Teensy 3.2 Breadboard-Friendly Development Board Arrives At Adafruit

Adafruit has this week announced the arrival of the new Teensy 3.2 breadboard-friendly development board which has been designed by Paul Stoffregen and PJRC.

The Teensy 3.2 has been created to provide makers and developers with a low-cost 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 platform, using an adapted version of the Arduino IDE (Teensyduino) or programming directly in C language.

Features of the new development board include :

– 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 72MHz CPU (M4 = DSP extensions) Here is Freescale’s reference manual for the chip (warning 1227 pages) as well as the Datasheet and User Guide!
– 256K Flash Memory, 64K RAM, 2K EEPROM
– 21* High Resolution Analog Inputs (13 bits usable, 16 bit hardware)
– 34* Digital I/O Pins (21 shared with analog)
– 12 PWM outputs
– 1 12-bit DAC output
– 8 Timers for intervals/delays, separate from PWM
– USB with dedicated DMA memory transfers
– CAN bus
– 3 UARTs (serial ports)
– SPI, I2C, I2S, IR modulator
– I2S (for high quality audio interface)
– Real Time Clock (with user-added 32.768 crystal and battery)
– 16 general purpose DMA channels (separate from USB)

The Teensy 3.2 is now available to purchase directly from the Adafruit online store priced at $19.95 follow the link below to learn more information and to make a purchase.

Source: Adafruit

CellRobot Modular Robot Is A 100 Robots In One (video)

KEYi Technology has started a new Kickstarter campaign this week for their modular robot called the CellRobot, which is being promoted as offering 100 robots in one device.

The CellRobot advanced modular robot is capable of being programmed and re-configured to carry out a wide variety of different tasks thanks to its cells, watch the video below to learn more.

The development team behind CellRobot explain a little more about its inspiration and modular system.

Modular robotics is one of the most complex areas of robotics. Each added element allows new movements. Normally such robot stays in research labs, in places like MIT (link to video). We decided to give access to such cutting edge technology to non-specialists.

Of course it has limitations: it’s not cheap and it’s not fast, you won’t fly it around like a drone, it’s not yet quite like the microbots in Big Hero 6. Did you know that robots in the movie were inspired by research conducted at MIT on modular robotics and at Carnegie Mellon on soft robotics? Our robots are learning tools: we truly believe they can help learn complex cinematic / combinatory movement, aspects of programming and possibly put their future owners on a path to dive deep into robotics, like we did.

If you consider this project like a “Macintosh moment” in the field of consumer robotics, you might understand our excitement at bringing it to you. And it’s no coincidence our “CELLs” look like alien eggs. Because they are 

CellRobot is the world first smart modular robot. Assemble it into various forms and control complex movements that no other robot does. Cell Robot is both entertaining and educational.

For more information on the new CellRobot modular robot jump over to the Kickstarter website for details.

Source: Kickstarter

Apple’s Mac 1TB Fusion Drive Now Only Has 24GB Of Flash Storage

When  Apple launched their new 1TB Fusion drive a few years ago, the device came with a 128GB flashdrive and a 1TB hard drive, this gave you around 1.11TB of usable storage on an iMac.

Yesterday Apple announced its new range of iMac’s, the company has introduced a new 1TB  Fusion Drive in these new iMac’s and it now comes with less flash storage.

The new 1TB Apple Fusion Drive now has 1TB hard drive and 24GB of flash storage, this is significantly less than the previous model.

There are no changes to the 2TB and 3TB Fusion drives, they both come with 128GB of flash storage, so those might be the better options to go for on the new Mac.

Apple has not mentioned anything about why the have cut the flash storage down from 128GB to 24GB on the 1TB Fusion Drive on the new Mac’s, you can find out more information over at Apple.

Source 9 to 5 Mac

Google Nexus 5X Will Start Shipping 22nd Of October

Google recently announced their new Nexus smartphones, the Google Nexus 5X and Google Nexus 6P and now we have more details on the release date of the 5X.

Both the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X are currently up for pre-order and now it looks like the 5X will launch on the 22nd of October, we previously heard it would launch in the UK on the 19th.

Google is now showing a shipping date for the 5X on their Google Store of the 22nd of October, this is apparently only for the black and white versions of the handset.

As a reminder the handset comes with a 5.2 inch Full HD display with a resolution of 120 x 1080 and features a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor plus 2GB of RAM.

Other specifications on the handset include a choice of 16GB or 32GB of built in storage and the device comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The handset features a 5 megapixel camera with a F2.0 aperture up front and on the back there is a 12.3 megapixel camera with an F2.0 aperture, it also has a 2700 mAh non removable battery.

Source Ubergizmo