Where old meets new: Cracker Barrel serves up EV charging stations

Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores Inc. -- a restaurant chain modeled on veneration for older, simpler times --has launched a pilot project whereby it will install ECOtality's Blink electric vehicle (EV) chargers at 24 restaurants across Tennessee.

The pilot is part of a broader effort ("The EV Project") by ECOtality to get charging stations in more places across the country. Cracker Barrel restaurants are usually located near major highways where travelers can get on and off the road easily; ECOtality says this makes the venues an ideal choice for the charging stations.

Cracker Barrel is working with The EV Project to install Blink electric vehicle chargers at select locations in "The Tennessee Triangle," a 425-mile stretch of interstate highway that connects Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. Interested guests will be able to get a full EV charge in about a half hour. Installation of the chargers is set for the spring of 2011, to be completed within a few months.

Fun stuff, great story. But, here's the thing: do folks even care?

Will unproven technology and reliability concerns diminish consumer appetite for electric vehicles?

The first highway-capable plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) for the mass market will be available for sale by the end of 2010. But according to a survey from Pike Research, key objections among some skeptical consumers include concerns that PEV technology has not yet been proven, and that PEVs may not be as reliable as traditional gasoline vehicles.

“The electric vehicle industry has been very focused on addressing so-called driving 'range anxiety', the term used to describe consumers’ qualms about the effective range of a PEV on a single charge,” says Pike senior analyst John Gartner. “But the fact is that a 'wait-and-see' approach about the technology itself was a greater issue for consumers in our survey. It could easily take several years for mainstream car shoppers to get comfortable with the idea of electric vehicles.”

Link to Full Story: Unproven Technology and Reliability Concerns May Hinder Consumer Demand for Electric Vehicles, According to New Survey

Voltaire raises stakes in Infiniband vs. Ethernet showdown

While most Ethernet backbones use 10-Gigabit Ethernet, some large organizations and carriers are eyeing 100-Gigabit Ethernet backbone gear, which the new InfiniBand standard, dubbed FDR (Fourteen Data Rate) InfiniBand, should provide the basis for at 168 Gbps switch-to-switch throughput. So says Voltaire's vice president of marketing Asaf Somekh in an article by IDG News's Joab Jackson at PC World.

Voltaire plans to offer switches that use FDR in the second half of 2011. In June, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) updated the InfiniBand Roadmap, introducing FDR as a higher-throughput replacement for its current standard, QDR (Quad Data Rate). QDR can provide 40G bps (bits per second) throughput to a server, or 32Gb/s of actual payload. FDR can provide 56Gb/s of payload, Somekh said.

RELATED NEWS:

Ethernet Alliance releases white papers on 40/100G interoperability testing

UNH-IOL launches IEEE 802.3ba consortium for 40G/100G Ethernet standard

The report continues:

Somekh would not reveal what the total throughput will be, though IBTA asserts that FDR's new rate of encoding can deliver 64 bits of information using only 2 bits of overhead, which is superior to the QDR encoding that delivers 8 bits using 2 bits of overhead. This suggests that total throughput, including overhead, might be around 57.75 Gb/s.

Somekh did not give any details on Voltaire's plans for FDR server adapters, but he did say the company plans to introduce a set of switches that would have three 56 Gb/s channels, for an aggregate throughput of 168 Gb/s, in the second half of next year.

The IBTA has positioned FDR as a cost-effective InfiniBand for midsized data centers. In addition to FDR, the association also introduced EDR (Enhanced Data Rate), which will have approximately twice the throughput of FDR and is expected to become available next year. Voltaire did not say whether it plans to support EDR.

Both standards are the latest salvos in the ongoing competition between InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet as the choice for low-latency, high-throughput communications. Last June, the IEEE approved the 802.3ba standard for 40-Gigabit and 100-Gigabit Ethernet, and vendors are now producing gear to meet these specs.

We'll continue to follow this story closely here at Interconnection World.

LINK:

Voltaire Ups Ante in InfiniBand Ethernet Duel (PC World)

TEARDOWN: Microsoft Kinect motion sensing gaming controller

As reported yesterday at Reuters, Microsoft announced that it has sold more than 1 million of its new hands-free Kinect gaming systems in the first 10 days since launch, putting it on track to beat its target of 5 million sales by the end of the year.

The Kinect is a sensing device that plugs into the Xbox gaming console which allows the player to play games just by moving his or her body and speaking commands. The device is available as a standalone unit or bundled with a 4 gigabyte Xbox console.

Microsoft is hoping the new technology will help extend the role of its Xbox 360, which has sold 45 million units, and introduce a concept that is expected to feature in forms of electronics and computers in the next few years, while countering competing motion-based gaming systems from Nintendo Co, which makes the Wii, and Sony Corp, which introduced its Move product two months ago.

I said to myself, there has to be more to this story than the gaming system companies' rush up to Black Friday...there has to be a tech teardown of this master gadget's hardware and technology out there on the Web. And so there is.

As briefly summarized at ubergizmo, the device incorporates a strong albeit small fan amongst a plethora of sensors, a quartet of microphones, a couple of autofocus cameras that have been specially optimized for depth detection, an IR transmitting diode, 64 MB of Hynix DDR2 SDRAM, a motor and a three-axis accelerometer. The device is essentially a sophisticated sensor suite that detects a body's position and movements in 3D space.

