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Seen at Assembly 2011

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

The stand for Ubuntu Linux also had some Meego people showing that Meego is still going wrong. I got my hands on the Nokia N9 prototype version (I did not get permission to take picture of it). There was also Intel Meego tablet reference platform shown on the stand. The MeeGo people from Nokia were not allowed to tell any interesting details of their MeeGo plans…

I visited the Assembly TV premises to catch up what they are doing this year and meeting the friends there. This year the broadcasting system was almost completely in HDTV format, including the cameras for main broadcast (seminars still used standard definition video). HDTV video editing and playback was done mainly using Apple computers (proven to work in this application better than PC based systems). Technology to transfer video between devices was mainly HD-SDI, DVI (over fiber optics) and Ethernet. Audio connections used RockNet technology. RockNet real-time, low latency audio distribution network using CAT5 cable. RockNet can link up to 99 devices into a single network comprising 160 audio channels. The network is self-healing for single connection failures.

Helsinki Hacklab had an interesting stand with all kinds of robots and electronics hacks. At the same stand there were also Tampere hackerspace 5w and Hacklab Turku. It is good to see that there are forming groups of people who hack things together. This is one robot on the stand. It is based on RC servos connected with servo card and Python program running on PC.

hacklab_robot

metku.net stand had also this year some interesting hardware hacks shows. This is one interesting case for a PC.

mobira_dataman

I met Kristoffer Lawson at Assembly. He told about his new on-line banking project Holvi. Holvi in essence is a new way to do online banking. With Holvi, small groups are able to tag each payment in certain ways so that a clear overall picture is formed and thus it helps these groups to better understand how their money is spent and received. This should pretty much makes bookkeeping redundant for smaller organizations and groups. Holvi is a great example of a team sticking to their guns and building upon their core expertise. There is much of Scred in there, but the shift in approach.

The main demo competition and 4kilobytes intro competitions were again high quality. You can find the entries at Assembly Archive. Some coders are really making wonders with their code.

Posted in Audio and Video, Computers | 2 Comments »

New tech fails to drive new TV set sales

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

TV manufacturers try to put in all kind of new technical gimmicks to their products. Top telly tech fails to drive new set sales. The technologies telly makers are promoting in a bid to persuade punters to replace existing TVs are failing to excite consumers: LED backlight technology, internet connectivity and 3D. LED was the strongest driver, followed by internet access and, a very long way from the average, 3D (only four per cent of Q1 telly shipments).

hdtv

Posted in Audio and Video | 4 Comments »

Entering The Minority Report Era?

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report (released nearly 10 years ago) captured the imagination of many in the technology space. Today we are seeing some things from the movie start to come true right in front of our eyes today. Entering The Minority Report Era: A Video Series article shows some examples of those technologies. The video collection in this article is quite large, so expect to spend some time with this interesting material.

Posted in Audio and Video, Computers | No Comments »

Fractals without a Computer!

Friday, May 13th, 2011

A fractal is a figure with a self-similar pattern. Usually the fractals are calculated with a computer, but is is possible to produce Fractals without a Computer! It’s very cool – partly because it looks neat, but also partly because it shows you something important about fractals.

Optical video feedback is a well-known phenomenon. If you hook a camera up to a TV and then point it at the TV, you get an infinite regression of images. I remember playing with this effect at 1980’s when first time playing with video camera. You can get some interesting effect in this way (was cool at that time, nothing spectacular at today’s standards when computer special effects are widely used in videos).

This video shows that you can use the same feedback phenomenon with multiple displays to make fractals.

Posted in Audio and Video, Off topic fun | 1 Comment »

Audio, Distortion and Feedback

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Audiophiles seem to revel in minor controversies – vinyl vs CD’s, tubes versus solid state, capacitor, wires, magic dots… and negative feedback. At one extreme (“objectivists” and engineers), the position is that “feedback makes amplifiers perfect”. At the other extreme (“subjectivists”) usually claim that “feedback is a menacing succubus that sucks the life out of the music, leaving a dried husk, devoid of soul”. Accusations are occasionally made that objectivists can’t hear, and conversely that subjectivists hear things that aren’t there.

Audio, Distortion and Feedback document has some some simple tutorial, comments and a discussion of phenomena associated with complexity in distortion created by nonlinear gain stages, negative feedback, and the audio signal. This is good reading for anybody interested in audio and electronics.

Negative feedback is very successful in stabilizing amplifier circuits and lowering distortion to very tiny numbers as measured by distortion analyzers. Feedback needs to be used in the right way to avoid Transient Intermodulation Distortion (TIM), also called slew rate distortion. In high quality modern amplifiers the open loop response is at least 20 kHz, canceling TIM distortion.

Aquila_Hi-fi_Stereo

Posted in Audio and Video, Electronics Design | No Comments »

Star-Quad Cable in test

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Are Star-Quad is well known in the audio industry as a good cable construction to use in demanding environments because its superior handling of EMI. And that reputation is based in science; the Canare document, for example, contains lots of claims which can be tested objectively, and all those claims are rooted in physics-based (reality-based) mechanisms.

