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Issue #215 June 2008
Communications Hub
by C. J. Abate
In its early days, Circuit Cellar was known as the essential monthly print magazine for computer applications. By the late-1990s, it was known as the essential monthly print magazine that also offered some useful online content. Today, the name “Circuit Cellar” has various meanings to different people. This was clear in April when I spoke with readers, authors, and advertisers at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California.
For some, the name simply meant the interesting print magazine started by Steve Ciarcia in 1988. For others, it meant the easy-to-navigate, downloadable Electronic Edition (EE). Other conference-goers regarded Circuit Cellar as the company that runs design contests and puts new design kits in the hands of eager engineers. Others still referred to Circuit Cellar as the name of the website that publishes viewable articles, projects, code files, and highly trafficked online forum discussions.
To each his own, but I like to put it this way: Circuit Cellar is the hub of communication for the entire embedded engineering community. Running this hub is a rewarding yet challenging task for our staff. During the last several months, we’ve found ourselves developing new website- and email-based initiatives for delivering fresh content and useful reminders to our readers on a more frequent basis. Why? Recently, we’ve learned (via surveys, etc.) that our readers require more information—about projects, code, and parts—more regularly than once a month. They also need to be able to easily share this information with their peers and colleagues.
A decade ago, most engineers would slowly read each issue and then mail off their ideas to authors, staff members, and other designers at a leisurely pace. But things are much different in today’s need-it-now culture. So, we’ve been successfully adapting our various delivery systems for disseminating Circuit Cellar-quality content about embedded technologies. We publish in-depth articles via our print magazine, EE, and website. Our EE and online articles link to code files, manufacturer websites, and author websites, as well as to other useful content found at Circuitcellar.com. The forums on our site foster active discussions between designers from around the world. A new feature on our site is the “SHARE” button, which enables readers to share articles (and ideas about them) by linking to content-sharing websites, blogs, and more. We will continue developing these products and features because we believe that ease of communication is key to keeping our readers informed and interested in communicating their ideas with others.
As managing editor, I strongly encourage you to depart from and return to Circuit Cellar—the hub of communication for the embedded engineering community—during your future design journeys. The following authors did just that.
On page 14, Peter Csaszar and Monica Flores describe their PIC18F4520-based voicemail monitoring system. In “Pump Control,” Richard Wotiz describes his award-winning spa pump controller system (p. 20). Turn to page 30 for Ed Nisley’s description of how to connect circuitry directly to an AC power line. On page 36, Scott Bingham and Yunfan Donald Zhang describe how they implemented a ray tracer on an FPGA. You’ll enjoy Peter Baston’s article if you want to build a system for receiving and decoding data transmissions (p. 46). On page 54, Andrew March describes an MCU-based, dot-matrix game that he programmed in C. Turn to page 62 for Jeff Bachiochi’s article about replacing an old doorbell switch with a capacitive touch pad. For information about crystals, turn to page 70, where Robert Lacoste explains the difference between “series” and “parallel” crystals, and more. Finally, on page 78, Tom Cantrell introduces new touch sensors from Cypress Semiconductor and Silicon Laboratories.
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