I have a good source of info that it appears the iPhone 2 will be sporting a Qualcomm chipset and is in fact thinner as the newer rumors say…

We’ve gotten several people asking about the WEEGEE board and what it is and why we built in. I’ll try to answer that here. First off, it’s a single board computer specifically built as a wireless robot computer. In other words, it’s destined to be the brain in any robot or electronic design that needs to use 2 normal DC motors.

Now why would you use this instead of a Handyboard or a cricket etc? The motor drivers in all other board on the market can only handle pathetic small motors with 1A max current, only 600ma on some of them! We found this unacceptable, there are a lot of cheap motors out there (for instance the ones in Tamiya’s Dual gear box) which just can’t be used without a more capable driver. As such a lot of people buy secondary motor controllers boards for high prices. With the WEEGEE board that’s no longer needed, we built in a full size H-bridge capable of driving up to 3A motors normally, and even more if you add some extra wire to increase the amps they can draw and beef up a heatsink. (The components are rated up to 8A).

In addition our board uses the MaxStream XBEE wireless radio’s. As such anything you build with this can be wirelessly tethered to a computer, or to other XBEE devices including other WEEGEE boards. IE, swarm mode robotics. You can flash your new program code wirelessly to the AVR! You can stream pictures back to a monitoring computer… In short, we added this aspect as we liked the SRV-1’s wireless capability and wanted that without the added bulk of a entire embedded computer running linux which you have to code around.

Using the ATMEGA644P we have 2 serial ports available so while the wireless is using the first port, we have the second port available for a camera module or anything else you want to use it for. We will soon demonstrate using a serial controlled camera.

We also are adding a SD expansion board which will sit right on top of the current weegee board using the 6 pin ISP port. This will allow mass storage for the pictures, mapping, or whatever you need it for. And with future software coding it will be possible to use the SD for program memory!

Please let us know what you think and give us any suggestions you might have.

Our informant dropped by again, this time with some more details. While the information is sketchy at best, and this devices prototype status makes the information even less solid. However, this is what we got:

• MSM6800 Chipset
• Internal Wifi
• OS 5.2.1944
• ARM1136
• MEM 101.53

For ongoing information and discussion, see this thread: http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=164889

Someone stopped into our chat room today with this to show us:

Its a CDMA WM Treo 800, but according to our source in the Ukraine it is also known as the Palm Zeppelin.  More details will follow, as we are unsure of the pixel count on the screen as well as several other important details.  The one little fact that was mentioned was that it does not use a mini USB plug but rather a micro USB.

So a little bit back spymongoose, eeprom7777 and myself received our first prototype WEEGEE 1.0 PCB’s and we of course went nuts getting them together quickly. It’s actually a little disturbing how quickly we found a few things here and there we want changed. Needless to say, we’ve moved our design up to WEEGEE 1.1 now although nothing has been ordered for production yet. We need your input! If you want a WEEGEE board or are interested in what they can do, please head over to the WEEGEE forum and talk with us!

I’m putting up a huge picture of a prototype here, link only, modem users beware, this is a big picture.

http://www.shadowmite.com/img/Weegee1.0.JPG

The current changes we are making include a extra serial port, twice as much program memory/ram, and some extra options. Also we’ve reduced the size a bit as seeing it in person we were able to find the areas that could be reduced without effecting the design much.

For the WEEGEE 1.1 (our first hopeful production release) we are also going to be including a SD Daughterboard option to open up the possibilities for a few things. Namely we intend that extra serial port to go to a camera in the near future, and the sd card to be for mass storage of pictures or mapping data. The other possible use is if we write a simple interpretter of some kind our board will suddenly have the ability to have 2 gigs and up in program and memory space!

As for functionality of the 1.0 units, they have proven our design works, the H-Bridges are absolutely amazing and allow motors that were never an option with any of the other boards out there with built in motor drivers. I have recently finished adapting code to allow over the air firmware flashing for the mcu making this a truely sweet project.

http://www.shadowmite.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=40

What is it?

The WeeGee board is a joint project from Spymongoose and Shadowmite of shadowmite.com.

