Samsung’s Smart Media Hub. SE-208BW, The Swiss Army Knife of Optical Drives.

It was easy to miss Samsung’s new SE-208BW Optical Drive announced this week. Drowned out by all of the noise at the IFA gadget festival in Germany Samsung’s new drive is a game changing device non the less, this a whole new class of device being created before our eyes. Samsung’s new drive is the Über can do drive, like all great super hero’s this is a split personality device. As a mild manured Optical Drive it run’s flawlessly and looks great to boot, but there is another side to the SE-208BW, connect it to a network and it becomes the Wi-Fi Superman gadget. Able to backup entire smartphones in a single click, serves files faster than a Google’s farm and handier than a box full of Swiss army knives. You will wonder why we have all put up with plain old external drives.

Not forgetting that at it’s core this is an external DVD, as such it does the basics very well. Specifications include 24X CD-ROM, 24X CD-RW, 8X DVD reading and 8X DVD±R, 5X DVD-RAM, 6X DVD+R Dual Layer, 6X DVD-R Dual Layer, 8X DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW recording. The drive boasts Buffer Under Run technology to prevent errors that may result from writing speeds that exceed data transfer speeds, while also enabling PC multitasking. Bootable through USB for those annoying Windows installs. Read the full article »»»»

Cult of: AppleTV version 0.0.9 beta

The Apple rumour mill is at it again!  This latest rumor may seems like a rerun, but this one has been updated. The latest iteration of the longstanding rumor is that Apple will get in to the business of selling TVs by building a digital TV based on iOS. That’s according to multiple Silicon Valley sources cited by Venture Beat. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told Venture Beat that he predicted Apple would produce a TV set by the end of 2012 or early 2013.

Technoid has trumpeting the possibility of an Apple-made TV set since March this year “Not happy with the Apple TV set top box, Apple is launching into the Television market, the first true Smart TV’s are about to roll of the production line. Apples ethos has always been to ADD gadgets to our lives, the Apple iTV  Read more: www.highpants.com

Just a thought: Wouldn’t Apple Inc be better off making a 40 inch iMac, all the technology we’re raving about below, loaded into a pc with the biggest IPS monitor money can buy, ease of use, integration. Surely a new Cinema sized iMac makes more sense?

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Technoid Blipverts, now with twice the vampire stopping power.

Firstly birthday best wishes to the IBM PC 5050, 30 years old this week. Quirky technology of the week has to be the Fred Flintstone DVD a new ultra hardy DVD, made of stone. Curiosity is a funny thing though, sometimes the very old can make the cat curious, like one of the oldest electronic synths ever made was recently re-discovered in france. Google+ is coming along in leaps and bounds, if you haven’t tried then you should be curious. BitCoins are just simply curiosity in their own right. Also this week WIMM Labs gadget developer hardware, Dell’s cheap IPS and LGs new IPS laptop.

Clicking fingers at the ready, remember they aren’t allowed in your house without your permission, TrueBlood… Read the full article »»»»

Sony HD S-Frame Innovation Series, The Moving Image Picture Frame

Sony has this week release a new picture frame with a difference, the HD S-Frame Series. As well as the usual assortment of PictureFrame functions, slide show, clock, alarm, the new series picture frame can play full 1080 HD media files on its LCD screen. Three new models have been introduced as part of the HD S-Frame line-up, top of the range is the DPF-HD1000 with a 10″ LCD - 1024×600 – , DPF-HD800 8″ – 800×480 – and not to be forgotten the cut down bargain of the group the DPF-HD700 7″ LCD.

With the new S-Frame models Sony has achieved a very clean and sharp look, the front fascia is free from sparkles and fancy button layouts that have been used in the past on Sony picture frames. Attractive but they still look at home by the bed or on the mantle piece. Read the full article »»»»

Coffee Table in Disco, Texas Instruments RGB LED Coffee Table

Texas Instruments has managed to invent the funkiest piece of furniture almost completely by accident. The team from TI have created the ultimate Disco coffee-table. Designed as a demonstration project for TI’s MSP-430 microcontroller the project was just a side note until they switched it on. The project was given the title ‘The RGB LED Coffee Table’ and the plans are available for anyone to make their own. Watching the video you are quickly hypnotised by the wild colour changes and rhythmic beat matching that causes colours to wash over the table in waves. The LED lights used are capable of displaying any of 16 million colours in its palette, and it shows, graduated fade outs being one of the beautiful results.

The top of the coffee table is covered with 128 frosted glass tubes each containing an RGB LED light. The LED’s in each tube are controlled by the clever MSP-430, this allows patterns and beat matching programs to be run on the table. The table top can display animations at 40 frames per second, making for quite fast and smooth animations. The 128 tubes are arranged in a 16×8 grid, not high enough resolution for detailed pictures but plenty enough for a funky coffee table. For the mod’ers out there a Python library is available that allows custom programs to control the table top, want a clock under your coffee cup, write it, upload it to the table and no more questions from the timeless.  Instructions and diagrams are available from the LaunchPad site for making your own disco coffee table if the idea grabs you.

LaunchPad is TI’s quick development system built around the MPS-430 microcontroller just like the 430G2553 used in the coffee table which runs at 16mhz, has 16kb of Flash, 512 bytes of Sram and 2 16 bit timers, quite a capable chip. The core of the development kit is the ValueLine controller board, appropriate name, each board is the bargain basement price of $4.30. The board has a socket for the MSP-430 microcontroller, mini-usb port for pc connection  and connectors for various expansion boards called BoosterPacks. The BoosterPacks take the off the shelf approach further. Almost zero work is required to add the BoosterPacks to the 430, plug it in and change some of the programming, done. Various handy add-ons are already available including; LCD display controllers with wireless, solar cells, wireless charging modules and touch input kits. The RGB LED Coffee table isn’t the only project offered by the LaunchPad site,  LaunchPad Bot is a robot the multiple 430 micro to make the bot scurry about the floor also worth a mention is Music2Go is a portable 16 note sound generator. If your interested in getting into electronics at the soldering iron level this definitely looks like an easy introduction.

TI’s RGB LED coffee table has to be one of life’s wonderful accidents, TI set out to sell its 430 microprocessor and ended up creating the funkiest piece of disco furniture ever which will draw plenty of attention to the 430 naturally enough. This I can say with complete confidence, when Highpants HQ gets a coffee table budget a couple of these bad boys are going in the break room, even if it means a year with a soldering iron and lead poisoning.

More information at TI LaunchPad and RGB LED Coffee Table

Buddha’s Brother out…