Tag Archives: Thoughts

Engineering Joke of the Week: The Pet Shop

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A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there, another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper: “I’ll  have a C-monkey please”.

The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop, and took out a monkey. He fit a collar and leash and handed it to the customer, saying “That’ll be $5000”.

The customer paid and walked out with his monkey.

Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said: “That was a very expensive monkey, most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so much?”
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Comparing CodeWarrior with Kinetis Design Studio

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At FTF 2014, Freescale made the announcement that CodeWarrior won’t support all the new ARM Kinetis devices coming out in the future: they will be supported with the free-of-charge Kinetis Design Studio (KDS) instead. As for myself, this is a big shift from a well established CodeWarrior toolchain to something new. A question which came up recently several times in the forums and in other posts is: how do CodeWarrior and KDS compare with each other?

CW vs KDS

CW vs KDS

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A Compendium: is this what you are looking for?

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When I started this blog back on February 1st 2012 with a ‘hello world‘ post, I did not know where and how this well end up. WordPress.com (the host of this blog) counted 1862 views in that first month. 30 months later (time is flying by!), views they are beyond 100k every month! Thanks to you all for commenting and liking posts, which is very encouraging. And there was one suggesting made recently which I would like to address:

Compendium Page

Compendium Page

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Girls for Science!

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Working in an engineering domain of electrical engineering and computer science, female engineers are clearly the minority, at least in my country. For example the ETH Zurich has less than 30% female students. The US National Science Foundation had published articles on that subject: Interestingly, 70% of young girls are interested in math and science, but they lose that interest afterwards.

Verizon Commercial 2014 (Source: Youtube)

Verizon Commercial 2014 (Source: Youtube)

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Showcase of Student Project Exhibition 2014 in Horw

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Yesterday Friday afternoon, the students at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Horw showcased their last semester project work to the public at the university. There were many, many interesting projects, so here are a few to give an idea what has been accomplished …

Part of the Exhibition Area

Part of the Exhibition Area

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The Turbo Encabulator

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At the university the mid-term presentations are due. Which reminds me about the importance to use the right terms and keywords not only for scientific presentations and abstracts, but as well to use and know the correct terms in any presentation or documentation. A have been pointed to an interesting concept: The Turbo Encabulator, described in this data sheet:

Turboencabulator

Turboencabulator

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Should I use that Elevator?

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I’m returning from the Embedded World in Nürnberg/Germany. A very busy schedule, a crowed exhibition, and a *lot* of good stuff. IoT (Internet of Things) was everywhere, to the point that I heard from visitors that they do not want to hear it anymore, about it because it so over-used ;-). And it seems that every vendor wants to have its feet in it, without really knowing where it could go. Sounds like in the early days of the ‘internet’, and everyone fears that if he has not ‘IoT’ somewhere, they might miss something.

But the topic here is something completely different: I was staying at a small and inexpensive hotel near the city center. I returned last night around 11pm. I was really tired from the long day, and with a heavy notebook back with me. I was going to enter the elevator to the upper floors, when I saw this signage on the elevator door (sorry the bad image quality):

Elevator Door Sign

Elevator Door Sign

So there I was staying in front of that door, about to press the button, still thinking about the consequences. Not a good sign. Can I take the risk? What would you do?

Happy Elevating 🙂

EnterCritical() and ExitCritical(): Why Things are Failing Badly

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I have carefully implemented my firmware. It works perfectly for hours, days, months, maybe for years. If there would not be this problem: the firmware crashes sporadically :-(. Yes, I’m using watchdogs to recover, but hey: it is a serious problem. And because it happens only under rare and special conditions, it is hard to track it down or to debug it.

Accessing shared data

Accessing shared data from the main application and from an interrupt

The thing is: these nightmares exist, and they are real and nasty. I’m pushing my students hard on this topic: It is about how to protect critical sections. And what could go wrong. And here is just yet another example: how it can go badly wrong if you are not careful. And it took me a while too to realize where the problem is. It was not a fun ride….

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