But do Star quad cables can also improve sound quality? Does Star Quad Microphone Cable Sound Better? Let’s Find Out! John Huntington tries to test that scientifically in ongoing on-line blind listening test. The survey will be available until 6pm NYC time on Thursday, March 10, 2011. Happy listening to see if you can hear any difference or not.

Posted in Audio and Video | 1 Comment »

Audio crossfader

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

The DJ mixer crossfader was originally developed as a control for implementing smooth fades from one program source to another, but where did the idea come from? Evolution of the DJ Crossfader article tells the history and development of crossfader in DJ mixers.

niceboy_Mixer

Posted in Audio and Video, Electronics Design | 2 Comments »

Why 3D doesn’t work

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed. article tells about a letter is from Walter Murch, the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema (and not a big fan of 3D). The article comments on 3D cinema: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive.

The first problem is that the 3D image is dark (about a camera stop darker) and looks small. Somehow the glasses seem to “gather in” the image and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

Walter edited one 3D film back in the 1980’s — “Captain Eo” — and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. The audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen, but their eyes must converge at different distances depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix (unless we can change to true “holographic” images).

Read also 3D Cinema Doesn’t Work and Never Will comments at Slashdot. Read also my earlier 3D postings Why Bad 3D Gives You Headaches, 3D is dangerous?, 3D Vision Problems and 3-D is coming soon.

3dglass

Posted in Audio and Video | 6 Comments »

Surveillance camera image processing

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Use FPGAs for stunning surveillance camera images is a cool article on image processing performed inside modern surveillance cameras. The “stunning images” are made possible by utilizing the latest in high definition high dynamic range CMOS image sensor technology. The “valuable information” is provided by adding intelligence in the camera that can look for the image and process it to show the interesting details well.

A typical image sensor can only reproduce about 72dB of dynamic range (around 12 bits). Today’s latest image sensors use adaptive non-linear exposure techniques that can exceed 115dB of dynamic range (19-20 bits).

Even if you increase the dynamic range of the camera, the the displayed output is going to be limited to only 8-10 bits of brightness (luminance) information per pixel. A dynamic range compression algorithm needs to be used to convert the high dynamic range to something that displays well on limited dynamic range display. The process is somewhat similar to processing used in High dynamic range imaging or digital image artist do to their photographs.

With more dynamic range in the image sensor and right processing, the details in the darkest of areas along with the brightest of areas can be reproduced without compromising either extreme. Your your eye based visual system is actually doing something very similar to this, but you’re not actually aware of it (in that way eye is covering up to 160dB of dynamic range).

Real time image dynamic range processing requires massive, flexible parallel processing in a small, power-efficient footprint. FPGAs are excellent devices to enable cameras with these new features. The FPGA is mentioned on the article very often because the guy who wrote the article seems to be FPGA guy (Marketing Manager of Altera, a company that makes FPGA ICs).

johnny_automatic_surveillance_camera

Image processing could be also done using ASICs or CPU. At the moment a lot of ASICs inside digital camera do similar or even more complicated computations, but they are not reconfigurable. Modern PC CPUs and GPUs are very powerful computing engines, so a lot of image processing can be done with them if you can wait for short time for the processing to happens. Amazing amount of image processing can also be done using a GPU in CUDA or OpenCL. GPUs are nowdays used to build supercomputers so lots of computing is available on that way as long as the device does not need to be very small and can consume lots of electrical power.

Posted in Audio and Video, Electronics Design | 9 Comments »

VGA is dying?

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Many modern PCs still use the over 20 year old 15 pin analogue VGA connector to connect the display to PC. The VGA connector carries the video signal in RGB format, which is a bit outdated in the world where the graphics card and display devices are all digital. Most Windows PC builders have been clinging to VGA to support legacy displays, especially in corporate environments where companies have often been hesitant or unable to update to modern screens and projectors.

Vga15pf1

The digital display interfaces have thought to replace the analogue VGA interface long time ago, but it has not happened yet. But maybe after few years it might happen. Apple was one of the first to abandon VGA in its products, adopting first DVI and later the DisplayPort and derivative Mini DisplayPort standards for its notebooks and desktops.

AMD, Intel, PC builders plan to drop VGA by 2015 article tells: AMD, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Samsung and LG on Wednesday said they plan on focusing on putting digital DisplayPort and HDMI connections into their computer products. They hope to drop analog VGA and LVDS connections in AMD- and Intel-based products by 2015.

The article says that AMD CTO of the graphics division Eric Demers believed DisplayPort 1.2 is the future interface for PC monitors and HDMI 1.4a is the next step for TVs. DisplayPort is backwards compatible with VGA and DVI thanks to adapters.

Posted in Audio and Video, Computers | 2 Comments »

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