Hi welcome to the Eev blog and Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics Design. I'm your host Dave Jones Never Ends Back into it, it's Nicole Thursday morning. The conference is kind of sort of officially ended, but there's still dozens and dozens of labs and lectures until about midday. This is the morning networking breakfast, so I'm going to go Network and then maybe check out another lab or two and that'll be it.

It'll be winding down so let's go and the labs are still going and it looks like they're playing with the new RX board. How's the RX board going guys? Oh, it's very fast. Fast. very fast.

Yeah, faster than we expected. Deug? No. It is a brilliant. It really looks like a brilliant board and you're just McKing around with the Hue Are you with the development environment? Yeah, we're trying different options for performance measurement and getting it each time.

it's a little bit faster. Fantastic! I Found someone just hanging out in the lobby after one of the lectures. how you doing doing fine Thanks! Excellent! Who are you? my name is Alex Dean and I'm an assist associate professor at North Carolina State University I Teach classes with Renaissance processors and I do research with them too. Fantastic! How are you enjoying the conference? Oh, it's lots of fun I'm getting a lot of good ideas.

Excellent Hey J Have you scored one of the new Free Rx kits yet? No, they ran out. They ran out completely ran. It's that popular it is. That's right, it does look pretty good.

Yeah I Can't wait to play with it. Looks nice and fast, but I have to get one first. So you actually teach? Uh, you actually teach R's products in your class? Yeah, yeah, We teach a couple of embedded systems courses introductory. I had a grad level and they both use M16c and this is the same course material that Jim Conrad has been using as well.

Brian What happened the other night I I heard you won the I did but there's a story behind it. I Uh so I won the Wii but actually I need to give it to somebody to keep Good Karma So basically I met a guy at dinner and uh from synopsis and we uh we were talking for their dinner and uh then we got our tickets for the casino night. so we go and we play roulette and we were just winning. Winning winning Winning! He ended up winning 20,000 and I won 144,000 So between the two of us we had 34 tickets and uh basically he wasn't going to be here during dur the dinner so he gave me the tickets and said hey just go ahead and if you win and then we ended up playing we bowling and he never played we bowling before so I said you know what I'm going to put all these in the Wii uh box and if I win the Wii I'll send it to you.

you won the wi so I won the Wii so I'm uh actually one of the renisance guys is going to take it with them back to uh the Bay Area and give it to the guy. So fantastic. It's good karma, right? It's good karma it. come back.

Score! one of the new three RX I Need one heard ran out it's it's that popular I got contacts I can get one good? Well yeah cuz he is. uh there he is the designer the only time you've seen me without a beer in my head right? I can test actually I don't know if you noticed but Kent started a new company. it's Kent Lman and Associates he's well that's the other thing I Didn't notice the whole festival is my badge is wrong. You know it's like my name is my company name and never even noticed it.

We decided that I am ubiquitous so it's now Kent Lman, Industries and Associate and Associate I'm pretty sure I'm just going to shorten it to Kent because you know if you're really big you don't need two names. but Bono Madonna Kent but I'm sure you can't buy Kent.com right? So that's so you're screwed. If you can't get theom domain name, yeah without it I'm nothing. Yep, it's all over it's all about Google Ranking right is good conference though.

I Tell you these guys. Uh, really really went all out y here with Marcel and she's a she's headed off. How was the conference? It was a fabulous conference and I'm headed back to Michigan today. so I'm hoping to work a lot more with Renaissance over the years to come.

and I enjoyed your presentation last night. It was great! thank you very much. you were one of the presenters I did yesterday I Talked about my Hardware In the Loop system. so what is it? Hardware In the Loop I do in yeah I'm from Boston so I often drop my RS right? Okay, well I so you should, yes, tell us about that.

So the Hardw in the Loop allows you to test your Control Systems without having the plant We call the plant which is essentially the vehicle or the medical system. Whatever you're going to be controlling, you don't have to have the real one. we do deterministic. We're in the loop testing and it allows you to run it as though it's in the vehicle that it will be in eventually.

So it's great business and a lot of fun here. With Cindy from Total phase. how's the conference? It was a great show I Really enjoyed it. It was really well organized I Was very impressed by the level of effort and time that people really obviously put into the conference.

So were you the only female here? I Was almost almost. Maybe there were four other ones in the room overwhelmed by the nerd here? No, it was inspiring. Ed Well, it's all over. that's Renaissance Devcon and I Got to say I am massively impressed I I Went into this thinking you know it's going to be a bit lame as most of these conferences are I've been to quite a few of them and this one was far from it.

The best put together conference I've ever been to. Unbelievable! The amount of effort and the lectures were were out of this world. Outstanding quality uh, lectures and Hardware Labs thoroughly well put together and the Renaissance products actually look really good. The new RX devices I I'm I'm I'm surprised.

hardly anyone's ever heard of Renaissance but hey, you know number three Semiconductor in the world. number one in micros and jeez, nobody knows about it. Tell you what they will after this. I think they're dismantling the sign there it goes in the entry for you.

Devc Con's over I Almost forgot. You know what we say here on the Evev blog. Don't turn it on. Take it apart.

Let's crack open the pokon. here. It is little USB pokon tag and let's crack it open now. kitties.

Let me tell you, if you go into one of these conferences, always bring your tools. Okay, get your. you should have a knife. a Swiss Army kn knife a multimeter.

Got my little pocket multimeter. No worries and we're going to crack this sucker open and see what's inside. Here we go now. It supposedly got an RFID tag or something like that in it.

So um, it. It looks like you can actually get in here and with a knife and actually, oh, there we go. There we go. It's popping open.

No problems. Piece of cake. There we go. Tada There's the pokon.

That's what's inside little lithium coin cell battery. No surprise there. that's a CR1632 And let's take a look at the board. As you'd expect, it's just a um, as you expect, it's just a single, um, a single board solution with the contacts directly on the board.

That's very common. This is actually a button on the front It's actually an LED and a button. So um, now I know we've got some heat. Stakes Check out the little heat Stakes here.

so I have to shave those off. Okay, I've shaved the heat Stakes off that and let's uh, take a look inside. shall we? Taada There it is that's inside the pokon. Check it out.

There's there's the inductive Loop uh coil. It's actually it's probably not. It's not an RFID tag. It looks like it's just a close proximity inductive Loop of some kind.

So they must. Um, that's why they only work when they get with inside a certain coupling range on that face. They if you put them back to back, they wouldn't actually work so you had to put them face to face. and that's why cuz they they work on an inductive coupling.

Loop So obviously, uh, the battery must um, pulse this Loop like once per second or something like that. Very quick, uh, fast pulse into that just to detect other um, other devices which are close. it just continuously detects whether or not a device is there. Now let's take a look at the uh uh uh microcontroller.

Let's hope it's a Renaissance part. It could very well be. but being the number one microcontroller manufacturer in the world, let me have a close look at that. It's a Ha5 61 I don't recognize it and the symbol is a bit bit hard to see.

um. motor? hey, that could be like an old Mitsubishi um one which is now Renais of course. But um yeah, I I don't recognize it off the top of my head. So there you go Ha.

1561 micro and just a couple of passive. There's some LEDs in there, a couple of other passive Parts but it looks like it's not. um, not your traditional RFID uh tag. it's You know it's effectively the same system.

It's A. It's a coiled loop with a with a little micro in there. but um, it doesn't use an off-the-shelf RFID solution. It's just a completely um uh, custom uh loop with a with a with a micro hanging off it.

Nothing to exciting. exactly what I expected. Really, it's been one hell of a conference, but time to head out of here. See you almost forgot the video camera.