I saw a couple of things at CES this year that I actually thought were worthy of sharing. Usually it’s just faster, shinier, bigger, badder gadget after gadget — yawn. I’m pretty jaded, you could say, when it comes to gadgets. I still carry around and cherish my aging Blackberry, and despite the nasty inch-long crack in the front bezel everything works great. It’s almost a badge of honor–no iPhone could handle that kind of real-world abuse and keep on serving its owner so faithfully.

The most stunning thing I saw at CES this year was no gadget, however. It was a mock-up of the “motherglass” substrate that Sharp uses to make its 57″ LCD panels.

That is indeed the mother of all glass substrates.

There’s these huge frickin machines somewhere out there in this world that takes in that 9 foot piece of glass and deposits thin films of silicon on it, and images microscopic patterns into the films to make all those big, beautiful hi def LCD displays that the gadget freaks lust after. I lust after the machine that makes those panels–eight 57″ LCDs panels at a time. It makes those 12″ wafers at the Intel booth look well…small.

Other noteworthy things were the 128 gigabyte 2.5″ solid state flash drive for laptops that Toshiba had on display at their booth. I think there was another vendor that offered drives like this–Sasmung I think? But they didn’t have the circuit boards out for me to gawk at like Toshiba did.

Click on the image for a larger version of the circuit board. The drives are currently priced at $10/gigabyte, but hey, you know, Moore’s law will fix that eventually (although eventually is getting pushed out farther and farther as Moore’s law slows down). These drives are much faster than a standard hard drive for random seek, so it makes things like rebooting your laptop happen in half the time. Personally, I’d love to see this technology combined with a couple gigabytes of embedded DRAM and a smart caching chip to make one wicked fast mass storage device.

The other thing I saw that was neat is a Menlow-based motherboard, the first I had seen. I uhh…forgot what product it was in, it’s some Toshiba ultra mobile PC, but who cares about that; I’m sure engadget has some article on it if you’re into those kinds of things. The motherboard was the interesting part for me.

Click on the image for a larger version of the motherboard.

That’s it for now — I only got through about a third of the exhibits there so far, I had a lot of meetings for the past couple of days. If I find anything else really interesting tomorrow I’ll post it!

Recently, someone on the chumby forum noted that the Energizer ER-PHOTO battery pack works with the chumby. The ER-PHOTO is a handy little device that essentially emulates a 12V DC wallwart with a pass-through mode, so you can continue to use whatever is plugged into the battery pack while it charges. There’s a lot of devices out there that run off of 12V and use that classic 5.5mm DC barrel jack, so they are certainly handy to have around. As you can see in the photo below, the pack consists of 3x 1800mAh Li-Ion cells, which gives a nominal capacity of 20 Wh; of course, the step-up regulator is probably only 90% efficient or so, and the circuitry in the pack is fairly simple, so maybe it lacks the electronics to safely milk the last drop out of the batteries, resulting in a reduced delivered capacity.

Scott Janousek has a nice little writeup about how you can install the battery pack inside a chumby, although I’d be more than a little bit wary about doing what he’s written up–he’s taken the raw Lithium Ion cells out of their protective plastic housing. The electrical tape wrapping won’t provide adequate protection against puncture or impact (which is possible if you’re carrying around a chumby and you drop it). This can lead to cells catching fire in a way that can’t be put out easily (only class D fire extinguishers work on these fires, and many homes and small offices have only type ABC extinguishers).

I had a “near fire” experience once where my electric Braun shaver developed a loose connection to the rechargeable cell (it’s cold-welded on, and the continuous vibration of my luggage being dragged over cobblestones in Italy eventually wore the metal tab down) so that the charging circuitry saw a substantial series resistance in its path–my guess is it was trying to do current mode charging without paying attention to the voltage–and the shaver got extremely hot and started to carbonize the potting glue used around the components. I ripped the shaver apart and sprayed the battery down with freeze-spray to keep it from going into thermal runaway. I’ve also had a few Dell Latitude battery packs get scary-hot during charging–hot potato hot, where I had to juggle it from hand to hand while I ran it to the freezer to cool it down.

At any rate, I encountered a surprising defect in an Energizer battery pack the other day. One of the folks at the chumby office got one to evaluate, charged it, but it didn’t seem to work. So I took it apart, and lo and behold, the battery terminals weren’t soldered into the motherboard. Click on the photo for a larger version of the picture, to see the defect clearly.

