Announcement for "Mechanical 3D linear array probe" Development

Nihon Dempa Kogyo Co.Ltd. today announced development of a "Mechanical 3D linear array probe" for advanced 3D/4D imaging applications in diagnostic ultrasound.This probe is targeted at breast scanning, but is also suitable for other clinical applications requiring high resolution 3D imaging over a wide field of view.

The mechanical 3D linear array probe is of novel design, with a sliding linear scan of a linear array. NDK's unique linear slide scan, the first of its type in the world, was developed to improved lateral resolution and increase diagnostic function compared to conventional circular scan geometries.

Additionally, the mechanical 3D linear array probe has a flat surface, allowing more even contact with soft tissue such as the breast.

NDK will start shipping a samples of this probe from June 2008.

The development of Ultra-compact (2520-size) Voltage Controlled Crystal Oscillator

NIHON DEMPA KOGYO CO., LTD. has developed an ultra-compact Voltage-Controlled Crystal Oscillator NV2520SA.

With the spread of digital broadcasting-capable mobile devices, there is a growing need for a compact and high-performance VCXO as a clock oscillator for the processing of complex image signals.

In order to meet this need, with the use of the high density mounting technology, we have developed NV2520SA , which is one of the industry’s smallest package (Dimension: 2.5 × 2.0 × 0.8mm). Although it is ultra-compact, it has Frequency control range "Min. ±100×10-6". Also, it has a wide Operating temperature range of from - 40 °C to +85 °C, and can be used under a wide variety of environmental conditions.

The development of an Enable/Disable(*) function-equipped TCXO for GPS applications

NIHON DEMPA KOGYO CO., LTD. has developed an ultra-compact Temperature Compensated Crystal Oscillator NT2016SB.

Recently, there has been a growing need for GPS-equipped mobile phones and mobile terminals. Amid the need for miniaturization, an extremely high precision has been required for the GPS function on these devices, and the need to reduce the power consumption has increased due to the multifunctionality of mobile phones.

In order to meet these needs, we have developed an ultra-compact, light and low profile (0.8 mm max) TCXO NT2016SB which has highly stable frequency-temperature characteristics and operates with lower power consumption due to the Enable/Disable function.

The development of the world's first* ultralow power-driven (0.8V min) crystal clock oscillator

NIHON DEMPA KOGYO CO., LTD. has developed the world's first environment-friendly, miniaturized (2.5 x 2.0 x 0.9 mm) and ultralow power-driven crystal clock oscillator “NZ2520SF”.

Recently, eco-friendly products have become popular in various applications, and the move towards energy conservation has accelerated. For this reason, there is a strong demand for electronic components constituting these products to be environment-friendly, and due to the requirements for long-life battery and multi-functionality, energy conservation through both miniaturization and power saving is desired especially in compact devices such as mobile phones or handheld devices. In order to meet these market needs, we have developed a crystal clock oscillator that can be operated at ultralow power (0.8V min).

“NZ2520SF” is the world's first* 2.5 x 2.0 mm type crystal clock oscillator that can be operated at ultralow power (0.8V min). In comparison with existing crystal clock oscillators, the operating voltage is about 50% lower and the current consumption is at least 40% lower (Fig.1). This is equivalent to approximately 70% reduction in power consumption.

This product helps achieve low-power operation, has significant increase in battery life and reduction in environmental load especially in mobile devices such as multi-functional mobile phones, silicon audio players, PND （Personal Navigation Device）and notebook computers. Due to its wide frequency range (1.5 to 50MHz), other than mobile application devices, it can be used in a wide range of electronic devices, leading to environmental load reductions in various fields in the electronics industry.

NDK Develops VCXO with Low Phase Jitter Improving Signal Quality of Optical Communication Networks

NIHON DEMPA KOGYO CO., LTD. (President : Hiroshi Takeuchi) has developed and started to ship mass-produced compact high frequency range type VCXO (Voltage-Controlled Crystal Oscillators).

Miniaturization of devices is required at high-speed wireless broadband networks and base stations for mobile communications from the perspective of establishing low-cost installations and operation. High frequency clock signals between 600 MHz to 700 MHz are required for the optical transmission devices and optical multiple-wavelength transmission devices used in these base stations and core networks.

In order to meet the market requirements, NDK has developed the “NV7050SA” VCXO. It handles high frequency and has a small package, 7.0 × 5.0mm (one-tenth volume compared to the conventional products) while maintaining the same frequency stability and pull-ability range as the conventional products. Furthermore, ultralow phase jitter is achieved at a few tens of femtoseconds, which is an order of magnitude lower than previously developed products.

