Embedded Processing

In a previous post I proposed that the differences between developing for embedded versus application-level systems are poorly distinguished and that, as an industry, we are paying an increasingly visible price for this lack of clarity. I personally came to understand some of the differences between the two types of development when I transitioned into the embedded world many years ago.

I did not think much of those differences as a public discussion until someone asked me why more embedded developers are not attending multicore conferences. That question made me realize that there are at least two very different perspectives on what multicore or multiprocessor means, and the typical embedded care-abouts are not the same as what I have seen as the major focus of contemporary muticore conferences (topic...Read More

I keep hearing people say that applications are becoming more embedded and that the line between applications and embedded systems is blurring. I think statements like these are a symptom of a lack of a clear distinction of what constitutes an embedded system. I believe the time has come that we should clarify the distinction between embedded and application-level software because we, as an industry, are now more visibly paying a price for this confusion.

An online search using the query "What is an embedded system" yielded a few definitions. The first definition on the list (from BDTI) includes a significant ambiguity. It says that an embedded system is "A system containing a processor where the processor is not generally reprogrammable by the end user. For example, a cell phone containing a DS...Read More

When I am at an industry show or conference, such as the Embedded Systems Conference last week, people often ask me if I have seen anything exciting while there. Most of the time when someone asks me this question, I feel their meaning for "exciting" is did I see anything that will radically replace the current way the world works and revolutionize how we will do something from now on—such as during the Internet bubble where "everything" was radically changing—or not. I've always taken a reserved perspective when I see such claims because frankly, time usually proves those claims to be exaggerated or overly optimistic.

However, I do get excited when I see people trying to describe challenges from different angles, because the different vocabulary or perspective gained from such an exerc...Read More

I have an intense interest in autonomous systems, especially ones that incorporate learning to refine how they sense and interact with the world. Before becoming a technical editor at EDN, I devoted many years to research and development designing and building fully autonomous vehicles. A certain mission, which happened a few weeks ago, involving a satellite in orbit, had a personal significance to me, as I was part of the team that spent a few years working on the original technology that powered the final autonomous portion of that system. With systems as complicated as these, it can be many years, potentially decades, between the original work and a working demonstration in field conditions.

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A number of years ago, I did a hands-on project that demonstrated that a Nintendo Gameboy, an electronic hand-held game machine, could be used for serious applications. One of the intents of the article was to show that the 60 to 100 million Gameboy units that were being made obsolete by the Gameboy Advance did not need to go into the trash, but that they could find a new life as terminals for serious applications, including medical applications.

I did not anticipate this, but Nintendo has once again unwittingly created a platform that is spawning creative and unintended (and unsupported) uses of their equipment. For an example of some of these uses, visit Jo...Read More

Successfully innovating often entails recognizing some pattern or relationship in nature and applying it to solve a specific challenge. The nice thing is that often innovations contribute to future innovations such that they provide a foundation of understanding that makes if possible for engineers to recognize ever more subtle patterns or relationships that lead to the development of future innovations. Each year, EDN's hot 100 products feature lists those products that potentially contain the seeds of understanding for future innovations. I suspect if you were to look at the product listing across multiple years, you might be able to spot some trends that could help point you to your next great innovative idea.

In the spirit of sharing recognized patterns and relationships that are useful, I would like to share w...Read More

While turning my focus to available robotic platforms and the development tools currently available to designers for my just-published hands-on project (see "Robots on the march"), I quickly noticed parallels between what issues designers have to address regardless of whether they are working on robotic designs or semi-autonomous subsystems.

An example from my own personal experience is the autonomous vehicles I worked on in the early 1990s. They sensed the world inertially and visually, had a set of goals they tried to accomplish, had a means to move around, interact with, and affect the world around them, and were "smart enough" to be able to adjust their behavior based on how the environment changed. We never referred to these as robots, and I never thought to apply the word robot to them unti...Read More

The season is appropriate to bring up this interesting relationship. Hopefully it will make you chuckle, pause a moment as you think about it, and then want to tell it to someone else.

Before I expose the answer, let me offer some hints because the revelation hits so much better when you make the connection on your own. That and I can embed and hide the explicit answer in the text so you hopefully do not see it before you want to.

