embedded OSs

I liked this comment, as well:

"Right at the bottom was the need for major vendor support ? while this might appear reasonable, this is a different picture to what we might expect to see for non-embedded applications."

Overall, stability and reliability were at the top and after-sale support at the bottom. This profoundly affects any business model designed for this marketplace.

Jon

.... at the bottom of that page they talk about OS-less solutions... I did a new version of io_pic today,

Just a RS232 device that adds

8 analog input channels with 10 bit resolution. 2 digital input channels. 5 digital output channels. 1 PWM output channel (0 to 100) to your PC or whatever embedded system, one chip solution, 2 if you add a MAX232. I decided to add an addressable function, so you can have more then one of these devices on the same RS232 line (listen in parallel, send as logical 'OR'), or have it work on a line where other traffic happens. So you activate this one by sending the magic string 'WU_PIC' (for wake up PIC in this case), and after that this one will for example reply to the string 'a7CR' with 123mV, so the voltage it sees on a pin. Now that is an I/O expansion I think tha tis hard to beat in price. PICs are so beautiful to program in ASM, so versatile, so nice, so powerful...

I noticed you did some home control interfacing and it needed 2 boards, maybe consider this PIC for a next project... It is just a state machine, it should be reliable,

Android is going to be a big thing, and take all the growth away from Linux. Or so they seem to think in Asia.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:17:56 -0500) it happened Spehro Pefhany wrote in :

I dunno, the new google phone is not accepted very well by customers. There always weill be a thousand or more Linux versions.

I think there are two factors affecting that part about after-sales support: One, in any technical realm, after sales support is almost always crappy. I have never worked in an engineering group that wasn't

-- with a couple of significant exceptions -- a lot sharper than the sales/support engineers trying to help them (I have to mention Chuck Finger of Linear here, as one of those significant exceptions). Two, both with chips and with 3rd-party embedded software, if it isn't transparent enough that I feel that I can understand the important facets of what's going on under the hood, I don't want to use it.

Combine those, and you find that a "worthwhile" OS is one that the sharper guys on my team can understand without help from the vendor, and if the vendor's customer support engineers were that sharp they'd be working in a design team. This means that by the time my product is shipping, my sharpest one or two team members knows far more about the care and feeding of their product in my app then they ever will (or at least than they ever will admit to), and suddenly I'm finding energetic "after sales support" to be more of an unwanted intrusion than a big help.

--
www.wescottdesign.com

I bought the Integrity boards (RS232, 8 10-bit analogs, 8 digital i/o's, some PWM stuff) for about $75 each, and they work fine. I added my own small board with RTD signal conditioning and one-shot relay drivers to control the furnace. The PC-side software is PowerBasic.

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Auto_wired.jpg

This is updated every minute or so:

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/CABIN.TXT

I turned the heat on before we left San Francisco yesterday and it was all nice and toasty when we got to Truckee.

Lately my guys have been using a small AVR for simple stuff like front panels, programming in C. Seems to work fine. I've never liked the PIC instruction set... reminds me too much of a PDP-8.

John

Good points that I broadly agree with. Provider companies probably have a hard time fielding support personnel with the same or better experience in developing applications than at least one or two of those at consumer companies they serve. Hopefully, anyway. Otherwise, I'd be a little worried about the products!

All of this agrees with my own experience, as well. If the microcontroller product is designed well by a decent team, regardless of the documentation available or the support available, most of us with experience and work out the details of how it functions because we are familiar with good designs and know the one or two ways how they _must_ function.

I've one caveat to all this, when talking about micros and not some embedded operating system.

I have uncovered undocumented silicon bugs in Microchip parts before and I have to say that the people I was exposed to were unparalleled in their knowledge about the part. Not just later, but right at first when I first made my call into Microchip. Everyone was exceptional -- this was perhaps in

2002 or 2003, though.

When I faced a bug in their c compiler (they used statics for compiler temporaries and their live-variable analysis failed to properly take this into account across compilation units), I was provided immediate access to their c compiler team and had some great discussions, which ultimately led to my having lunch when one of their team next visited my area.

When I had so much as a flaky switch on an old ProMate II that they no longer were even selling (but still supporting as well as still selling add-in modules), they shipped me a new/refurb unit along with a prepaid return box to arrive the following morning with NO MORE than the serial number from the bottom required. That's all. I was already doing well enough, getting by with the switch problem, but they still didn't waste any time. The next morning I had the replacement unit. They didn't even bother to look at whether or not I represented some large or small number of part sales.

It's been this kind of support from Microchip that has put all the other companies into _stark_ contrast for me. The support is fantastic, while the prices remain competitive. It's something I've grown to appreciate.

By comparison, when I contacted SiLabs quite recently regarding some questions on their DMA unit (not documented), it was something close to a month getting a knowledgeable response and my local office here was nearly livid trying to explain why. They _did_ get back to me and answered all my questions to my satisfaction, but the entire process left me wondering just a bit. I don't mean to suggest that I needed the answers -- the chip IS well-designed and I was able to suss out how it probably worked and develop the product without the support. Just as you suggest. But it could have been different and I like to know there is something there faster than 30 days or more in terms of turn-around for relatively basic questions about existing functionality.

So I have need of it, from time to time. Usually when some question arises or I uncover a silicon bug that isn't otherwise documented.

But I also take your points in all this. The thing is, I actually find myself placing a high value on Microchip's consistent high quality support. So even though I like to imagine I'm one of those you talk about ("sharpest one or two team members") when developing products, it's not entirely as though good support is to be discounted, either. It has value. At least, to me. The key lesson I'd take from your comments is that any company that _depends entirely_ upon the support of the field staff from some vendor is doomed to failure at the outset. On that, I agree.

Jon

How can that be? The Android Architecture chart at

shows a Linux kernel support layer as part of Android. The description says: "Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model."

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:02:18 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

There is nothing to like or dislike, in my view anyways, about it. Just a way to address the hardware. At least it is asm, so it does what you tell it to do :-)