The teardown motherlode for this thing, however, is to be found at ifixit.com ("the free repair manual anyone can edit"): Microsoft Kinect Teardown (ifixit.com).

As meticulously detailed in the teardown, most of the Xbox's processing power is dedicated to gaming, so Kinect preprocesses the image prior to sending it on to the Xbox. Two CMOS cameras and an IR projector make up the Kinect's eyes; from there, the device condenses all the information it collects about your living room into two fields: a color image and a depth map.

The device's slim form factor has forced Microsoft to split up the main board, stacking three boards vertically ('like a small apartment building," notes ifixit.) Microsoft is using a USB-like device connector for the Kinect, which uses 12 watts. (Quite a bit more than 2.5 watts of power provided by a standard USB port, by the way.)

The teardown further determined that the device board features a TI TAS1020B USB audio controller front and center. All four microphones connect to the motherboard with a single cable connector. A Kionix MEMS KXSD9 accelerometer is speculated to be used for inclination and tilt sensing, and possibly image stabilization.

RELATED: Kinect disconnected: Video tears down Microsoft's motion sensing gaming device

The microelectronic brains of the device pull together a roster of the electronics industry's usual suspects including Wolfson Microelectronics, Fairchild Semiconductor, NEC, Marvell, Analog Devices, Allegro Microsystems, and ST Microelectronics.

As ifixit amusingly notes, without a service manual, repairing the device will be quite a challenge. Microsoft has not made a service manual available, and used four kinds of screws in locking down the console design -- including some "hated security bits": T6, T10, T10 security, and Phillips #0.

As indicated in other reports, including this one from Wired.com, the Kinect is the result of hundreds of millions of dollars of research Microsoft has invested in speech and motion recognition technology.

SOURCES:

Microsoft says sells 1 million Kinect devices (Reuters)

Microsoft Kinect teardown (ubergizmo)

Microsoft Kinect Teardown (ifixit)

How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect (Wired)

IPC charges Greenpeace with shuffling 'bad science'

IPC - Association Connecting Electronics Industries has again come forward with a charge of "faulty science," this time contained in the latest revision of the Greenpeace electronics scorecard. IPC is contending that certain steps that Greenpeace is demanding of electronics companies are not necessary according to scientific research with particular regard to brominated flame retardents (BFRs) in general and the BFR Tetrabromobisphenol-A (TBBPA) in particular. Peter Clarke reporting at EE Times has the full story with analysis.

NEC's Android-based tablet PC doubles down on USB

As reported at PCWorld, Japan's NEC has developed an Android-based tablet PC that will begin shipping in Japan this month. Unveiled at NEC's iExpo event in Tokyo, the LifeTouch features a 7-inch touchscreen and is intended for use as an access device for cloud-based services.

Based on an ARM Cortex processor, the unit incorporates Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and optional 3G networking, a 3-megapixel camera and GPS sensor, as well as both micro USB and standard USB connectors with host-mode support and a SD card reader.

RELATED STORIES:

Industry associations endorse Micro-USB for mobile handsets

JAE unveils Micro USB connector line

Initially available only to corporate clients, the LifeTouch is being billed as a terminal for electronic book, online shopping and health-care services. NEC also anticipates use of the tablet inside companies as an input device for sales or logistics work.

And so, there you have it: the latest skirmish in the Android vs. iPad wars, characterized by some as the great contest of 2010. Gadget guilt? Get over it!

iPhone hacked with serial connector makes perfect IT troubleshooter

With most of the iPhone's "easter egg" secrets having already been discovered and parsed to the Nth degree by geeks everywhere, the smartphone continues to harbor one little-known but incredibly useful capability: a hidden serial port.

And so a "jailbroken" iPhone armed with a serial port connector becomes a thing of beauty for one IT worker: an entire computer that can be whipped out of pocket to do mainframe troubleshooting in a pinch. I can see most network engineers perking up at the notion of being able to rely on just their phones in the server room, rather than being chained to a laptop or remote terminal...

Cribbed images reveal spartan state of Foxconn's Shenzhen dorms

Roughly half of Foxconn's 420,000 workers are based in Shenzhen. The facility is where electronics for many Western companies are assembled, including Apple products like the iPhone. Captured as part of a joint project by Wired and Gizmodo, the photos reveal spartan worker dormitories, with only modest luxuries. Halls are described as "institutionally" empty, and dimly lit.

Foxconn has reportedly outsourced the management of its employee living quarters, a response to complaints about potential conflicts of interest in doing it itself.

Read more: Photos show state of Foxconn's Shenzhen campus (electronista.com)

HyperMac rebranding as HyperJuice in Apple patent battle

The Sanho-HyperMac vs. Apple-Magsafe wars just took a turn for The Marketing. HyperMac, the company that recently goaded Apple into litigious action over its use of the MagSafe magnetic connectors, announced on Monday that it will be changing its name to HyperJuice. The HyperMac product line included several portable chargers for Apple’s MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, as well as the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and iPod. Sanho and HyperMac said the planned name change is part of their “ongoing comprehensive licensing negotiations” with Apple.

Here are the links:

AppleInsider: HyperMac to be rebranded HyperJuice after Apple legal action

MacObserver: HyperMac Rebranding as HyperJuice in Apple Patent Battle

Gearlog: HyperMac to Rebrand to HyperJuice, Stop Selling Batteries Today