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Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 9 (September 16)

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

Does adding an IP address change embedded designs?
What should design reviews accomplish?
Is "automation addiction" a real problem?
Is testing always essential?
How does your company handle test failures?
How much trial and error do you rely on in designs?
What is driving lower data center energy use?
What tools do you use to program multiple processor cores?
Will flying cars start showing up on the road?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Rae MorrowBob FrostholmVoices of Industry - Article by Rae Morrow and Bob Frostholm

The Engineer: Marketing's Secret Weapon

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Robert CravottaArticle by Robert Cravotta

Travelling the Road of Natural Interfaces

Mind of the Engineer

The fast pace that technology is evolving enables some interesting ways to interpret how the world works. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, xkcd updates its web comic with content that is sure to make you smile, groan, or possibly even moan. The warning at the bottom of the web page states: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." Enjoy.

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... you measure your code size in KBytes or Bytes and you know what an EPROM was used for." – J.C. @ LI

Add your own reply, and you might see it in a future edition of our newsletter.


Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 8 (July 14)

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

Will the Internet become obsolete?
What does the last Space Shuttle flight mean?
What game(s) do you recommend?
How is embedded debugging different?
What techniques do you use to protect information?
Are GNU tools good enough for embedded designs?
What is important when looking at a processor's low power modes?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Guillaume LargillierVoices of Industry - Article by Guillaume Largillier

Requirements for tablet handwriting input

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Robert CravottaArticle by Robert Cravotta

Touch me (too) tender

Inside the Embedded Mind

The final mission of the Space Shuttle program is underway. These reusable orbiters have been providing space services for 30 years. Contained here are a few fun facts about the orbiters and the program.

  • While in orbit, the crew on the Shuttle is able to see a new sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes.
  • The combined mileage of all five orbiters is 513.7 million miles (826.7 million km), or 1.3 times the distance between Earth and Jupiter. Each orbiter, except for Challenger, traveled farther than the distance between Earth and the sun.
  • The space shuttle's Thermal Protection System, or heat shield, contains more than 30,000 tiles that are constructed essentially of sand which are each thoroughly inspected before each launch. The tiles can cool fast enough after being heated to peak temperature to be held in your hand only a minute later.
  • The heaviest space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, weighed 178,000 pounds (80,700 kg). It weighed the most partly because of the white paint that was on the main fuel tank to protect the insulation on the tank. It was determined after the first flights that the paint was not required for protection.
  • The space shuttle program is officially known as the STS (Space Transportation System). Initially, the missions were given sequential numbers indicating their order of launch, from STS-1 through STS-9. However, NASA administrator James Beggs suffered from triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) and wanted to avoid associations with the unlucky Apollo 13 mission, so a new numbering scheme was used. What would have been STS-11 was named STS-41-B, STS-12 became STS-41-C, and STS-13 was STS-41-D. The first number was the last digit in the fiscal year (1984), the second number indicated the launch site (1 for Kennedy Space Center, and 6 for Vandenberg Air Force Base), and the letter indicated the sequence (A was the first launch of the year, and so on). After the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster, when that orbiter and its STS-51-L mission crew were lost, the agency resumed the sequential numbering system, starting with STS-26.

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... your manager introduces you to a visitor with "and this is our group's software developer" just while you put the soldering iron down after adding a serial interface to your debug target (really happened)." – C. @ EM

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Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 7 (May 26)

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

Do you care if your development tools are Eclipse based?
Is the cloud safe enough?
Do you use any custom or in-house development tools?
Is the job market for embedded developers improving?
How do you ensure full coverage for your design/spec reviews?
Is design-by-committee ever the best way to do a design?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Carolina Blanch Rogier Baert Maja DHondtVoices of Industry - Articles by Carolina Blanch and Rogier Baert and Maja D'Hondt

Implementing system-wide load balancing
Dynamic runtime task assignment

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Robert CravottaArticle by Robert Cravotta

An interface around the bend

Mind of the Engineer

Demonstrating sort algorithms visually can provide the viewer with insights about how a particular algorithm works. Sapientia University put a few videos online recently that uses folk dances to illustrate a number of sort algorithms, such as a Bubble sort via a Hungarian folk dance and an Insert sort via a Romanian folk dance. Demonstrating the sort algorithm with music and dance can provide an interesting way to illustrate which parts of the data are being worked on and what functions are being performed on those data. Do you know of any interesting or creative ways that people demonstrate sorting algorithms?

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... you are certain that it is the hardware that is at fault." – P.V. @ LI

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Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 6 (April 14)

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

Is bigger and better always better?
Is peer code inspection worthwhile?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Øyvind JanbuVoices of Industry - Article by Øyvind Janbu

Boosting energy efficiency – Energy debugging

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Robert CravottaArticle by Robert Cravotta

The battle for multi-touch

Mind of the Engineer

The Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois is the center of a lot of esoteric discussion regarding particle physics and the possibility that a previously unknown (and unpredicted) particle might have been recently detected. If the interpretation of the data is proven to be correct (rather than a statistical fluke), it would represent the first particle detected that does not fit within the standard model of particle physics. The Tevatron experiment consisted of banging together a proton and an anti-proton at about two TeV (one TeV is the amount of kinetic energy a flying mosquito produces) of energy. Excess mass was detected in the collision that is not described by current theoretical predictions with a statistical significance of 3.2 standard deviations. The statistical significance is not high enough to declare this is a real particle (five standard deviations is required for that), and there will be efforts over the next year or two to confirm the validity of the data.

