ARM has announced a partnership between it and Canonical (of Ubuntu fame) to produce chips for netbooks. The chips will compete directly with Intel’s Atom CPUs and VIA’s C7 series. Canonical is porting Ubuntu to run on the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors and is set to be released in April 2009.
Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
ARM to release netbook chips
Thursday, November 13th, 2008OLPC “Give 1 Get 1″ in Europe
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008OLPC’s G1G1 program is coming back and will also be available in Europe this time. In the G1G1 you pay for two OLPCs, one of which is donated to a third world country and one of which you receive yourself.
- When will G1G1 v2 be available in Europe? Monday, November 17, just like in the United States.
- At what price?Around $399 | £254 | €312 (No VAT will be applied only shipping costs!).
- Which countries will be included? The 27 member states of the EU, plus Switzerland, Russia and Turkey.
- Will we get customized keyboards? No, there will only be English/International keyboards.
- Which power-plugs will be available? European and UK.
- How will I be able to order or donate? Also via Amazon’s online-store at amazon.com/xo from where you will be redirected to amazon.co.uk.
WIRED: Build It. Share It. Profit.
Friday, October 24th, 2008
As you might have read a recent post of mine, I’ve recently been getting acquiented with the Arduino platform. Indeed I got my hands on my very own Arduino Nano this afternoon when it arrived in the mail.
Now, quite handily, Wired has an interesting article on Arduino and Open Source Computing (titled ‘Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?‘).
Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don’t need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open.
The only piece of intellectual property the team reserved was the name Arduino, which it trademarked. If anyone wants to sell boards using that name, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This, Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.
Arduino, a brief introduction.
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
This week I’ve been on a introductory course for Arduinos, so I thought I might share some of what I’ve learned. Arduino is an open source rapid prototyping platform based on easy to use hardware and software. It’s intended to be used by hobbyists, artists, designers, and anyone who’s interested in quickly and easily creating their own gadgets.
It is possible to connect almost anything to the Arduino board. I myself have successfully experimented with servos, ultrasound distance sensors, and the Wii Nunchuck, among others. What’s more, an Arduino can easily be connected up to a computer that can control the Arduino, and can receive data from it.
The Arduino can work with pretty much any computing platform, and the official IDE is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows.
I’ll soon post some of my projects here, and in the meanwhile you can get more information on Arduinos on the Arduino home page and on the Arduino Wikipedia article.
For an idea of some of the things that you can do with Arduinos, go to Arduino Playground.
If you understand Finnish, you can also go to Sulautetut.fi
Open set-top box
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Neuros Technology is shipping its new open set-top box. The HD-capable Open Source Device 2.0 runs several Linux stacks on a Texas Instruments CPU.
The OSD2 aims to be more than just a consumer device, however. Describing it as a “super-reference design,” Born explained that one aim for Neuros has been to create an open hardware design that can be used as the basis for other products, by customers who want to make set-top boxes, but do not want to design their own hardware. “We’re trying to do for the TV set what the IBM PC did for the computer — provide an open platform so Visicalc doesn’t have to be in the hardware business,” [Neuros CEO Joe Born] explained.
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- Neuros OSD front
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- Neuros OSD back
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- Neuros OSD open
Dell Inspiron 910 release date: 5th September
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
According to a post on Gizmodo Dell’s answer to the likes of the ASUS Eee PC and the MSI Wind, the Inspiron 910 is to be released this Friday, September 5th 2008. No word on what the source of this information is nor on whether the pencil will be included in the package nor on in which markets the Inspiron 910 will be available.
MSI Wind U90 available in Europe for €339 (with Linux)
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
According to a post on Engadget the new MSI Wind U90 netbook will be available here in Europe (no info abut specific markets) for €339 with SUSE Linux. Shipping should start by the end of September.
Engadget also has a new gallery of pictures.
Wikipedia Comparison of netbooks
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
I just noticed an useful page in Wikipedia. A comprehensive comparison of the various current and upcoming netbooks/sub-notebooks. If you’re in the looking to buy one of the many variants of netbooks on the market, this will certainly help you decide which one to get.
8.9″ MSI Wind U90
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
Here to accompany the 10″ MSI Wind U100 is the U90 with an 8.9″ inch screen. Specifications on this particular netbook (or sub-notebook, depending on how you see things…) are as follows:
- Intel® AtomTM N270 Processor
- 512MB/1GB RAM (DDR II 667MHz)
- 8.9″ Wide Screen Display
- 80 GB SATA HDD
- 1.3M / 0.3M Webcam
- 2 Stereo Speakers and Microphone
802.11b / g WLAN with Bluetooth - 4-in-1 Card Reader, SD/MMC/MS/MSpro
- 10/100 LAN
- 3xUSB 2.0
Unfortunately no word on whether this will be available with Linux as well, the MSI site on mentions Windows XP (which is a damn stupid OS to run on such low-spec machines).
Recap: 7 Stories I missed this week
Friday, August 29th, 2008Once again apologies for the pause in posts, it’s been a busy week. Here, to compensate, are seven interesting stories I didn’t have time to post about during this week.