Your first inclination might be to look at the overlapping religious significance of these holidays—but I assure you this is a purely technical/engineering/mathematical relationship that we are looking for here.

So putting aside the social context of these two events—how else could we find a common relationship between them? We can establish a spatial/temporal relationship between these two events by looking at the c...Read More

I would like to encourage you to visit the latest edition of the EDN Microprocessor Directory. The 2007 edition just went live and it has been growing substantially each year. If you were to print the contents of this year's directory, it would number in the hundreds of pages of material. The immediate goal of the directory is to provide designers with an unbiased resource for finding what computing resources are available for use in their embedded projects. The listing continues to add more international options as they make themselves known to us.

The longer-term goal of the directory is to provide an engineering resource and tool set that enables designers to explore more design options so they can make more informed decisions before they lock...Read More

I hear on a semi-regular basis from semiconductor companies targeting consumer products, especially for audio and video applications, that their latest offering will be successful because consumers demand the better features and quality of capabilities that their new silicon product targets. However, I am not convinced that consumer demand is what is pushing forward and driving all of this technological advancement. In fact, I would go so far as to say that consumers seem to value devices and offerings with less exciting features more frequently than devices that boast the highest technical prowess.

Take for example audio quality. The MP3 market is booming, and yet the quality of the audio from these devices is inferior to the already existing and legacy format used on CDs. Additionally, MP3 players costs a substantial amount more than the $15 for which you can purchase ...Read More

While researching about recognizing gestures, I was reminded how much I love designing user interfaces. Designing user interfaces is a fertile area to uncover new ways to conceptualize ideas and create a more natural communication link between users and machines. The naïve approach of user-interface design focuses on when the context and communication method between the user and machine are ideal. Designing good user interfaces, especially ones that involve innovative new approaches, can involve taking care of a lot of (near) invisible details, such as how to handle ambiguous and invalid inputs and handle undesirable and non-ideal world conditions.

I think there is always room for improvement in any user interface, and much of that improvement is again, mostly invisible to the end user in the way that expert ...Read More

I recently changed how I receive television programs. The change included switching out my existing set-top boxes for new ones. It also meant switching remote controls. The newer remote control supports up to four different devices—perfect for my setup.

Remote controls for entertainment electronics are not a new concept. In fact, Zenith Radio Corp introduced the first remote control, intended to control a television, in the 1950s. The first such device, known as the "Lazy Bones," used wires between the remote and the television. Remote controls that did not require wires appeared shortly after that, and the industry has been evolving and improving them ever since. According to the remote control entry in Wikipedia, Steve Wozniak started a company called CL9 that introduced one of the first remote c...Read More

I have been focusing on human-machine interfaces the last month for an upcoming cover story in August. It has been a lot of fun rediscovering my passion for interface design, a passion I had put away in the closet for much too long. I have three things to share/ask you about regarding sound.

1) I would like to share an observation with you that until the last year I had never given much consideration to, and I wonder how many "normal" hearing people do. Many systems that I interact with use audio feedback, such as to let me know when I have pressed a button. An example would be my microwave or even the control panel at my gas station. What I have noticed is that many systems that use audio feedback seem to emit a single tone composed of a single frequency—my unscientific sample suggests it often is in the 1k+ Hz range. For normal hearing people with a nor...Read More

Last week, Microsoft announced Surface, which is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that allows small groups of people to simultaneously interact with the system by touching and gesturing on the surface of the display. This takes the human-machine interface concept beyond that of a display with a touch screen placed in a table top by including the machine intelligence to interpret gestures and to recognize different types of objects on or near the surface of the display.

The timing of this announcement happens to coincide well with the cover story I am currently working on for this August on the past, present, and future of gesture interfaces. I am in process of working with Microsoft to get more technical details about the Surface. I am also trying to contact ...Read More

Today I've launched a companion blog to this one, and I invite you to check it out. In How We See Embedded Processing, I'll be inviting industry experts to share their insights about processor and software-processing architectures and the impact they have on system and software development. I've posted an introductory message, and the blog already includes an introduction and a topical post—on the cost of development boards—from the first contributor, Lucio Di Jasio of Microchip.