video conferencing for the masses

I've been looking for a better way to get video conferecing on the cheap. This looks promising

Webcams - Live Webcams, streaming free of charge through our service

Simulation standards body

Simulation is fascinating stuff. SISO looks to be a pipe and elbow-patch-jacket kind of group looking to make inter operable simulation standards

SISO

RS232 will never die

I can't decide if it's a good thing or not that so many new hardware devices have an RS232 emulation mode. But here are some good tools suggested by Silicon Labs for debugging such things:

UVCView:

Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/vidcap/UVCview.mspx

UVCView displays the USB information in a device (like VID, PID, Product String, descriptors, etc) connected to the bus. The driver for the device does not need to be installed or loaded for UVCView to read the information, as the utility uses the low-level USB driver to talk to the device. This is useful for when a CP210x is not enumerating because of an incorrectly programmed PID.

PortMon:

SysInternals: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Portmon.html

PortMon is a serial port monitoring program that records the transactions between the host application and the serial interface. PortMon is useful for determining if invalid settings are accidentally being used with the CP210x or if the data is being sent properly to the device.

Interesting Company: Sensorstar

Small Sensor Algorithms company in the beltway

sensorstar