.Dust

I have been fol­low­ing the Bug blog for a long time wait­ing for the com­mer­cial avail­abil­ity of their prod­ucts and they are finally on sale! That’s great news.

Bug Labs is a col­lec­tion of mod­ules that you can plug together to build any elec­tronic gad­get you can imag­ine. The great thing about this prod­uct is that you do not need any kind of sol­der­ing and, even bet­ter, with­out any knowl­edge of solid state elec­tron­ics. You can sim­ply plug in mod­ules in a mas­ter mod­ule and you are set with your new gadget.

The foun­da­tion of this is called BUG­base a fully pro­gram­ma­ble linux based com­puter. If you look at the specs of BUG­bse you will be impressed. In such a tiny form fac­tor you will find:

• ARM1136JF-​S-​based microprocessor
• 1 USB 2.0 HS host interface/​4 hub port connections
• 1 USB OTG HS interface
• 4 UART ser­ial links
• 4 chan­nel SPI interface
• I2C (400 kbits) interface/​4 channels
• I2S interface/​2 channels
• Smart LCD interface
• Cam­era sen­sor interface
• Micro mem­ory card interface
• MPEG4 hard­ware encoding/​decoding
• Hard­ware graphic acceleration
• ¹⁰⁄₁₀₀ Eth­er­net MAC
• 802.11b/g

• Base unit LCD mod­ule interface
• Base unit onboard mem­ory (FLASH/​DDR SDRAM)
• JTAG/​ICE support
• Ser­ial debug port
• Power sys­tem
• AC oper­a­tion
• Bat­tery operation/​up to 4 exter­nal batteries
• Fast bat­tery charging/​simultaneous of inter­nal and exter­nal batteries
• Smart power man­age­ment support
• Battery-​backed real-​time clock
• Audio out via onboard piezo speaker

This is really a very com­plete set of fea­ture leav­ing space for the cre­ation of a great range of elec­tron­ics gadgets.

But this is only the base. You can plug to BUG­base a num­ber of other modules:

• A dig­i­tal camera/​videocamera module.
• A GPS module.
• A Touch sen­si­tive LCD Display.
• An accelerom­e­ter and motion sensor.

The com­pany will also offer an SDK though which you will give fuel to your machine.

I really love this kind of approach. You can plug and unplug the dif­fer­ent mod­ules to build dif­fer­ent devices. A WiFi con­nected MP3 player, a GPS log­ger, a PDA with motion sen­sors, a dig­i­tal cam­era all at your fingertips.

I def­i­nitely think I will buy one of these.

I have liked the com­pany approach to this kind of prod­uct. They already have com­mu­nity tools to dis­cuss about their prod­uct. They have been run­ning a blog from a long time lis­ten­ing to their com­menters. They have an appli­ca­tion direc­tory and a forum sec­tions. I think this is def­i­nitely the best approach to launch such prod­ucts on the mar­ket. They will have to strongly rely on the con­tri­bu­tions from their customers.

I hope they will be able to obtain a great mar­ket suc­cess with their product.

Unfor­tu­nately they still do not have a GSM/​GPRS/​UMTS mod­ule that would make the prod­uct much more inter­est­ing, at least for me and I hope they will think about it.

If you want more infor­ma­tions you can have a deep look at their com­pany web site.

Related posts:

1. Solar Pow­er­ing Your Gadgets
2. Time For A Change
3. Cam­era Phones vs. Cameras
4. Mobile Web Toolkit for Word­Press from beeweeb
5. Buy­ing music from a mobile phone