Freescale Technical Forum 2011

We will be in San Antonio, TX on the 20-23 June for this event.  Please let us know if you are going to be there – we would love to meet up!

Canterbury Earthquake

This is a quick update to let you know what is happening with regard to this on-going event.

• We are all OK and so is our office. 
• The staff and families of our extended network of contractors and suppliers we have been able to contact so far (which is most of them) are also fine.   Power is still out to a lot of the city, so we have not been able to contact everyone yet.
• We have heard there is damage to our Contract Manufacturers buildings, and will be updated on that next week.  There will be delays for production, but we can’t say much beyond that right now.
• Couriers are not operating so we are unable to ship orders this week.  Our courier is operating so we can ship orders placed via the web site.
• We are still attending Embedded World in Germany next week. 

Keeping in touch

2010 was a busy year, and we didn’t always do a great job of keeping everyone up-to-date on the happenings at Device Solutions.  It’s a new year and as good a time as any to change that!  There are a lot of different ways to interact with companies these days, and we want your input on where we should focus our attention.  Vote away…

A bit of a shake up…

We are located very near to the Earthquake that struck Christchurch on Saturday morning local time. No-one was hurt, but things are a bit of a mess. Please excuse us if we take a little longer to get back to your enquiries.

Be more productive on the road (or the couch)

While this is not one of our products, it is “micro” and will make you more productive.  It is a new mouse designed for laptops, and comes from Swiftpoint, a startup company based in Christchurch, NZ.  I have had mine for a couple of weeks and I’m really impressed!   The video explains the features better than I can:



And no, I’m not an investor in this company – just a fan of the product!

Freescale Technical Forum, Orlando

This event in Florida (21-24 June) is a great way to get in-depth training on Freescale products and see what new things they have.  It’s also a really nice change from the current weather in NZ!

Let us know if you are going to be at the show, or are in the area – we would love to meet up with you.

Ethernet support on Meridian/P

We have just released a new firmware build for Meridian/P that supports the Ethernet adapter board.

The firmware includes SSL and DPWS support.  You can download it here.

Please read this document before you hook up the Ethernet board as there is one issue that could let the smoke out of the Meridian/P if you do it wrong!

We have also released a new version of the standard build that fixes an application deployment issue that some people were seeing.

Meridian/P is shipping

Meridian/P is our new Micro Dev Board, which incorporates all the features of the Meridian CPU in a prototype-friendly package.  You have a USB connector on the board for download and debug of code, and plenty of easy-to-access headers for adding all the bits you need.  It also supports the SchmartBoard form-factor so prototyping with surface mount components won’t slow you down!

The kit package includes the board, a USB cable and 0.1″ headers which you can solder as you please.

Our web store has stock now, and our distributors will have stock next week.

New SP1 Firmware for Tahoe-II

We have just uploaded new firmware for Tahoe-II and a new SDK to support this.

The new firmware is built using Service Pack 1 that was released by Microsoft a few days ago.  The main fixes in this release are for the file system and SD card support.  This now works with 2GB cards and no longer requires the use of our KillMBR application.

The other main feature we added was screen rotation.  You can change this on a reboot by holding down the left button and pressing reset for portrait, and the right button + reset to get back to landscape. Check out the release notes for all the changes. 

The SDK has also changed.  It’s now called the Device Solutions SDK as it supports all our development boards and not just the Tahoe.  The libraries have been updated to include support for several new features, and the Tahoe-II emulator finally supports touch – thanks Jens!

New Tahoe Firmware Release

We have updated the Tahoe release on the downloads page.  This new release removes the evaluation version limitation, and includes support for download and debug over the serial port.

Update: This release was for the original Tahoe only.  We are testing a Tahoe-II build which includes SD card support and will have this available at the end of next week (6 Feb).