Great article, I am glad MSDS was touched on before machining cast parts. The only thing I would add is that users should check MSDS before machining ANY material. There are a few exotic metal alloys whose dust can cause severe respiratory trauma.
If they are referring to TI's OMAP processors, then they typically feature multiple ARM cores with various media accelerators (http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/swpt034b/swpt034b.pdf). These are like all-in-one chips designed for mobile platforms that are optimized for displaying media on a LCD-ish display at minimum power. The OMAP offerings are pretty similar to chips from Broadcom or Samsung, however, it makes sense for them to get integrated with their biggest customer. They already have NDAs in place and TI probably has field engineers that essentially work for Amazon, they would just be transferring financial stake different production processes.
Having said that, the reason that you probably don't want to run a EC2 instance on an OMAP, or any ARM for that matter, is because they are not 64bit compatible, they do not have good virtualization support, and you would not be taking advantage of various media/display capability.
I have a cubicle and a lab area at work where I do hardware/software development, which means a large portion of my work involves a computer. I decided to try a standing desk about two years ago, however, I didn't want to commit fully and we don't have desks that raise and lower automatically. I decided the best solution would be convert my lab workstation to standing. I built something to hold mouse and keyboard at proper height and raised my monitors/docking station to eye level. I also added a 3/4" textured mat to stand on and keep a set of comfortable shoes at work.
My findings are that I am more alert standing up, however, I focus better on documentation while sitting down, so I alternate between the two throughout the day. Having both standing and sitting desks seemed to be optimal since a proper sitting desk chair can be more comfortable than a tall chair at a standing desk.
PSoC5 is supported by GCC, the Cypress PSoC IDE just makes it easier for novices to get started. There is also a FreeRTOS port to PSoC5, so you can get into some pretty interesting stuff.
That aside, I am really glad they went with PSoC5 (ARM Cortex-M3 architecture) instead of the cheaper PSoC3 (8051 architecture). This makes it easy to prototype on the PSoC5 and then move to a more specialized Cortex when they hit performance limits.
Finally, I don't see mechanical drawings, however, I hope they spaced the parallel connectors on freeSOC n*0.1" apart. One of the frustrating things about Arduino is that the spacing on the shield connector is non-standard, so you can't simply plug it into a breadboard.
Just from the descriptions and photos, it looks like the mini will be breadboardable.
The bigger one almost certainly not -- it's arduino compatible and the gap on one side is visibly smaller than the other. Also, it's not clear if the big one will have pins dropping down below the board (just looks like female headers).
The IDE isn't just for novices, unless you really want to hand-configure every I/O pin and block on the device. That can take a hell of a lot of time to read through the documentation and figure out. It's not just a matter of "oh this pin is an input and this is an output" like Arduino/AVR.
Fine print is below, looks like Nissan will own the rights to anything you submit:
Grant of Usage Rights in Submissions:
By entering your Submission into the Innovation Garage, you grant to Nissan an irrevocable,
perpetual, transferable, non-exclusive, fully-paid, worldwide, license (sub-licensable
through multiple tiers) to (a) use, copy, transmit, distribute, reproduce, modify, create
derivative works, adapt, combine with other ideas or works, publish, translate, publicly perform,
and publicly display your Innovation Garage Submission (or any modification thereto), in
whole or in part, in any format or medium now known or later developed and (b) use (and
permit others to use) your Innovation Garage Submission in any manner and for any purpose
(including, without limitation, commercial purposes) that Nissan deems appropriate in its
sole discretion (including, without limitation, to incorporate your Innovation Garage Submission
or any modification thereto, in whole or in part, into any vehicle, technology, product, or service).
They own "a" right, not "the rights". At any rate, it means that they can implement any submitted idea without compensation or award to any person.
The idiocy with this agreement is that it says "fully paid", and without any renumeration actually getting paid to you, that test fails. Irrespective of that idiocy, even if "fully paid" is struck, it's irrevocable, so you could find yourself losing AND in a lawsuit with Nissan over the priority of rights, yours versus theirs.
You are correct in your first sentence, I am not a lawyer but interpreted the agreement as they are able to use/sell your idea or any modification of your idea while you still technically own your idea.
Neat, however, software for base station are not provided and interested companies can contact the site owner. Pretty cool that this is allegedly running on a software defined radio kit which can be had for only ~$2000 (a bargain).
Because you are comparing two different categories of radios. There is a big difference between a very cheap receiver and a high quality, wide bandwidth, customizable transceiver. A bad automobile analogy would be a Yugo vs Peterbilt.
It is not so much about specialization as the 'throw-away' culture. I emigrated to the United States from Russia more than a decade ago and was amazed how quickly people went to throw away or completely replace things here that broke down even if there was a simple fix. Specialization is good, however, fixing things yourself is a matter of economics and sometimes a matter of pride. I do fix my own plumbing if it is an easy enough job, I can often save some money and may end up doing a better job by using higher quality materials. I still have the first car I bought, which is a Jeep with 250k miles on it and is in good shape (not my daily driver though). I have had glass shops cut me custom glass panes before to fix a windows. Judging by the growing popularity of the DIY movement in the USA (see make magazine, techshop, popularity of home made 3D printers) I would argue that fixing things yourself is on the rise.
DIY in the US tends to mean "buy some things so I can DIY", so its really just a replacement for more consumerism. Rarely does the DIY market do something like "Don't throw out that XX. You can repair it for very little money!".
The commercial GPS sensor is more for testing on the receiver properties, it won't give location data. Location data will come from a space-rated GPS we have in the bus.
As long as you're below the GPS constellation (at around 26000 km: http://www.navipedia.net/index.php/GPS_Space_Segment), and you use a GPS that doesn't have the altitude restriction, you can use it for orbit location determination.
The bigger issue here is if such a back door/debug mode was accidentally/intentionally left in any of the Actel FPGAs that use their anti-fuse technology. At present, anti-fuse seems to be the most robust technology for preventing read-out of configuration bit-stream as there is no serial data being pushed around each time the logic resets. ProASIC3 is a great platform for when you are on a very constrained power budget, however, I would not consider it one of their leading security-hardened chips. There is a lot of design reuse in complex semiconductor products so it is possible that this portion of the design was leaked to other devices.
