Query: what the hell is this thing I’ve been lugging around for the past three years?

An enigma, wrapped in a mystery, under acrylic

It’s some sort of StrongARM development system.  I think it may be related to the Intel “Brutus” eval boards, but I’m not certain.  The daughterboard is labelled “SA1110 daughter card”; there’s nothing useful on the larger board.  There’s a fairly anonymous StrongARM chip in the ZIF socket.  It feels like some sort of demo unit, given how it’s all gussied up and under acrylic.

A profusion of useless geegaws

What’s on the big board?

• one USB client port
• three USB host ports
• two classic RS232 ports
• nine general-purpose indicator LEDs
• eight general-purpose switches
• two four-bit rotary switches
• eight seven-segment w/ decimal LED displays
• six audio jacks
• a CF slot
• a PCMCIA slot
• and innumerable spare headers, LEDs, switches, etc.

Intel sold off all its StrongARM/PXA properties years ago, and scrubbed pretty much anything useful from its website.  Archive.org hasn’t been too helpful.  Anyone have any leads?

We came, we saw, we definitely didn’t conquer. The picture above shows Tom Igoe (who won 3rd place! congrats!) triumphantly turning off the tellyvision with his finished device. I have to say, an award should have gone to Matt Joyce for looking the coolest with his bad-ass bandanna, and an award to me for the most amount of trash talking! Check out the great video below of the event.

Great, great job Bre Pettis and Brady Forrest for putting on an amazing show last night at Ignite! And congratulations to the winners (AND losers!).

photo by luis.net – video by ieee.

Ok, well, erm, sorry for all the Fail Whale’s yesterday… We had a little too much fun at NYCR last night.

Moving back to the world of blinking LED’s and robots… isn’t this little guy, cute? He, I mean, it, was developed by the University of the West of England and are called Emotibots. They are currently on display at London’s Science Museum. The scary, yet sad, looking robot above and below is called the Heart Bot. If you hug it, it will relax and hug you back and it’s pulse changes. If you grab it and shake, or yell, Heart Bot gets scared and sad, just like my cat! More on these little cute robots… here.

Floating Fail Whale by Nick Bilton