In one case I selected an ARM chip, drew the schematic, made a set of rules for the PCB guy so the DRAM/flash interface would have good signal integrity, verified the layout and had it sent off for manufacture. Then brought the prototype board up, broke out the J-Link, verified the hardware, banged out and debugged an assembly code bootloader to initialize the ARM and pull the customized kernel out of NAND. Once I had Debian running stable on there, I handed it off to the software guys for them to do their part.

But sigh, it runs an OS, so I guess I'm not an embedded designer. Got a better job title?

I've used Debian extensively in the past for embedded Linux development - I've got equipment in the field running on the x86, armel, mips and powerpc ports, from biscuit PCs running full GUIs to $10 uP's doing network-attached-widget duties in the corner of a PCB.

Debian's "non-x86" ports work well, the distribution is simple, trims down small, easily modified for whatever purpose, and it just plain gets the job done. Couldn't be happier with it.

... can we stop using that word? I don't know if it's the same for anyone else, but whenever I hear that word it sounds like something between the word "synergy" and an ice pick stabbed into my ear.

Speaking as an outdoorsman that has come across far too many dead/wounded deer in the woods... If a hunter using this setup is much more likely to score a single fatal shot on game, killing it with as little suffering as possible, I hope this makes it to market as quick as possible.

Around here half the deer hunters don't bother going to the shooting range, and they're god-awful shots because of it. So they end up wounding whatever deer they shoot at, and the poor thing takes off and suffers for hours until it either bleeds to death or a coyote brings it down.

Take a consumer hard drive, put it in a deep freeze and let it chill to -20C. Now take it out and plug it in your PC.

Is it gonna work? No? Well I guess the same hard drive won't work in a car that's been parked overnight in the winter.

And that's just the first test your hardware has to pass before it can be installed in a car. Next up, vibration testing...

From personal experience.

Never put a PC/104 setup in a system that's going to be subjected to vibration, you'll cause the connector to wear out and eventually one of the important pins on the PC/104 connector will fail. And when it does, the ISA bus presented on the PC104 connector doesn't have any error detection/correction either, meaning your system may not fail gracefully.

Not something you want in a large robot.

Lets see...

- The music being encoded. Some songs have combinations of sounds which don't encode well.
- The encoding format, and the type of artifacts that it produces.
- The bitrate and other encoder configuration.
- The playback gear being used, and the listening environment. A quiet environment and gear with clear treble reproduction will tend to highlight encoding artifacts.
- The listener, and whether they know what to listen for.

I spent most of a decade designing broadcast audio hardware and DSP code, and as a result I've become pretty good at picking out glitches/artifacts/etc - especially with familiar songs. But I'm not most people.

I'm envisioning a little PCB that goes between a power cable and a SSD, and has some power management parts and a holdover capacitor. If power fails it would provide power to the SSD for a few seconds, hopefully long enough for it to flush its data to NAND. Could also do overvoltage protection etc. to prevent a bad power supply from frying the SSD as an extra feature. Should only cost ~$10-20 or so to make in quantities of 10 or so, and be a pretty quick design to bang out.

It won't fit in anything other than a desktop PC. And I wouldn't be surprised if some SSDs would still drop dead with the card, because they'd have some dumb quirk like the controller hanging up if the SATA interface drops dead...

Here's how you crack this.

- Buy another one of these drives and gut it. Replace or reprogram the touchscreen controller, and stuff a GSM modem in there.
- Program the controller to act like an ordinary drive, but send the entered password as a text message via the GSM modem. Make it act like the password was entered wrong so the user enters it a few times.
- Swap the modified "drive" for the users' original drive.
- Wait for the password to arrive at your prepaid cellphone.

You can break Truecrypt the same way - copy a users' encrypted data, and replace the Truecrypt executable with one that broadcasts the password when the user types it.

Not sure what this attack is called - "false keypad attack"?

Definitely. 3rd harmonic of the broadcast carrier lands right on top of the 315MHz band.

3rd harmonic is very easy to generate - unless you've spent a *ton* of money on your FM exciter, made every amplifier stage seriously overbiased and underdriven, etc.. you'll have a significant amount of 3rd harmonic coming out of your final amplifier. And it's hard to get rid of, requiring a sharp lowpass or notch on the transmitter output.

And dipole antennas work perfectly fine at odd order harmonics.

I used to design AM/FM broadcast equipment for a living, and making the output of a FM transmitter pass spectrum requirements takes an enormous amount of design effort and testing. "Making a filter to take the harmonics out" is easy to say - but at VHF L's look like C's, C's look like L's and R is never exactly 0 or 50.

Because in my experience, the yield from the chinese Model B factory is 50%.

My first RPi is currently tied up in a work project, so I ordered another model B from Newark. It came in and I fired it up yesterday, no LEDs or any signs of life. Dead.

Then I noticed the main BGA in the center of the card looked a bit askew, looked closer and noticed the BCM2835 was missing. The Samsung DRAM that ordinary sits on top of the '2835 was soldered straight onto the PCB. I understand the part shooter fucking up once in a while and missing a chip, but the board shouldn't have made it out of the factory.

C'mon. I'd rather pay a few extra bucks for something that's most likely going to work, than do what I'm doing now and spending even more bucks mailing the fucking thing back, and crossing my fingers that the replacement works too...

One of my friends did exactly what you're describing - he works on an offshore oil rig, and used a high gain antenna pointed at land to get cellphone service. It worked great... until he came ashore and his phone didn't get a signal.

Turns out the RF connector in the phone is only there for production testing of power/RF compliance - it's only intended to be connected to once, and it's not designed for daily connections/disconnections. The datasheet for one replacement connector we found was only rated for 10 cycles.

Other than sharing the same 2.4GHz ISM frequency band, bluetooth (used for their controllers) and WiFi share basically nothing. In the regular Wii they use separate chipsets, separate antennas, etc. They're stripping out a few bucks worth of hardware. Not to mention, implementing WiFi in a product invariably involves paying a bunch of license fees to patent holders etc - either included in the price of your wifi chipset or paid separately. This adds a couple more bucks to the design.

Take the $99 they're selling the thing for at the store and subtract store markup, shipping, factory tooling, packaging, the rest of the stuff in the Wii box, etc. and you don't have much money to spend on the Wii Mini itself. A few bucks spent adding WiFi could end up being a significant part of the cost.

Honestly, I have to throw some praise at Nintendo for making a game system that's so cheap. My workplace is doing an "adopt-a-family" thing for the christmas season, where employees get together and buy christmas gifts for single parents who can't afford much for their kids. At $99, it's made our shopping list.

Actual use cases I've seen for the Raspberry Pi that I've done myself and seen others do:

- Plug the Rpi into a LAN, and connect it to the serial console of a piece of equipment with a USB to serial cable - old router, telephone equipment, radio broadcast transmitter, fill in the blank. SSH into the thing if you need to get at the console instead of doing a site trip.
- Plug a few sensors into it, run it off a 12V car battery and a +5V automotive USB adapter, and leave it somewhere to log data onto the SD card or a USB stick.
- Plug a USB hard drive into it, and use it as a low power torrent downloader, instead of keeping your desktop PC powered up when you're not home.

It's a tiny, $25 linux machine. Possibilities are endless.

And in other news, Arduino cards have a 16MHz 8-bit processor with mere kilobytes of both RAM and flash. And despite making a 1980s suitcase computer look fast, they've proven themselves to be fully capable of running all sorts of awesome things that hobbyists have been using them for.

What's your point again?