Lol... Found out from Wikipedia yesterday that the Sidekick is now being (re)sold in Canada as the mobiflip through Mobilicity. It of course has none of the service benefits that made it awesome, but still fun to see it eek out a little more life.
The other thing I found out yesterday was that the Danger Developer Zone is offline, and has been for months. This is not wholly unexpected with the Microsoft acquisition, but was sad because I was hoping to use the hiptop SDK to help my son write a game that he could take with him and show his friends. I guess I'll have to use a more modern development environment...
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
eZ430-Chronos... Again.
I took a small detour and briefly considered working on an application for the iPad, but have come back to the consensus that active RFID is something I really should put some time into.
The first order of business is to get these two eZ430 kits to talk to each other.
When I got distracted the other day I was attempting to compile the MSP-GCC tools for my Mac... this time I'm just going to do it the easy way and install the Code Composer tools that come with the kit.
Came across this write-up the other day. Similar goal to mine actually, so I'm curious to see how my results at 433MHz compare to his at 2.4GHz. He led me to OpenBeacon as well, which I hadn't seen previously.
The first order of business is to get these two eZ430 kits to talk to each other.
When I got distracted the other day I was attempting to compile the MSP-GCC tools for my Mac... this time I'm just going to do it the easy way and install the Code Composer tools that come with the kit.
Came across this write-up the other day. Similar goal to mine actually, so I'm curious to see how my results at 433MHz compare to his at 2.4GHz. He led me to OpenBeacon as well, which I hadn't seen previously.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Decisions
As my recent entries show I've been dreaming about active RFID and the scenarios I could chase down in that arena. This would build my hardware/firmware skills, which are in need of some development.
But then yesterday and today I've been thinking about working on an iPad application that my daughter inspired. I've never ventured into Apple development, let alone iOS, and that's something I feel I would benefit from.
This isn't the first time I've been down this road. I'm almost certain I suffer from some form of attention deficit. What I'm interested in doing during the off-hours changes so often that I find it difficult to make much forward progress on anything...
But then yesterday and today I've been thinking about working on an iPad application that my daughter inspired. I've never ventured into Apple development, let alone iOS, and that's something I feel I would benefit from.
This isn't the first time I've been down this road. I'm almost certain I suffer from some form of attention deficit. What I'm interested in doing during the off-hours changes so often that I find it difficult to make much forward progress on anything...
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Active RFID
Since summer I've had a great interest in active RFID, mostly because of stumbling upon DASH7 and subsequently reading as much as I could about the subject.
It's unfortunate that the DASH7 specs are gated by ISO. The old spec is available for $166.99 in Canada, but the interesting spec is Mode 2, and drafts of that are only available to members of the DASH7 Alliance, which requires deeper pockets than I have ($3500.00+). Apparently the Mode 2 spec will be available early 2011 from ISO...
Then comes software support. The old spec has a reference implementation in the form of OpenTag for Semtech chips, but a version of OpenTag that supports Mode 2 and/or touted MSP/Chipcon platforms has been just around the corner for months.
All of this sort of discourages my hobby activities directly related to DASH7, but I'm not one to be deterred that easily... I recently ordered a couple of eZ430-Chronos development kits. These are one of the coolest development kits I've seen (especially for the price, which has seen deep discounts), and are supposedly a supported platform for DASH7/OpenTag. I'm working on getting the MSP-GCC tools installed on my Mac, at which point I hope to do something interesting with them. I'm putting some faith in the fact that the new version of OpenTag will be available soon with MSP/CC support, but even if not I should be able to enable basic communications and locating.
It's unfortunate that the DASH7 specs are gated by ISO. The old spec is available for $166.99 in Canada, but the interesting spec is Mode 2, and drafts of that are only available to members of the DASH7 Alliance, which requires deeper pockets than I have ($3500.00+). Apparently the Mode 2 spec will be available early 2011 from ISO...
Then comes software support. The old spec has a reference implementation in the form of OpenTag for Semtech chips, but a version of OpenTag that supports Mode 2 and/or touted MSP/Chipcon platforms has been just around the corner for months.
All of this sort of discourages my hobby activities directly related to DASH7, but I'm not one to be deterred that easily... I recently ordered a couple of eZ430-Chronos development kits. These are one of the coolest development kits I've seen (especially for the price, which has seen deep discounts), and are supposedly a supported platform for DASH7/OpenTag. I'm working on getting the MSP-GCC tools installed on my Mac, at which point I hope to do something interesting with them. I'm putting some faith in the fact that the new version of OpenTag will be available soon with MSP/CC support, but even if not I should be able to enable basic communications and locating.
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