2011 OpenWorld Design Contest

OpenWorld is an interesting design contest launched this week by STMicroelectronics and a bunch of industrial and research partners. The OpenWorld application design contest is a “technology promotion engaged by the Autonomie project” with as goal the development of “advanced navigation and augmented reality applications to assist the handicapped”.

The contest is based on the EvoPrimer tools that target especially portable applications. On the Embedded World show I saw a nifty extension card for the EvoPrimer that should allow for some pretty impressive personal in-house dead reckoning. The board was not only capable of tracking horizontal movements, but it also measures vertical displacements so it can help track a person going up and down the stairs. With such hardware some cool augmented reality (I should say this more often: augmented reality, augmented reality) applications should be possible.



To enter the contest and win some of the $ 20.000 cash awards you have to submit a proposition on the theme of Technology for Human Assistance. The best application concepts win EvoPrimer tools and enter the second phase to actually transform the concept into a working prototype.

Dreams,dreams, dreams...

Every once in a while I come across a component that gets me dreaming. This morning I received a press release about such a component: a wireless EEPROM from STMicroelectronics. The M24LR64-R is a 64 Kbit EEPROM with password protection and a dual interface. It has a standard 400 kHz I2C bus for reading and writing the device, but it also has an ISO 15693 compatible 13.56 MHz contactless interface. You can actually read and write this chip using RFID and near field communications (NFC) techniques without needing to power it. I think that is pretty cool.

Every time when I had to draw a PCB with memory, especially the kind with lots of address and data pins, interfacing in parallel to a processor, I started dreaming about wireless memory. Wouldn’t it be great if you only had to plunk a memory chip on a board, somewhere in the vicinity of the processor and not wire anything? Instead of transmitting over the air you could probably use a copper or some other metal plane as a better communication medium. Or you could make the PCB out of wood or paper and stick the components on it with ecological glue.

Maybe some day wireless will be so cheap that you can have intelligent wireless resistors, capacitors and other parts that could be mesh-networked to build a circuit. You simply put the components in a bag or box, like rice or sugar, and it all would work without wires and soldering. OK, that is a bit far fetched, but who knows what we will have 50 years from now? This RFID EEPROM is definitely a step in the right direction.

This kind of dreaming reminds me of the time when I was a kid and a friend of mine had a Tandy electronics experimentation kit with resistors, transistors and other parts. It used springs for wiring. We would wire at random the parts together while fantasizing about the amazing things our circuit would do. Of course nothing ever happened (and somehow we never smoked anything), but it kept us busy after school. Being nerds we had not yet discovered girls, but I did get a glimpse of his mum naked. Maybe one of our random circuits did work after all…