InGeniusBlog.com

Lots of pictures here.

Started the day at the show press conference. LynuxWorks announced that its OS LynxOS-178 will be used by the European Space Agency for core communications between Ground and Space Operations for the Galileo Satellite Navigation System. Their OS is the only FAA certified OS available at this time.

Stopped by Al Gore’s keynote address. Mr Gore gave a passionate talk, quite familiar to anyone who’s seen his movie, but added a couple of twists to make the geeky embedded engineer crowd happy. For instance, he mentioned that when you drive a car from one place to another, 90% of the energy used is wasted - and it goes up to 99% if you consider actually moving only the person from one place to another - not the car.  He tried to revitalize some of JFK’s passion - bringing up the race to the moon - trying to parallel that with the sort of effort that is required now to fix the climate crisis.

One highlight of the show was a Prius teardown - they pulled the car apart to analyze the technology for function and cost. For fun, they set off the airbag - that camera image is a bit shaky. It’s loud!

Saw some really cool technology from Eridon. They’ve developed a system whereby you can actually snap together boards to build a prototype. The system detects the boards you have added to the system, automatically loads drivers and allocates bus space to communicate, then lets you program the components by simply referencing them in code. For instance, if you’ve snapped on a VGA board, you might then type “vga.print(”hello”)  or similar and your text will show up on the display. Once you are happy with your design, you can then simply lay out a board with all the components you’ve used, and your product is done. The demo was really slick and looks very worthwhile if you are considering low volume projects, or need to get a demo going quickly. The dev system was about $5k.

Parallax was showing their propeller system - a tiny single chip with 8 32 bit CPUs arranged in a unique fashion. Chip Gracey, the company founder, spent quite a bit of time with me, going over the architecture, and how you develop code in this environment. Each of the 8 CPU’s operates independently - they can wait on a pin change, do calculations, drive pins, do calculations. And each is given access to a central store of memory in discrete time slices - and this central memory is used to manage shared data for interprocess communication.

The idea is that you break up your system into tasks that you drop onto a CPU, then let that CPU go to work, just doing its part. The end result is much simpler and cleaner designs. They have developed a simple language called SPIN for coding the processes on the 8 CPUs - the language looks a bit like Basic and Python and is easy to learn. There are a lot of libraries of code available, with more being added all the time. Chip himself has put together some really cool demos including a speech synthesis module that actually simulates a human throat. It sounded pretty cool.

The highlight of the day was the Intel keynote given by Doug Davis, Intel VP and General Manager for Embedded and Communications Group. Doug’s talk covered the wide ranging use of Intel chips, culminating in the announcement of a quad-core chip for embedded use, the Xeon 5300.

Then, the fun really began.

With a roar, and a cloud of smoke, Paul Teutul Sr. arrived atop the Intel Chopper, the latest creation of Orange County Choppers. He roared right up on stage in the 250 horsepower, 4 cylinder chopper, and the Orange County team showed off the high-tech controls - of course built using Intel chips.

Paul Junior’s thumb was bandaged - I asked why, and he really didn’t want to answer - but then said it was a gun accident, but not as exciting as it sounds. I didn’t ask more.

Mikey, a fashion coneseur if there ever was one, commented a couple of times that he liked my Hawaiian shirt. I’m not sure how to take that one.

One of the first press releases out of the Embedded Systems Conference is a cool new board from Atmel that includes:

• an AT32AP7000 CPU,
• 2 RJ-45 Ethernet jacks,
• drivers, protocol stack, communications apps all included,
• USB 2.0 mini-B terminal,
• SD memory card slot,
• RS232 port.

The card ships with Linux 2.6.18 including a ton of drivers and applications which make use of the USB, SD (like an FTP -> SD app) and an on-board web server.

The processor includes 16-bit stereo DAC’s for audio, and a 2048×2048 pixel LCD controller.

A header is provided on the board to access all the extra functions available from the CPU.

The board ships with a complete Linux development environment, though you are recommended to purchase the JTAGICE mkII on-chip debug adapter.

Very cool for $69!

Check it out at: www.atmel.com/AVR32

Sat in on the “Managing Embedded Projects” tutorial given by Jack Ganssle this morning. This was the most highly attended session I’ve seen yet. Jack is a great speaker, with lots of good examples and real-life experience. A lot of his ideas were straight on, but others are a bit more controversial. For instance he advocates throwing extra CPU’s into a design - to simplify the software by dividing the project up into smaller chunks which are far more manageable, and less likely to fall behind schedule. This is certainly true from a project management point of view, but goes against the grain of every hardware designer who’s trying to eliminate every part from the board.

He also advocates throwing out bug lists since they are so useless. He feels you should simply eliminate EVERY BUG before you ship. Maintaining lists of bugs, assigning priorities to them etc should be avoided. Instead, force each developer to clear away all their bugs before developing any new feature. This is a nice thought, but doesn’t translate so well into the real world where you have to ship product in order to survive.

The session was just packed. In fact they had to bring in extra chairs to accommodate the overflow crowd. Certainly worthwhile - as long as you don’t take EVERYTHING at face value.

I also sat in on the User Interface Design session given by Niall Murphy. This session was nowhere near as well attended - in fact just a smattering of people in the room. Niall’s ideas are great - this was a session that should have had a much better attendance. Unfortunately, Niall’s slides weren’t that slick. Pretty ugly actually. So, great ideas, bad presentation. Niall covered lots of ground - from color, icons, button design, size, sounds, etc.

It’s sad that this session wasn’t better attended. Typically embedded systems have such terrible UI’s - the group of developers here should have been FORCED to attend this one session!

Spent the morning settling in and registering at the ESC. The conference looks like it’ll be pretty good this year - the exhibit hall is quite huge - I can’t wait to get in on Tuesday for a full tour.

I sat in on a couple of the courses today:

The Introduction to Real-Time Operating Systems talk by David Kalinsky was horrifyingly S L O W. David would talk on one slide for 20 or 30 minutes, slogging through some very simple concepts, giving warnings about features of some RTOS’s, but then not naming the culprits, and over and over again referencing things that will be in “future” slides rather than what he’s talking about right now.

The audience is a mix of noobs and experienced developers - so I can see how it’s difficult for David to keep everyone interested.

Conversely, John Edwards DSP Demystified talk was terrific! He’s a VERY interesting speaker, captivating on what could be a really dry topic. He knows to skip the details, and instead concentrate on the stuff engineers need to simply get things done. Really worth attending.

Happy customer at the DSP demystified presentation.