Alan Kay: .. people who love software want to do their own hardware ..

Embedded Systems

Most of the work I'm currently doing in the embedded space evolves around the Arduino Project as well as designing embedded Internet devices, using Dallas Semiconductor's DS80C390 and DS80C400 Microcontrollers.

Arduino

Arduino is an open-source computing platform based on a simple board, and a development environment for writing software. The Arduino board hosts an Atmel MicroController chip, the AVR-ATMega8, which has 8-KByte self-programming Flash Program Memory, 1-KByte SRAM, 512 Byte EEPROM, 23 I/O pins, 6 or 8 Channel 10-bit A/D-converter, and 16 MIPS throughput at 16 MHz.
The other IC on the board is an FTDI FT232RL, a single chip USB/Asynchronous serial data transfer solution, with 256 Byte receive and 128 Byte transmit buffer.

[Arduino Board with the ATmega168]
[Photo: © Wolf Paulus 2006]

Inside ...

Small hack increases available memory by 6%
Doubling Arduino's amount of Flash Memory
ATmega 8 / 168 internal clock and fuse settings
Recent conference presentation: Arduino Fever - PHYSICAL COMPUTING

DS80C390 / 80C400

Dallas Semiconductor provides several Ethernet-ready prototype boards, which include a small but powerful chipset and a Java programmable runtime environment. The chipset provides processing, control, device-level communication and networking capabilities. Most of the features of the underlying hardware are exposed through a set of Java APIs.

Click to turn ..
[Photo: © Dallas Semiconductor / Maxim-IC, 2001] Click image to turn over

Here is one of my prototypes, based on the DS80C390 microcontroller.
(I added the pen to show the size of the device - and no; I'm not getting any kickbacks from Compuware.)

80C390 Caba Prototype
[Photo: © Wolf Paulus, 2003]

DS80C390
512kB of flash memory
1MB of NV SRAM
10Base-T Ethernet Controller
RTC
Dual CAN controllers
Dual serial ports (one RS-232 level and one +5V level)

This prototype is based on the all-new high speed DS80C400 microcontroller.

80C400 Caba Prototype loading firmware and runtime into flash mem.

10/100 Base-T
3 Hardware Serial Ports
Integrated 1-Wire® Network Master
CAN2.0B Port
Real-Time Clock for Time Stamping
1MB Flash ROM for Application Storage
1MB NV SRAM for Data Storage

80C400 Caba Prototype socket-board wt m400 module

8051 Embedded Systems Projects

Other embedded projects I have worked on include 8031, 80C32, and 8051 boards as Keypad Encoder, Digital Camera Controllers, and Motion Detectors. More details can be found here and here.