PLL frequency multiplication is generally used to obtain high frequencies in the range of hundreds of MHz, however the drawback is phase jitter is magnified during this process which can significantly degrade the quality of transmission signals. Through NDK's proprietary technical knowledge, high frequency fundamental crystal units were designed and applied to obtain high frequencies without the need for PLL frequency multiplication processing. This has enabled the phase jitter to reduce to values of one quarter to one fifth the level of phase jitter produced by conventional PLL multiplication type VCXO.

MSPDEBUG – Power profiling with the MSP430-JTAG-ISO-MK2

MSP430-JTAG-ISO-MK2 has power profiling functionality which can be used from MSPDebug. When a chip is running, the debugger continuously captures current consumption and MAB (program counter) samples, which can be read and analysed.

As of 4 Oct 2012, MSPDebug contains support for the following power profiling functionality:

•     Basic statistics (average current, run time, charge consumption).
•     Time-domain analysis, including exporting of raw samples to CSV format.
•     Disassembly annotations, which show power consumption on a per-instruction basis.
•     Hotspot/profile analysis to discover which functions are consuming the most power.

The driver for this device supports both raw USB and tty access, and can be used to perform firmware updates.

MSPDEBUG is open source tool, for debugging MSP430 microcontrollers. The project is hosted on Sourceforge

The next logical step is to create IDE with MSPGCC+Eclipse+MSPDEBUG plugin for one completely free development environment for MSP430 supporting all MSP430 devices and JTAGs on the market +  Power Profiling feature if you use MSP430-JTAG-ISO-MK2. The IDE will support Linux and Windows and we hope to be able to demonstrate it at Electronica 2012 in November.

FRIDAY FREE BOARD QUIZ ISSUE #11 PRIZE IS MOD-IO2

MOD-IO2 is UEXT module with two relays and 7 GPIOs, which can work with any of our boards with UEXT connectors.As MOD-IO2 are stackable you can have as many IOs as you want to your UEXT board by simply plug together MOD-IO2 boards, so you can have 2,4,6 etc controllable relays.
The modules talk via I2C and the protocol is very easy. You can command the relays and read the GPIO status.

Everyone have chance to win this board if answer correctly our Quiz question.

Today at 17.00 o’clock our local Bulgarian time (GMT+3) we will post on Twitter our question.

You have one hour to reply to our tweet with the correct answer.

At 18.00 o’clock we will count the correct answers and ask random.org to generate random number in range then anнounce the winner and ship the board by airmail next Monday.

Working with iMX233-OLinuXino and MOD-IO2

UEXT connector allow many and different devices to be attached to it.

To may they all work together without collisions I2C protocol is used to address them.

The protocol is like this:



– this is the unique OLIMEX I2C address which is 0×48 this address is used to talk to all Olimex UEXT modules.

– this is the ID of every UEXT module TYPE which is attached to the I2C bus, for instance if we want to talk to MOD-IO2 this ID is 0×02

– as we can have many MOD-IO2 connected on the I2C but this is the MOD-IO2 address number which we talk to, each MOD-IO2 by default have address 0xA0, this address can be re-programmed to other value so many MOD-IO2 to be connected together.

– allow specific command to be sent to the UEXT module like switch relays, read GPIOs, read AINx etc.

Set-relay command is 0×40, Set-new-address command is 0xB0, read AIN0 is 0×10 read AIN7 is 0×17 and so on.



if we use I2CTOOL we can talk easily to MOD-IO2 connected to iMX233-OLinuXino, for instance to switch both relays ON we can do:

$ ./i2c-tool -w 0 0×48 4 0×02 0xA0 0×40 0×03

where -w means I2C write, 0 – this is I2C channel we write to channel 0, 0×48 is OLIMEX I2C address, 4 is number of bytes to follow, 0×02 is MOD-IO2 ID, 0xA0 is default MOD-IO2 address, 0×40 is set-relay command, 0×03 is set both relays

MOD-VGA (Gameduino in Arduino + UEXT form factor)

Gameduino is open source game shield for Arduino compatible boards and you can see number of games implemented on this shield.

We love it and decided that we have to make one but to be available for our boards with UEXT connectors, and this is how we made MOD-VGA.

What we add more to MOD-VGA is PS2 keyboard connector so one who want to use keypad or keyboard while play the games now have access to one.

Also original Gameduino is restricted to 400×300 pixels with 512 colors as use internal FPGA RAM as video memory. We decided to add optionally 32MB of SD-RAM as option to MOD-VGA so higher resolutions and more colors to be available (with proper new FPGA firmware). If someone is experienced with FPGA and want to play with MOD-VGA trying to implement higher resolutions please let me know I will send you board.

Originally MOD-VGA was intended mostly to run with Duinomite as it is monochrome, Ken Segler worked for a while on this idea but later on he got busy with other stuff so he never completed the MOD-VGA support in DuinoMite BASIC firmware.

