Wiimote competing with the SHAKE

Over 30 million people around the world have access to Wii Controller. Nintendo Wii Controller, known as Wiimote (Wii Remote), can be used in computer-based applications without the Nintendo Console. Johnny Chung Lee, from Carnegi Mellon University, has already designed and developed tangible interaction techniques using the Wiimote. His demos are available in YouTube website.

This easy-to-use and publicly available device will open up opportunities to use the Wiimote in the interaction with handheld devices, as it communicates via Bluetooth.

Something less wired

No one likes carrying a big bag of wires or being wired to something when you would like to walk around freely. This problem comes to light in intelligent home project when people like to use remote controls or handheld gadgets to control various objects around. One possible solution is using a new pack of sensors, similar to Phidgets, called ZWave. These gadgets use radio to get around being wired problem, however, ZWave is still new enough that there aren't yet many such gadgets on the market in the UK.

Phidgets and Handheld device

UMPC comes with at least two USB ports, which allow users to access non-standard interaction technologies such as Phidgets. Phidgets Interface package comes with varieties of USB kits and analog sensors. For example, Interface Kit 8/8/8 allows to connect up to 8 analog sensors and 8 digital sensors and real 8 digital input. ServoMotor Kit, LCD text and RFID kit are other popular USB kits.

One problem with phidgets in particular is that using USB, they must be within a certain distance of a computer; people who are interested in making their home intelligent using Phidgets, that is a rather awkward constraint. However, there are many interesting applications built using Phidgets (Videos). Students in Computer Science Department, Swansea University of Wales do main part of their coursework for CS-M79 module using Phidgets.

Asus EEE, Ultra Mobile PC

The Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC), is a specification for a small form factor tablet PC. It was developed as a joint development exercise by Microsoft, Intel, and Samsung, among others. Current UMPCs feature the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, or Linux operating system and low-voltage Intel Pentium or VIA C7-M processors in the 1 GHz range. The most popular UMPC is VAIO designed by SONY but in compare to other handheld gadgets such as PDAs and smart phones, UMPCs have not been so sucessful because of their short battery life, price and weight. Asus has promised to deliver a light and low price (just under 200£) UMPC in 2008. This is called EEE and is running Linux. Its weight is under one Kg; because it does not have any hard-disk and uses only flash memory (4GB). It will be a big step forward in designing ultra-light mobile PCs.

Powerful chips on mobile phones

The good news is in the next few years , 5 years apparently, mobile phones will carry chips with the power of today's desktop PCs. This was announced by Intel.

What has motivated this idea is having a personal net and high-speed internet access on mobile phones. Since iPhone's appealing user interface and easy WiFi connection via all access-points the competition among mobile phone designers is hight to provide a more intuitive and less frustrating web service on handheld devices. In the other hand, having powerful chips means longer battery life and good support for graphics, which eventually improve other aspect of interface design on handheld devices.

Sensor Noise (I)

Sensory data is usually noisy unless the sensor itself has a decent built-in filter. However, we can write simple filters to filter out noise. Matlab provides decent filter function, for instance, "filtfilt" for this purpose. I have written a simple filtfilt function working with C or C++ applications, shown in the figure.

Order is the order of the filter function, i.e. zero, first, second, etc. Based on the order coefficients, "a" and "b" are calculated. The simplest way to calculate them is using Matlab "butter" function
, e.g., [b,a]=butter(order, length); For a third order filter coefficients, "a" and "b" are calculated as: [b,a] = butter(3,1/10);

b[0]= 0.0007; b[1]= 0.0021; b[2]=0.0021;
b[3]=0.0007; a[0]= 1.0000; a[1]= -2.6236;
a[2]= 2.3147; a[3]=-0.6855;

PDF Reader/Viewer and Handhelds (I)

FoxitReader Core Engine has been proven to be one of the best performed PDF Rendering Engines. The code base is probably the smallest in the market. Comparing with Adobe, it loads much faster and needs far less memory. Foxit Reader has recently been ranked as one of the top 100 free software by PC World magazine.

"Foxit Reader Named to PC World's "101 Fabulous Freebies' List

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124883-page,2-c,freeware/article.html

in Tune Up (Utilities and System Tools)

Foxit PDF Rendering customers include IBM, NEC, Panasonic, Siemens, Microsoft, Xerox, Access, Nero and Lawrence Livermore National Lab etc. Foxit supports all major desktop OSs and the mobile platforms including WinCE, Linux, Brew and Symbian. The embedded WinCE SDK is available in

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/sdk/embedded/

However, the one time licene cost for research will be $4500.00 and the royalty fee for each application sold will be $5.00.