Digital Fanatics

The EasyEDA project seems like an interesting project. They are developing a production quality EDA system, but with a different monitization model. The plan is to offer free, ad-supported, accounts, cheap, ad-free, accounts and premium accounts. The main revenue stream is not to come from these accounts, but from a prototyping service. So, if that service really flies, the tool might be free for everyone. One interesting part of the account plan is that one can upgrade the account not only by paying, but also by contributing howtos, schematic symbols, etc.

In addition to applying gamification and a different revenue model, they already have 75000+ schematic and 15000 spice libraries, so it looks as if the contents is growing.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out. It looks promising to me.

Via dangerousprototypes.

Over at schematics.com you can find designs and share your designs in an online community. This can be a handy resource for finding reference designs. An interesting detail is the contribution from semi-conductor manufacturers. For instance, NXP are contributing designs to the site.

What is the first thing to do when you have video out on your microcontroller? Some say Tetris, other say Pong.

I won’t lie – it’s unlikely your daughter will be giving up her Nintendo DS, and this isn’t going to provide hours of fun for the whole family – but it is an awesome and easy project to improve your Arduino coding.

We’ll make two basic controllers, and the video will output to your TV through a standard composite video cable.

Via DangerousPrototypes.