News for Saturday, 31 May 2008

A number of us have purchased an iTrip compatible with one of the first iPods. Most of the time, it outlives the iPod. Cobus decided to recycle one of them and use it with his laptop.

I opened my iTrip, then checked out the wiring diagram at http://www.maushammer.com/systems/ipod-remote/ipod-remote.html


I then installed the board in a plastic housing with a spot for batteries (in this case a TV remote), to which I attached a 3.5" audio jack (taken from some headphones)
The power resistance then needs to be removed (the cylinder with the coloured rings - maroon, black, maroon, gold) as the iPod provides 3.5 volts whereas our two batteries (rechargeables, of course!) only total to 2.4 to 2.7 volts. No more need to lower the power level at the entrance to the iTrip!



Think about drilling a small hole in the casing to be able to see the diode light up when the iTrip is broadcasting.
For the record, welds were made by heating a nail on a gas stove, seeing as how I did not have a soldering iron during the holidays. :-)

Going a little further with this modification, it would be fairly simple to instead put a slightly larger resistance on, rather than completely removing it, and powering the device directly using the 5 volts from the USB bus.

According to the information gleaned from the beta versions of the iPhone firmware, Apple will use an Infineon chip for the 3G part of the new iPhone.
Infineon has just announced a new generation of chips that will be 50% smaller and on stand-by consume 30% less energy. Several models will be available, supporting different standards, HSDPA 3,6 or 7,2 and being able to drive cameras from 2 to 5 MPixels.
It remains to be seen if Apple has obtained some in time for its new iPhone or whether one has to be wait for the next generation of iPhones.

While continuing to denounce this technology and to bring lawsuits against various manufacturers, Seagate announced that its first SSD disks will be available during 2009.
These disks are intended to be for the professionals, the mark considers that the general public market is too far away from maturity. The cost per GB will be too expensive (this is true) and they do not see this market developing for a very long time.
As a follow up, and to show that traditional disks still have a broad path of advances, they announced that the first discs 3,5" of 2 TB will also arrive in 2009.
We should state that for reasons unknown to us, manufacturers of disks have decided to put an end to the war of capacity and had nicely fixed all to a maximum of 1 TB. However, with the most recent platters containing 334 GB of data, it would be possible for them to immediately propose disks of more than 1,5 TB.
One is unaware of if Seagate will buy the chips needed for the manufacture of SSD disks or they will build their own production factories. The second solution would be better on the long run but extremely expensive and difficult to show a profit compared to new competitors like Intel or Samsung where it is a core activity.

In the words of Johan

I wanted just to let you know that Digidesign released last night a pre release of Protools 7.4 compatible with Mac OS X 10.5.3. I have already waited impatiently a few months for this, I hope that the news will delight more than just one user…

http://www.digidesign.com

The company Call/Recall have announced that they developed a disk able to store 1 TB of data and compatible with the blue laser used in the Blu-ray apparatuses.
To arrive at this result, they use a substrate radically different from that of the current disks. It is filled with a dye reacting to the laser by emitting light if it is excited by a second laser. This emission of light or its absence allow the reading of to the 1 and 0.
The announced data flow for reading is very promising; it should reach the 100 MB/s, much more than the solution, Inphase, it will compete with.
In the long term, Call/Recall hopes to be able to store 5 TB on a wafer the size of a CD. You will have understood that it will not be able to read this media on standard Blu-ray readers. On the other hand, the fact that it uses common components should make this technology much more accessible than the other 3D storage systems used in specific systems.
Marketing should start, in the best case, at the beginning of the next decade.