info (ie DCT values) while B frames has mostly motion vectors.
6. PCR in Video is a 26 hour clock.
7. An ordinary Set-Top-Box in US costs 40$. THe Encoder costs about 15,000$.
8. THe encoder should hav to know the exact memory model of the decoder.
9. 4:2:2 is the Professional Video Format.
10. Latest trends: eCinema and DLP
11. Something interesting is there in MPEG 4 (Part 10) spec. LOOk at it.
