I talked last week about the internet of things (IoT) panel I attended at DAC. One thing that is clear is that IoT is not really a market on its own, but nonetheless the fact that billions of edge-node devices are going to be connected to the internet is a real trend. One company that takes IoT very seriously is Atmel, since they have an … Read More
Tag: atmel
What’s not quite MCU, and not quite SoC?
There has been a lot of railing lately about how we don’t have quite the right chips for the upcoming wave of wearables. Chips one would drop in a smartphone are often overkill and overpowered, burning through electrons too quickly. Chips one would use for a simple control task generally lack peripherals and performance, offsetting… Read More
Atmel and the Arduino Zero
As I wrote about last month, this weekend is the Maker Faire in San Mateo. If you are interested in the cutting edge of what people are getting up to outside of the corporate world, this is the place to go. You will see stuff that you will not hear about for a year or two when it finally goes mainstream.
Increasingly, there is a lot of electronics… Read More
More “toddlers” innovating on the IoT
As the PC Era took shape, Tom Peters predicted the shift away from “where all the cars are parked”. He foresaw that large, established companies would no longer be the economic engine, or the dominant force in innovation. Smaller firms, even individuals, would rise to prominence in a new, technologically-driven economy.
That … Read More
Calling all makers for new #8bitideas
The maker community and the learn-to-code movement is growing with many ideas built on small, power-efficient, easy-to-use 8-bit microcontrollers. If you want to be one of the next famous makers and maybe win some cash in the process, Atmel has a contest open until September 30, 2014 – here are tips on getting your #8bitideas in … Read More
Maker Faire San Mateo
A few years ago my then-girlfriend was an artist and she had some friends who were in the maker movement, one who ran a tool “lending library” and so on. So she wanted to go to the Maker Faire, which is a huge event held in San Mateo exhibit center. In those days it was more like an outgrowth of burning man but there were already… Read More
Sewn open: Arduino and soft electronics
As several other recent threads on SemiWiki have pointed out, the term “wearables” is a bit amorphous right now. The most recognizable wearable endeavors so far are the smartwatch and fitness band, but these are far from the only categories of interest.
There is another area of wearable wonder beginning to get attention: clothing,… Read More
Atmel on Tour at AT&T Park
OK, it’s not exactly AT&T park…it’s the parking lot. But they have a huge semi loaded up with lots of cool Atmel stuff to show off some of the things that their customers are doing with their microcontrollers and display technology, primarily focused on the internet of things (IoT). I went down to check it … Read More
Internet of Things and the Wearable Market
My wife and I drove to Southern California last week in search of information on the wearable computing market. After stops in Irvine, San Diego, and some play time in La Jolla we returned in time for the CASPA Symposium: “The Wearable Future: Moving Beyond the Hype; the Search for the Holy Grail and Practical Use Cases”… Read More
Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers
Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More