Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Hard on the outside, soft at the core
As the mobile application market has seemingly gone to hell (at least the direct sales market, even though there’s still a big opportunity in providing mobile applications on a commercial basis to complement public and corporate Web services), it’s time to move on to more profitable and worthwhile pastures.
This might be one of them: Applications for embedded systems using one-chip computers or micro controllers. Consider that even washing machines and cars are computer-controlled nowadays, making use of such chips, and in terms of cars many of them.
I’m currently looking at a solution based on Atmel’s ATmega168, being used in a kit called Miduino (that in turn is based on the Arduino open source design) that includes connectors for all the peripheral ports (analog and digital), as well as an on-board MIDI interface for direct connection to music instruments of all kinds. The designer of the Miduino board, Tom Scarff, also offers many MIDI-related hardware/software projects, so I will try a few of those before I make my own.
It’s always good to set a time- and feature-limited project goal, even though my primary intention is to learn how to use such MCUs, and that is to make a prototype for a MIDI controller using a new type of controller device that I haven’t seen any commercial product use so far. As MIDI is all digital and has by now a very broad functionality, the combinatoric options are vast, and also simple to implement, even though my electronic skills are quite rusty at the moment.
Interestingly the ATmega168 has the same amount of program memory as the first products I designed and programmed while working for Axis Communications back in the 80’s, so there sure is a nostalgic component as well.