8-Bit Atmel microcontroller with ISP port (running at 7.3728MHz)
16 easy access digital IO with Handyboard style connectors
8 of those can additionally be used as analog
1 Extra open serial port (4 pin header) (first is used for XBEE Wireless)
2 Built in H-Bridges capable of motors with up to ~3A draw (depending on heat sink used up to 8A)
X-Bee 2.4gHz Wireless Link on board complete with reset and sleep control from the AVR
3 Additional IO lines can be used from the ISP port if needed
Additional 2 IO lines from AVR + 8 from X-Bee available in non wired port under X-Bee
Those are shared with the LED and Piezo buzzer.
On/Off physical switch on main
Minimal power usage when X-Bee and AVR are in sleep mode
3.3V Logic used throughout

http://shadowmite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=2425

Does anyone have recommendations on a colocation company, or at least pricing that is acceptable vs what is not acceptable? It seems to very wildly along with the methods used to calculate bandwidth usage (which seems to be either total data used, or average of throughput over a month with some error margin removed). Currently I am looking at Globalcon or Cologuys but I also have considered starting my own colo service as there seems to be a strong need for more realistic pricing of people more literate in knowing what they are doing. I’ve worked in almost every Level 3 data center across the US in my time with Fujitsu and have to say more of what I read seems to be nonsense as far as how simple this all actually is.  Opinions?

I’ve been pretty busy with my job lately since becoming a real paid developer. Also I’ve found having a wife to take a lot more time than having a girlfriend. So again, sorry about the delay in updates and I’m trying to get a more “scheduled” routine down.

Biggest thing lately is I just upgraded my sz650n laptop with a 320gb sata drive out of the WD Passport external. Newegg had a amazing deal for $50 cheaper than the drive costs alone! Works great in the laptop, copying it over required a desktop and linking both drives to the sata interface and using the dd command to image the new one.

I’ve recently purchased a new server for the site and will plan to put that up as soon as I find a decent priced colo company in the DFW area. So far they appear to range from $50 a month and up for very little bandwith, which is a little crazy considering the cheap dedicated places out there offer more bandwith and a dedicated machine for less. Providing the machine yourself should cost less (provided it’s a 1u rack mount etc). Any suggestions let me know.

The 6800 has most users now know is fully GPS enabled now after a leaked rom contained the special radio to enable that part of the communications core processor. The driver goes through a custom version of the GPSID from microsoft which needless to say causes some issues with applications failing to open the port properly. The actual hardware is GPIO controlled it appears, gpd0 being the gpsid control port. More to come…

So I have recently aquired a VGN-SZ650N as much as I hate sony, and I have to say, I like it a lot. While sony may fail to understand many markets properly, the laptops they make are pretty topnotch. Granted they come with a premium pricetag as well.

First off, the Vista default install… HORRID, I recommend nothing more than digging up the recovery tool that they hide and burning a restore dvd quickly… Then downgrade to XP, and if you’re like me, partition for linux while youre at it.

XP Downgrade:

Sony has MOST of the drivers and software at their site. You will need to install all of them on either the stamina or speed modes, then switch to the other and repeat for the ones that still didn’t take.  (For those of you not in the know, the SZ650N has dual video cards and can switch between them with a little switch).

You will run into a problem with no fingerprint scanner software, but you can find it. I’ll post up a link soon.

Gentoo Linux install:

The 2007.0 install disc was able to get it booted without issues in the nvidia mode the first time, however there seems to be some issues with both modes at time and will certainly need 2 kernels compiled, one for each mode.

X-Windows config’ing for dual head display (with dvi out of the dock) has proven difficult and so far I have found only the nvidia card supports dvi, the intel doesn’t!. More on this as I get it all running.

The network cards are the SKY2 module

SATA and Audio are both intel based.

More coming as I continue this process…

Well, after all my ranting about the device, and trying to avoid it I finally did try a iPhone when the cost dropped $200. In my opinion this certainly brought the phone to a price it was actually worth and I was at that point curious. My first impressions were all positive and I proceeded to use it for almost a month now.

I have to say, I like it. However I like it from the “geek” perspective in which it is a hackers paradise of a phone. A true touchscreen highres BSD based device. As a consumer I can’t say I would ever buy one, I can honestly say palm has hit the generic consumer market as best as any manufacturer ever has, and with the centro coming, they will get all the low end consumers bucks soon enough.

Apple has a real chance with this device to get mid level to high end users on their customer list, the problem however appears to be Apple doesn’t want them as customers. Apple appears to want those same customers that enjoy palm’s devices. They refuse to have a open system, and furthermore are taking actions to BLOCK the open communities efforts to support 3rd party app’s on their iPhone. Is apple trying to get to a point where they can “sell” product signing and profit just to have an app on their phone? This is a foolish move in my opinion and we’ll have to see what happens.