Aug 7 | Articles
The do-it-yourself approach to a real-time operating system appeals to many an engineer’s desire to control, schedule, and manage application interrupts. So ten years ago, the number of in-house RTOS applications outstripped all commercial RTOS implementations. Although the do-it-yourself (DIY) RTOS remains the number-one competitor to commercial RTOSs, industry analyst Embedded Market Forecasters has found
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Jul 13 | Articles
ARM counts six large silicon suppliers as licensees for the Cortex-M3 processor core, which attests to its popularity. Microcontroller manufacturers license the Cortex-M3 core and its attendant debug-and-trace macrocells, called CoreSight. The CoreSight block includes many capabilities, and hardware and software engineers should know how to take advantage of them.
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Jun 17 | Articles
In late April I visited the exhibits at the annual Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. For the most part, people I met with discussed microcontrollers, communication, and development kits.
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Jun 9 | Articles
The emphasis on low-power embedded systems can give engineers heartburn. They must strive to enhance a system's performance, add capabilities, and make its battery last for as many as 10 years. A combination of hardware and software tools now help engineers understand power consumption without the antacids.
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May 4 | Articles
In late April I visited the exhibits at the annual Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. For the most part, people I met with discussed microcontrollers, communication, and development kits. The short descriptions below represent only a snapshot of the interesting products announced or unveiled at ESC.
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Apr 15 | Articles
As a teenager, I built many "computer" circuits with relays and switches. As I recall, a flip-flop took two 2PDT relays and a binary adder took two 4PDT relays in my brute-force logic circuit. Kids today can get started exploring computers more easily.
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Mar 11 | Articles
Microcontrollers offer engineers a variety of power-saving techniques. But using them effectively requires careful attention to tradeoffs in software and hardware at the start of a project. "Engineers must partition their application so they have a rough idea how long their microcontroller will stay in a sleep mode or in an active mode," said Mike Salas...
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Mar 11 | Articles
To find out more about the state of motor-control design in embedded systems, I recently talked with three engineers at Texas Instruments who work with motor-related hardware and software. "Motor control looks simple to start but it covers many disciplines so it's almost impossible to have one designer do everything," noted Miroslav Oljaca...
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Jan 13 | Articles
New devices, technologies, and development kits make it easier than ever to include haptic controls in a design. Here's an overview of several hardware and software advancements. Atmel's first maXTouch touch-sensor controller and microcontroller, the mXT224, gives equipment designers as many as 224 sensing nodes across display screens than can exceed 10 inches.
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Dec 21 2009 | Articles
Most networked equipment uses Internet Protocol version 4, or IPv4, which provides for about four billion 32-bit IP addresses. Concerns about exhausting these addresses--and other technical issues--led the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)to develop Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6.
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