Plugable

OS X 10.6.3 and DisplayLink Rotation

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Bernie Thompson in Using

There are reports of a few problems with the just-released OS X 10.6.3 update from Apple, and current DisplayLink drivers (1.5 and 1.6 beta) for Mac. In particular, displays in a rotated (portrait) configuration are corrupted. Switching back to standard unrotated mode is a workaround.

DisplayLink users on Mac might want to hold off on Apple’s update until any problems are shaken out.

SparkFun: Corporate Hero

Posted on 26. Mar, 2010 by Bernie Thompson in Other

If there’s a corporate recipe for Plugable Technologies, it’s taking a blend of Linksys, Belkin, Kensington, and mixing in a heavy dose of a secret ingredient: SparkFun.

SparkFun is a true corporate hero – bootstrapping from zero, innovating fundamentally, serving customers fanatically, thinking differently, building locally, selling internationally, staying lean, and growing and succeeding organically.

Nathan Seidle is the founder and CEO of SparkFun, and he’s giving a talk at MIT in a few days. Hopefully some video will make it online for those of us not in Boston. But you can get a flavor of it from Nathan’s recent visit to Vancouver, BC, which is in our backyard.

If you’re interested in starting a business with $0 of investment capital, building a profitable company around open-source technology, designing electronics for manufacturability, or getting your favorite part sold on SparkFun, come join the discussion!

This talk will describe how SparkFun grew from a one man operation, run out of an electrical engineering student’s undergraduate dorm room, into one of the largest companies in Colorado, and along the way enabled engineers, designers, students and hobbyists to build new kinds of electronics. The talk will walk through pitfalls and triumphs, and discuss the creative, technical, and social philosophies underlying the company.

Nathan Seidle is CEO of SparkFun Inc. in Boulder, Colorado, a company he founded in 2003 as an undergraduate student in electrical engineering. The company, which has grown to over 80 employees, provides tools, hardware, and other resources for artists, engineers, prototypers, and hobbyists to “play with cool electronic gadgetry”. He is an accomplished engineer, innovator, and bootstrapping entrepreneur.

Details at SparkFun Visit and Talk at MIT

Multi-Monitor Madness

Posted on 25. Mar, 2010 by Bernie Thompson in Windows

This is an older video from NetworkWorld.TV showing an earlier iteration of the DisplayLink technology we use at Plugable.

A few things that have evolved since the video:

* Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac support
* Open Source exists for programming the DisplayLink chips
* It’s hard to find monitors with DisplayLink integrated, but it’s easy to find the adapters that work with any monitor (like our UGA-2K-A, which uses the DisplayLink DL-195 chip)
* The video showed an adapter with only VGA out. Our provides the more flexible DVI out, and includes simple, passive DVI->VGA and DVI->HDMI adapters which work transparently.
* The video doesn’t talk about resolutions, but the newest chips like the DisplayLink DL-195 can hit higher resolutions and/or have higher quality motion video playback at lower resolutions.

And it’s still the best and easiest way to outfit a cool bat cave.