Since my first car was among the least expensive available when I made my purchase, I thought I would see what innovations are available today in that class. The lowest-priced sedan in the United States (according to my non-scientific web search) is the 2006 Chevrolet Aveo, with a starting manufacturer’s suggested retail price under $10,000. It has safety features including front and side airbags. I also learned that you can, in fact, still buy a car without power windows and power door locks, but an AM/FM stereo and air conditioning are included as standard features. Not bad. More than … Read More → "Baby, You Can Drive My Car"

What happened is that our cars have evolved to become, essentially, complex, networked, embedded systems – big ones. An average car when I was a kid back in the ’70s had just a small number of electronic components – lights (yes, we all had those, but it seemed like a head or tail light was always burning out), a slick and fancy 8-track “audio system,” and possibly air conditioning — not much else. Electronics in these vehicles accounted for just a sliver of the purchase price of the car, and didn’t cause much of a ruckus … Read More → "Connecting the Dots"

Open-source operating systems (and specifically embedded Linux) have been making big gains in the device software space. Development teams are attracted by the lack of licensing fees and contracts, lower cost of ownership, perceived portability, and broad availability of the underlying software and source code. Unfortunately, some of the mechanisms that create these attractive benefits also carry hidden (and not-so-hidden) penalties. Finding the right release (distribution), finding or creating a test suite that matches that distribution, getting support (since software that comes from nowhere has nobody answering the phones), and tracking the current and appropriate versions for your application … Read More → "The People’s RTOS"

First, there are many “knowns” in the enterprise software space. Developers usually develop on the same hardware (host machine) and software platform (i.e. operating system) that their final product will run on. Usually, it is a well-tested and well- known development environment that hasn’t changed over the multiple products that the developer has contributed to. As a result, the software developer typically focuses on the application rather than the environment. Additionally, in the majority of enterprise applications, there is also no concept of real-time performance, determinism, or interrupts (outside of keyboard, mouse and network).</ … Read More → "The Challenges of an Embedded Software Engineer"