Barcode – who invented it

„No product, idea, or achievement is possible without our most critical asset—the collective thought capital of hundreds of thousands of IBMers. The expertise, technical skill, willingness to take risk, and overall dedication of IBM employees have led to countless transformative innovations through the years. Meet team members who contributed to this Icon of Progress.“

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/upc/team/

DiveDuino – DIY dive computer

“ What is DiveDuino?

Right now Diveduino will not replace your dive computer, but it can log your depth and temperature during your dive, saving it to a MicroSd Card in a TEXT file format so you can import it to excel and do your fancy dive profile graphics, no need of special $100 USD cables that all the diving equipment manufacturing companies sell. Plus it has a display for that information with a actual graph of your dive profile.How it came to my mind?

DiveDuino came to my mind since I am an active diver and I enjoy the sport. I am an electrical engineer and at work I came across with the Arduino platform. Dive computers are expensive, if you want all the fancy features, you can find some computers for about $150 USD and others for about $1500 USD. Every basic dive computer has this indicators: No Decompression Limit(NDL), depth, temperature and elapsed time. So why not create something with the help of the Arduino open source platform, I found a sensor that could interact with Arduino and the rest is the prototype that I am building.“

http://www.diveduino.com/

Project is still fund raising at Kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1454384970/diveduino-diy-dive-logger?ref=ending_soon

Make a slim watch with ARM Cortex-M3 EFM32

Hack-a-Gecko project by Anders and Adam 

How to make a very slim watch and keep battery life long? In this Hack-a-Gecko project, they tried to catch two birds with one stone.

The Idea
We thought it would be cool to utilize the extremely low power EFM32 in combination with an extremely low power display to create a wrist watch demo application. And usually, the smaller and thinner something is, the cooler it is. (Admittedly, wrist watches do not necessarily follow this trend… big watches.)

Anyway, we wanted it slim. The starting point was the memory LCD display from Sharp (link). It is truly a Nano ampere display technology. And it is also thin, only 0.75 mm. A watch also needs a battery, cool new technologies exist such as the Thinergy battery, but the voltage of 4.1 V is a bit awkward. We decided to use a standard 3.0V CR1616 cell as it can power the EFM32 and display directly. Thickness of battery + display is 2.35 mm, is it possible to design the electronics as well within this thickness limit…? Challenge accepted!“

http://blog.energymicro.com/2012/12/12/make-a-slim-watch-with-arm-cortex-m3-efm32/

found via http://hackaday.com/2012/12/12/super-slim-wristwatch-build/

Samsung Advertisment – Lost on Apple Maps

The good news, Apple and Google seems to be friends again. The google maps app is still back to iOS 6. But Samsung uses the map ‚problem‘ of iOS to place a funny advertisment in Australia.

http://www.cnet.com.au/lost-on-apple-maps-samsung-has-an-app-for-that-339342793.htm

(Credit: Nic Healey/CNET)

found via http://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/12/samsung-targets-apple-maps-with-new-promotional-display-in-australia/

$49 Android PC System

“ Technical Details

APC runs a custom Android system, built for keyboard and mouse input. A basic selection of applications is preinstalled. Also included is a full set of consumer I/O ports, enabling APC to connect to your PC monitor or TV.

Item Description
Model APC 8750
Software Android 2.3 (PC System)
Chip VIA 800MHz Processor
Memory DDR3 512MB Memory
2GB NAND Flash
Graphics Built-in 2D/3D Graphic
Resolution up to 720p
Input and Output HDMI
VGA
USB 2.0 (x4)
Audio out / Mic in
microSD Slot
Network 10/100 Ethernet
Size 170 x 85mm (W x H)
Neo-ITX Standard*

* Neo-ITX is form factor compatible with Mini-ITX and MicroATX

http://apc.io/

Unfortunately no more pre-orders are possible, but you can subscribe to been notified when the product will be available.