Headworx

I decided to buy a new digital camera. Technology moves fast ahead and my current Minolta A2 is ageing. I have been quite happy with the A2, but it starts showing its wear... And there are some general capabilities of the camera it just does not have. I went through my albums and among things I would like to have improved are white skies. Indeed on most of my pictures the sky is white. This means the dynamic range of the sensor was not high enough. The bright portions of the image saturated the image sensor, most of the time resulting in a white sky. I do not complain about other aspects of the images that much. Resolution of 8 megapixels is fine for the moment. 28-200 lens are OK too. So I started some research to find a camera equipped with a high dynamic range sensor. On one hand there is a cornucopia of new models from the market leaders, namely Canon and Nikon, followed by Panasonic and Sony. On the other hand two designs have attracted my attention: Sigma SD-14 and Fujifilm S5 Pr...

Two weeks ago Interactive TV Today published an interview with Kenneth Lowe , VP of Business Development and Strategic Marketing at Sigma Designs. I wrote about Sigma a year ago , and for those of you who do not remember, Sigma Designs makes SOC ( System On Chip ) integrated circuits for next generation, high definition media players. Building their lead they managed to capture a significant piece of the market, from IP-TV set top boxes to Blue-Ray players, and have even secured a place inside the recently launched Apple TV . Going through the Ken Lowe interview I found an interesting paragraph: "when Microsoft moved from an all-software platform to a SoC-based platform using our silicon, it was a big paradigm shift. It required their software to adapt from a paradigm where everything runs on a big Pentium processor to a paradigm where a little software runs on a smaller processor and then a bunch of hardware subsystems perform each individual task." Smells like a paradigm sh...

The recent IPTV buzz brings to my mind another convergence story. Television and Web applications together. The match seems natural. Assuming the screen you will be using for IPTV is going to be a HD (High Definition, where minimum resolution is defined as 1280x720 with 1366x768 being more common), makes it quite reasonable to display a Web page on. Web on TV was approached several times in the past, but the ordinary (non-HD) TV sets used to give us just a fraction of what was needed ( 544x372 , which was about 5 times less than HD). And the IPTV screen is connected to the Internet, where it streams the content (movies, news, shows) from. OK, so we have two important components of an Internet-enabled PC already in place. A screen and a connection. What else is needed? Input controller. I hate remote controls. I have dozens of them scattered around. I use just 1% of the functionality they provide. Volume up / volume down (that refers to the TV set), channel up / channel down (that re...

Silicon Labs is buying Sigma Designs , practically the only vendor offering chips and stacks for Z-Wave, the established home automation standard. It is an interesting move and watching what happens next will be even more interesting. Contrary to what the press release says and what other people are saying, I think it is the end of the game for Z-Wave. Z-Wave has been the longest standing and most complete home automation standard. Mainly due to the fact it has been tightly held by a single company (Sigma Designs) who has been defacto the only supplier of silicon and stacks for Z-Wave devices. Achieving interoperability among a family of devices coming from a single vendor is easy. And that is why Z-Wave has been so far the only option for interoperable smart homes. But Z-Wave as a technology has been ageing quickly. It does not scale to cover a home full of smart devices. It has very weak or no security. Majority of Z-Wave devices on the market today speak clear text to each other...

The news of the first batches of commercially available Bluetooth mesh devices working seamlessly together have circled the world recently . This is a powerful demo indeed. Two independent products from two competing companies who never met before, taken off the shelf, work seamlessly together. It seems simple, while it is not. Actually, this is the first time ever, it happened. The details can be traced down to the two Bluetooth listings: the D038467 by LEDVANCE GmbH (who make the Sylvania light bulbs based on the Cypress Semiconductor module and stack) and the D039781 By Nordic Semiconductor (who offer a Bluetooth Mesh Profile subsystem loaded on the NRF5 development kit). These are totally independent implementations of the Mesh Specifications. And the products "just" work together. Some may say we had this before, with Z-Wave. This is true, but only to some extent. Z-Wave really succeeded as a standard facilitating interoperable products, but with two caveats: ...