I’m not quite sure how this got through QA–almost certainly there is a 100% unit test at the end of the line. Maybe the tabs made just enough contact for it to pass final test, and then vibration during shipping displaced them. It’s a very scary defect, however, as loose wires in battery packs can lead to hazardous conditions.

I can definitely see how a bug like this can happen in the process; I can just imagine two operators in China sitting next to each other, one of them stuffing the terminals and the other soldering them in, and then during shift change one of the stuffed but unsoldered devices gets mixed in with the soldered batch. Most factories put controls in place to try to avoid these kinds of process omissions–but mistakes do happen. To be clear, we all live in glass houses, as mistakes sometimes happen when building chumbys as well. Whenever I see a teardown of a chumby posted on the net, I take a keen look at the photos to see if all of the procedures were followed during the construction of the chumby device.

Last month’s challenge was not necessarily to name a particular device, but rather to name the type of device that generates a class of audible interference. You can listen to the sound again if you need your memory jogged!

While many immediately recognized the sound as interference caused by a GSM or EDGE phone, Jered wins the prize for his very precise analysis of the root cause of the noise:

The reason for the buzz is the nature of time-division mulitple access (TDMA). In the US, we operate mobile phones at 850 Mhz and 1900 Mhz; in Europe, 900 Mhz and 1800 Mhz. Good so far; that’s not going to make noise that we can hear. TDMA fits more subscribers into the same bandwidth by assigning different terminals different timeslots (vs. CDMA, which uses black magic). These timeslots happen to be spaced 4.615 ms apart, yielding a signal envelope which looks a lot like a dirty 217 Hz square wave.

All sorts of things (like “wires”) are good at picking up a 217 Hz square wave at 0.5 W, and 217 Hz is conveniently smack dab in the middle of our auditory capabilities.

Congratulations Jered! Email me for your prize.

I thought this noise was noteworthy because a surprising number of people do not realize where it is coming from. I’ve often heard this noise on conference calls, and its fairly obvious that some participants don’t understand that their cell phone is causing this interference. The thing that befuddles most is the range at which this interference can occur: their phone could be well across the table, yet with the proper antenna orientation, the noise is loud and clear. Often times, the problem can be ameliorated simply by rotating the phone by about ninety degrees.

What disturbs me about this noise is that it’s a prominent reminder of exactly how powerful this RF transmitter is that I happily stick next to my cerebral cortex and my gonads on a daily basis. 0.5 watts is not a trivial amount of power! And of course, Bluetooth hands-free sets are not much better. Granted the power is lower, but Bluetooth operates at 2.5 GHz — and it’s no mistake that microwave ovens also run at that frequency, as it is absorbed particularly well by the water that makes up 60% of our mass.

While there is no conclusive evidence that cell phones cause any sort of biological harm, there is precedent for entire societies that have fallen victim to the myopic use of technology to better life. For example, even a child can tell you today that lead causes poisoning and brain damage…and so we remark at the Roman’s folly: “Gosh, what idiots! They sweetened their wine with lead and used lead pipe to deliver drinking water. Duh, of course the Roman empire collapsed.”

I often wonder if a millennium from now, people will read about us as we do about the Romans. “Gosh, what idiots. They stuck half a watt of radiation on their heads every day for decades at a time. No wonder they all died of debilitating brain disease.” Or, my other favorite is, “Gosh, what idiots! The made their clothes, cars, and even utensils out of plastics. Everyone knows that plastics outgas damaging free radicals. No wonder they all died of cancer”…and in the end, the meek did inherit the Earth.

Then again…there is no conclusive evidence that anything we do really causes that much damage. We’ve learned from the Romans and gotten more clever, and we use “model” organisms and sophisticated extrapolation mechanisms. But then again, those are just models, and there’s no such thing as accelerated lifetime testing on a real human being…and as any engineer knows who has done a lot of reliability testing, there’s always that one corner case that gets through (e.g., the Xbox360 Red Ring of Death). So with enough new technology entering our lives, the chance that we’ll encounter unforeseen consequences goes up and up. You and me — we’re the ultimate guinea pigs in this grand experiment with technology!