Images from the 2008 Embedded Systems Conference

This year's Embedded Systems Conference was a good one, with a lot of great technology and devices on the cutting edge of computing, processor, and software technology. There was some engineer eye candy, like Kontron's walking mechanical giraffe that they used to highlight their computing technology. There is an slideshow available on the event site, but we thought you might like some of these pictures we took at the event:

Floor traffic was relatively light at times, but most exhibitors said they had a number of quality leads. Our interpretation is that the traffic reduction was due to the absence of the makers of peripheral technologies that usually exhibit when the market is doing well. The SBC and processor people were well represented, but there weren't as many intelligent sensor, imaging or other intelligent subsystem OEMs as in the past.

Speaking of engineer eye candy, Intel had this nice bike in the convention center lobby.

Speaking of vehicles, Parallax had their latest robot on display featuring their propeller IC. The tiny rover has a four-stroke 49-cc engine and eight 32-bit cogs at 20 MIPS each with a 64-kB EEPROM with 32kB of nonvolatile data storage. The rover comes with GPS, compass and a 3-axis accelerometer.

S3 Graphics had this cool driving simulator that dipped, tilted, and dove to match the screen imagery. Their display technology was behind the excellent multi-screen graphics. 

Speaking of graphics, the neck of the guy (or gal) that has to wear this helmet heads-up display rig from Rockwell Collins must be huge. Check out the large add-on module bolted to the top of the helmet. It extends all the way to the nape of the neck like a high-tech mohawk.

Some of the demos at the booths were nicely impressive while highlighting the device's strengths. This solid-state hard drive from Trident Space and Defense  sat under water while it was used by a computer connected to it.

Many of the booths ran classrooms and other learning activities a their booth. The Xilinx booth had a class going on FPGAs and processor block architectures.

Even Microsoft got into the interactive demo act, with this retail set-up driven by Windows.

It's hard to show the ubiquitous chip in an exhibit. Here SST shows their Z-scale package in an equally miniature context.

Here, a couple of National Instruments personnel trip the light fantastic on a dance-dance fever machine at their booth...

...while LeCroy used the Wii's Guitar Hero controller accessory to demonstrate their I²C test capability. (The Wii controller uses it to communicate with attached peripherals.) 

Lantronix used a modified electronic dog to demonstrate device remote control capability over the web.

There were of course lots of advanced engineering examples built using Legos. (What did engineers use before the Lego was invented?) This demo was at the Renesas booth.

This transparent EL display from Planar is a very nice device, as it suffers none of the issues of light-guide-enabled LCD and all the advantages of a luminescent display you can see through.