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... you can debug with an LED." – R. @ EM

Add your own reply, and you might see it in a future edition of our newsletter.


Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 5 (March 31)

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

When is single better than multiple?
Which is better: faster- or quality-to-market?
Do you have enough budget for your embedded project?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Øyvind JanbuVoices of Industry - Article by Øyvind Janbu

Boosting energy efficiency – Sleeping and waking

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Robert CravottaArticles by Robert Cravotta

Touch with the Microsoft Surface 2.0
Low Power Design: Energy Harvesting

Exercising the Embedded Mind

I find that being able to stretch my mind in different directions helps me solve problems that are providing a challenge to find a solution. Over the years I have found a number of puzzles and/or games that stretch my mind in a new way. SpaceChem is a new puzzle game that stretches the engineering mind in many useful ways. The premise is that you are a chemical reactor engineer and you program two Waldos (from Heinlein fame) to manipulate chemical molecules to build more complicated molecules that the frontier colonies need. The increasing complexity of the puzzles struck that balance between too difficult at first glance to solvable after you had some time to think about it.

The programming involves managing the spatial and temporal positioning of the Waldos, atoms, and molecules to avoid collisions with each other and the walls of the reactor. Efficient solutions will require you to handle concurrent tasks. There is a way to see how well your solution ranks against other designers, and the urge to improve your solution is intense. You can even check out recordings of other people's solutions as well as share you own. The mechanics of the reactor provides many opportunities for finding many satisfying a-ha insights. There is a free downloadable demo. The 50+ puzzles provide an insightful playground to stretch your mind.

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... your new gadget doesn't work right any more... and you're thrilled because now you get to debug it. Extra, bonus points if you can diagnose the problem based on just the external behavior of the failure!" – J.V. @ LI

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Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 4 (March 10)

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

How do you handle obsolescence?
What makes an embedded design low power?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Øyvind JanbuVoices of Industry - Article by Shawn Prestridge

Green with envy: Why power debugging is changing the way we develop code

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Robert CravottaArticle by Robert Cravotta

Low Power Design Course

Reviews

I have not seen a National Geographic magazine in years, but I picked up the March 2011 issue while waiting for my children to complete their appointments at the dentist. I was quite impressed by the range and depth of the articles I found in that particular issue such that I started to look around to determine how I might procure a copy of that issue. The subscription rate is quite modest, and the articles are available in digital form at www.ngm.com.

Among the articles that caught my eye is the cover story that explores the domestication of animals over the past 15,000 years, a feature story about the age of man, and an article about organ regeneration. Two other articles in that issue that have since caught my eye address pollinators and the longest deepest railway in the world. I pass these on to you because you might also find them interesting and indirectly influential in the problems that you solve on a day to day basis as an embedded developer. Please let us know if you run across similar sources of articles so that we can share them here.

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... you spend more time with your new starterkit then with your wife." – J. @ EM

Add your own reply, and you might see it in a future edition of our newsletter.


Embedded Insights Newsletter – 2011, Issue 3 (February 24)

Embedded Processing DirectoryEmbedded Processing Directory Update

We have updated the product pages in the Embedded Processing Directory for 11 companies, including the addition of Block Diagrams and links to more detailed information about specific products and product families. The companies whose pages have been updated are:

If you cannot find your favorite processor in the directory, please contact us so that we can track it down and add it.

Question of the WeekQuestion of the Week

Will Watson affect embedded systems?
Is embedded security necessary?
Can we reliably predict the winners?

We are posting the Question of the Week in multiple embedded communities. Please contact us if you would like to include these questions in your forums or site.

Øyvind JanbuVoices of Industry - Article by Øyvind Janbu

Boosting energy efficiency – How microcontrollers need to evolve

If you would like to become a Voices of Industry contributor, please contact us.

Max BaronArticle by Max Baron

Forward to the Past: A Different Way to Cope with Dark Silicon

Robert CravottaArticle by Robert Cravotta

How to add color to electronic ink

Embedded in Medical

I recently found this amazing video about the skin gun (warning: there are some images of skin burns in the video) to help burn victims recover from second degree burns in days rather than weeks or months. The technique involves harvesting and isolating healthy skin stem cells from the patient and spraying them onto the burn area. Using this technique, the healing process takes only a few days rather than months – and this greatly improves the patient's chances of avoiding infection and death while they wait for the skin to grow back using traditional methods. The enabling technology is not specifically identified in the video clip, but there is a telling statement by the Professor Joerg C. Gerlach that it needed a more sophisticated device that is computer controlled. An article at Physorg about the skin gun mentions that the new method uses an electronically controlled pneumatic device that does not injure the cells (the site includes the same video, but the player is poorer quality). Let me know if anyone working on embedded medical systems is willing to talk about their devices – We would love to feature them in this newsletter.

- Robert Cravotta

Quote of the Week:

Memorable quote taken from our first question of the week: "You know you're an embedded developer when ..."

"... you try to come up with efficient algorithms for everyday stuff like efficient grocery shopping or finding the best path to the bathroom." – Eduardo

Add your own reply, and you might see it in a future edition of our newsletter.

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The Embedded Insights Newsletter is a free bi-weekly e-newsletter for embedded developers that includes information and insights into design principles and industry trends. Each issue highlights articles, tools, and the "word on the street" for embedded systems. Rotating features include summaries of past questions of the week and highlights from active discussions in the embedded insights channels, as well as some light-hearted features. The newsletter is sent out on Thursdays.

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