So for the moment you can use MOD-VGA with Arduino and compatible.

LDmicro will turn PIC-IO, AVR-IO, AVR-IO-M16 and MOD-IO into PLC

LDMicro created by Jonathan Westhues is nice free program which can turn any PIC or AVR microcontroller in PLC with ladder logic.

The list of the supported devices is:

•     PIC16F628(A), PIC16F88, PIC16F819, PIC16F877(A), PIC16F876(A), PIC16F887, PIC16F886
•     ATmega128, ATmega64, ATmega162, ATmega32, ATmega16, ATmega8

LDmicro allow you to make your ladder schematic then to generate HEX code which does the ladder logic implementation in program code which you program to your AVR or PIC and got the ladder logic functionality.

LDmicro have interfaces in 7 languages.

PIC-IO supports PIC16F628 and AVR-IO supports ATMega8 you can use these boards with LDmicro, AVR-IO-M16 and MOD-IO have ATmega16 on it so they are ready to go.

You will need also programmers to load the generated HEX files to the boards, for PIC we recommend PIC-KIT3 and for AVR we recommend AVR-ISP-MK2

LDmicro adds nice functionality to PIC-IO and MOD-IO, AVR-IO, AVR-IO-M16 and offer yet another option to program these boards.

FRIDAY FREE BOARD QUIZ ISSUE #12 PRIZE IS MOD-VGA

MOD-VGA is open source hardware project based on the popular Gameduino shield for Arduino. What we improved here is to add PS2 keyboard as what is Game play without keyboard anyway? and to add option for 32MB SDRAM on board which allow firmware to be improved at later stage to support higher resolutions and more features.

Right now MOD-VGA runs the normal Gameduino firmware and act as normal Gameduino.

Everyone have chance to win this board if answer correctly our Quiz question.

Today at 17.00 o’clock our local Bulgarian time (GMT+3) we will post on Twitter our question.

You have one hour to reply to our tweet with the correct answer.

At 18.00 o’clock we will count the correct answers and ask random.org to generate random number in range then anнounce the winner and ship the board by airmail next Monday.

iMX233 OLinuXino now matures to volume projects all around the world

OLinuXino was designed with the idea everyone to may tailor it later to his own needs and now we start to see fruits of this.

When we announced the start of this project many people were comparing iMX233 with Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone and  was telling us that our Linux board is with so small amount of RAM and at lower frequency and that it would not be popular and people will have no much use of it.

The practice though proved that we were right with our idea big time.

Now every week we get messages from customers of ours who successfully implemented large scale projects based on iMX233-OLinuXino, as it’s reliable, robust, simple … and easy to re-produce.

Both Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone use BGA processors which are troublesome to assembly in companies with limited resources, but even home amateur could arrange assembly in house of iMX233 based board with TQFP package.

One project which we learned is for web based water pool controller / data logger with potential of 50K units per year (do they really have so many in house pools in USA? I envy)

Another project was fleet management with GPS/GSM for vehicle logging with potential several thousands units per year.

Today we got message from Australia for project based on OLinuXino for Lighting in the Cloud.

The interesting here is that this project first was based on the famous Raspberry Pi, but then they moved it to iMX233-OLinuXino-MICRO.
Why? Because OLinuXino is Open Source Hardware – once you make your project then you can customize it to your needs – something you can’t do With RPi.

Also since the big demand we read on element14 forum that RS Components didn’t deliver any RPi to their customers since July this year as Broadcom can’t ship them processors (!)
So if you need 1-2 boards to play at home RPi may give you more as specs, but if you want to make PRODUCT, OLinuXino is much more attractive as platform.

In the long term RPi wins the kids to play games at home, OLinuXino wins when you make Product and industrial apps.

A13-OLinuXino project – control relays and read ADCs and IOs with Android

Yesterday we got yet another amazing project by our friend Dimitar Gamishev.

He was playing with A13-OLinuXino-WIFI and decided to learn how to write Android applications, but he didn’t stop with “Hello world”

What he decided to try is to interface low level resources to his Android application like to implement I2C communication and control of MOD-IO connected to A13-OLinuXino UEXT connector.

With it you can switch on/off relays on MOD-IO and read the Input status and ADC analog values (the trimmer potentiometer on the picture).

The sources are at GitHub what he did was to use Android NDK to implement the I2C communication in C then to export it and make it public for use by the Android SDK java applications. As you can see the result is Android APK which you can run and it communicates with MOD-IO connected to UEXT.

Using the same approach all GPIOs, SPIs, I2C and etc resources on A13-OLinuXino can be made available for native Android SDK applications and you can intereface real world hardware with pure Android application code.

Omron Digital Thermometer MC-670-E Wins Reddot Design Award

OMRON Healthcare Co., Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of OMRON Corporation announced that its i-Temp digital thermometer (model MC-670-E) wins Reddot Design Award (*1), in the category of Product Design 2008.

