I remember reading a book about nuclear power, which had been written in the 1950s. It confidently foretold that an era of cheap energy was about to commence – so cheap that electricity would not need to be metered. I, for one, am still awaiting this golden age. Of course, things did not work out like that and meters for gas and electricity are still with us.
The technology of those meters is … Read More
Last week in my blog, I shared some views (courtesy Rich Rejmaniak) on the emerging trend of the role of RTOS in the embedded design space, specifically targeted at the current generation 32-bit microcontrollers.
Further to that post, I am excited to share the launch of a new product, Nucleus SmartFit, targeted at embedded developers primarily involved with designing for 32-bit MCUs. Nucleus SmartFit … Read More
rtos nucleus mcu microcontroller rtos nucleus arm cortex-m4 stellaris kinetis
In almost all modern embedded systems, memory is organized into bytes. CPUs, however, process data as 8-, 16- or 32-bit words. As soon as this word size is larger than a byte, a decision needs to be made with regard to how the bytes in a word are stored in memory. There are two obvious options and a number of other variations. The property that describes this byte ordering is called “endianness” … Read More
Every once in a while, I get the opportunity to introduce my colleagues to the world of blogging. This time, it is the turn of Rich Rejmaniak, Technical Marketing Engineer in the Mentor Embedded division.
Rich has extensive experience and insight into the rapidly evolving embedded system space. Here is his take on the emerging role of RTOS in the rapidly evolving embedded space.
When computers … Read More
The role of Android as an alternative to embedded Linux has been a subject of quite a bit of discussion recently. As the use of open source software in automotive gains momentum there are differing opinions on the subject of using Android, Linux or both. The Linux Foundation recently wrote a post summarizing a discussion during a panel at the Android Builders Summit as well as some interviews from … Read More
Infotainment, IVI, Automotive, MontaVista, Virtualization, Linux, linux container
I am always pleased when one of my colleagues volunteers to make a guest posting. Apart from the obvious benefit that I have less work to do, it does broaden the range of topics covered. A frequent guest blogger is Brooks Moses who always has something interesting to say. Today he is musing on sorting algorithms …
In my last guest post, I alluded to an interesting story about the sort routine … Read More
LAPACK, Mentor Embedded Performance Library, Quicksort, sorting, MEPL, qsort
Two weeks ago we announced the acquisition of the MontaVista Automotive Business Unit, including the Linux IVI (infotainment) platform called the MontaVista Automotive Technology Platform. When Mark Mitchell, GM of Open Source Embedded Solutions, was interviewed by EE Times he mentioned he expected to be have a combined release of the MontaVista Linux solution for IVI and the Mentor Embedded Infotainment … Read More
Infotainment, IVI, Automotive, yocto project, MontaVista Automotive Technology Platform, openembedded
Sometimes I think that I fully understand something, but then I have doubts. I have been reflecting on something very everyday and simple: how we judge distance.
We all know how to assess a distance. You just need to look and you intuitively have an idea how far away something is. The question is: how do your brain/eyes arrive at this information …
Most animals have two eyes. They may be set … Read More
The month of February has been a hectic one in terms of embedded activities in the industry, especially with two major conferences – the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) in San Francisco and Embedded World in Nuremberg, happening within days of each other. The Mentor Embedded marketing team has been on its toes supporting these. Now that the conferences are behind us, reflecting upon them, I am sure … Read More
busybox, Mentor Embedded, bbappends, recipes, Yocto embedded Linux ELC OpenEmbedded
Voice activated features such as placing calls have been available in automobiles for many years. Today the most advanced systems under development and research are in the areas of autonomous vehicles. At the Embedded World Conference 2013 I was reminded about a car from the 1980’s that already had all these capabilities built in. Yes it was KITT (the Knight Industries Two Thousand)! The car was right … Read More
Linux, Infotainment, Automotive, Automotive IVI, Android, Embedded World, Autonomous Vehicle, AUTOSAR
I recall a few years ago, I was at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. We had a presentation theater on the booth and my job was to manage it. That meant that I got to do some of the presentations and persuaded colleagues to do others. One session, that was not mine, was particularly successful. I am not sure whether this was because of the unique style of the presenter or the words she … Read More
I attended a very interesting presentation last week at the Connected Infotainment Conference in San Francisco, given by Joe Carra, from the USA National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA). NHTSA published its Phase 1 set of guidelines for driver distraction standards in February 2012, and has received comments from 83 separate entities. As part of the NHTSA process, all the comments … Read More
Our third day ends up being one of the busiest for the team at Embedded World with five sessions (just as many as the first two days combined):
Andrew Patterson has a session “Simultaneously leveraging Linux and Android in a Genivi compliant IVI system”. This is part of Session 22: Embedded Linux 1 and will be from 9:00 am to 10:00 am
Andrew Caples has a session “Meeting SEP 2.0 … Read More
As the demand for energy continues to increase worldwide, primarily fueled by the growth in emerging economies, the concept of “energy efficiency” has taken on a lot of importance. Apart from looking at alternate and renewable (solar, wind) sources of energy, much effort has been poured into making our current energy usage more efficient.
“Smart energy” is one such area with a lot of promise. At … Read More
This week I am on my annual pilgrimage to Nuremberg, Germany to attend Embedded World. This is the first major conference of the year that covers embedded software and is, I am sure, now the largest event serving this community anywhere in the world.
I have written about past visits and this year’s trip will be quite similar, except that I will be rather busy …
Most years I have had one … Read More