I am addicted to BackPack, a pretty nice W2.0 service for making lists and notes and etc. However, it is easy to create a million pages and have to keep upgrading your account, or start deleting. Counter to the future of data: never delete. So this model basically sucks. I’m looking for a good open source replacement that I can host myself. Use something nice? Let me know!

TaskFreak looks interesting, if more rigid/anal than BackPack. Having said that, BackPack’s strength, it’s simplicity, is also its great weakness. It is pretty bad at most everything else than simple lists. So in that regard one is not really giving up that much by using a more list-centric tool.

Aside from the rapidly escalating cost of the BackPack service as pages mount, I also really wish they would figure out how to mask features instead of eliminate them. They follow the Apple model of strict control of user choice. I would prefer taking the bloat approach of, say MS Word, then using skins, or complexity switches, to turn sets of features on and off. Kind of like adding features to FireFox, but there I wish one could group add-ons and their configurations into sets that can be applied all at once.

I may as well jump on the bandwagon and recommend the code editor everyone else in the world does. UltraEdit is cool. I especially like the bundle of UEStudio (which adds a version control system, among other nice features) and UltraCompare (which finds differences between similar files). Has a compiler plugin for the PIC C compiler from CCS. Much more flexible than MPLAB. Great for HTML, PHP etc. too.

I have been reviewing the documentation for pretty much every Zigbee and Zigbee-like mesh networking hardware solution I can find. So far I have been unable to find a solution which meets my target requirements: simple to implement, self-healing mesh networking, low enough in cost for modestly profitable low volume designs, a migration path to a high volume lower cost design, and the ability to programmatically control the node type at run time.The last requirement is driven by my goal of making a single device platform with with a single hardware connector. A mini USB connector would provide power and data for the coordinator device (the one at the PC) and just power for all other devices, which would be routers.

Jennic looked pretty good right up to the last requirement. Unfortunately there is no way to build an application which can programmatically perform router OR coordinator functions depending on the USB status. Which is a real shame, as the whole system seems otherwise nicely thought through. An integrated micro/radio has a ton of RAM and ROM. The user application is loaded into RAM on startup. A high volume product can store the application in ROM. A low volume or development system can store the program in external serial flash. The micro/radio can be purchased inexpensively. A complete module can be constructed for about ten or twelve bucks in relatively small quantities. A readymade module can be purchased for about twenty-five bucks. All the tools, including the stack, C compiler and IDE, are free. The dev systems are reasonably affordable, and a recent press release suggests that they will soon be cheaper still. A very nice touch is the API programming model, where the hardware is completely insulated from the user app, accessed only by API calls. Very clean. and much more likely to work! This approach is also used by the Ember 260, but it is ridiculously expensive.

Sadly, I am not willing to sacrifice the ability to construct a single product which acts as coordinator or router depending on environmental context. So I will have to forgo Jennic for now, and continue to look at other systems.

The MaxStream modules look like they contain both router and coordinator functionality. Unfortunately they are expensive and offer no path to chip-level integration. I may end up using them for simplicity if nothing else.

The Meshnetics system has some compelling features. It is based on a standard platform, the Atmel radio and an Atmel micro. The prefab modules seem well thought out, and well designed, both hardware and software. The system implies that a high volume product could emulate the prefab modules, and run the same application, but it is not clear how that works financially. I can find no offering of their stack independently, and their applications info suggests that their development environment supports only their modules. And of course, the documentation, tools and support from Atmel is awful, as always. Finally, their dev kits are way too expensive.

Turns out a lot of different types of devices have taken advantage of this class to provide simple file-like cross-platform access to device internal memory. I think this is a very interesting idea, and worth a close look. Wikipedia has a good overview, and points to an article and book by Jan Axelson that covers basically everything. Added to my Amazon buy list! Here is a chip-based FAT16 file system. Now if it would only provide a USB client interface as well…

I wonder how applications typically find the removable drive. That, unfortunately, is still not cross-platform, so would require different code for each. This would be the advantage, from the browser end, of using http instead. Now if a USB device could somehow emulate an http socket…