Reddot Design Award is recognized as one of the top three renowned design competitions (*2) in the world and awarded by Nordrhein Westfalen Design Center in Germany since 1955. Each year many entries are submitted from throughout the world for a variety of industrial products. There are three different categories for the awards: ‘product design’, ‘communication design’, and ‘design concept’. The entries are reviewed and evaluated according to the nine criteria such as degree of innovation, functionality, formal quality, ergonomic consideration and environmental friendliness to honor excellent and outstanding designs. In 2008, total of 3,203 submissions were made from 51 countries throughout the world, and 676 products were selected as the winners.

Our award-winning thermometer, i-Temp (MC-670-E) is the European version of the model MC-670, which was launched in Japan in November 2004. Sharing many features with MC-670 - a flat tip that allows users to hold it comfortably in the armpit, a large, easy-to-read LCD and a sleek body that fits easily in the hand - i-Temp was released in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in October,2007.　i-Temp was highly regarded by the judges for its easy-to-read large LCD, innovative and functional design and its high quality for users of all ages. i-Temp also won the ‘iF Design Gold Award’ in 2007.

Reddot gala award ceremony will be held on June 23, 2008 in the Essen Aalto-Theater. The award-winning products were exhibited in Reddot Design Museum from June 24 to July 27, 2008 and will be preserved there permanently thereafter.

OMRON Adds Secure RFID Protocol to V750 Series UHF RFID Reader/Writer

OMRON Corporation (TOKYO: 6645, ADR: OMRNY) today announced that, in cooperation with Hitachi, Ltd., it has achieved compatibility between its V750 series UHF RFID reader/writer and Secure RFID Protocol. Additional security functions provided by the protocol will be available as an option beginning in July 2008.

Secure RFID Protocol was developed through the Secure Electronic Tag Project led by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), with Hitachi as a core partner, from August 2006 to March 2007. The protocol provides enhanced security functions including communication distance control, which restricts the communication range of tags, and reading prohibition, which limits access to tags through password authentication, while maintaining compatibility with the UHF RFID international standard ISO/IEC 18000-6 Type C. A Secure RFID Protocol-ready IC developed by Hitachi, “µ-Chip(mu-chip) Hibiki,” is already on the market.

RFID in the UHF band (860MHz to 960MHz) realizes longer communication ranges among passive-type tags and conducts faster and more diverse data processing as compared with HF band (13.56MHz) systems. Prompted by major retailers in the USA, UHF RFID systems are increasingly being used around the world in areas ranging from manufacturing, distribution and logistics to stores, offices, public services and amusement/sports facilities. However, in open systems shared by multiple companies, one company’s unique data (embedded on a tag) could easily be passed on to other companies along with shared data. The fact that all companies in an open system can read and alter all the data on tags is becoming an obstacle to the utilization of RFID systems.

To date, Omron has developed a number of RFID reader/writers, inlays and tags mainly focusing on the HF and UHF bands. Omron’s products are designed not only to comply with common standards, but also to easily incorporate new functions and advanced technologies developed in response to market needs. By readying the V750 reader/writer for Secure RFID Protocol, Omron acknowledges that protecting company and product information is critical to increasing the use of RFID in distribution and logistics. In Japan, feasibility studies and trials of secured RFID systems are increasingly being carried out by book and home appliance distribution chains, and Omron intends to proactively participate in those studies.

New functions can be added to the V750 reader/writer by updating or supplementing its firmware. Secure RFID Protocol will be separated from the standard functions provided by the current product, and will be offered as an option to be added upon request. The protocol will be ready for the Japanese version of the V750 reader/writer in July 2008; other versions will be provided based on the protocol’s popularity in other countries.

The Secure RFID Protocol-ready V750 reader/writer can be seen at the Hitachi Group and Nissei Limited booths (West 10-53 and West 13-11, respectively) at the 3rd RFID Solutions Expo (RIDEX), being held at Tokyo Big Sight from May 14-16, 2008.

Yo Nakajima, General Manager of Hitachi’s Security Smart ID Solutions Division, offered the following remarks on the V750 reader/writer: “Hitachi welcomes the start of sales of interrogators that support the Secure RFID Protocol. The protocol has been developed with partners aiming to realize functions that fulfill needs for UHF IC tags in Japanese industry. We believe this protocol will expand worldwide and become the optimal UHF IC tag air protocol in the distribution and logistics area. We are expecting full-scale diffusion and market expansion of secured IC tags, triggered by sales of Omron’s V750 reader/writer. Hitachi will also keep making efforts to promote the protocol, and by so doing contribute to realizing a securer, safer and more comfortable society with all of our partners.”