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Embedded systems designers deserve better than the feature-lacking point-tools available today. Embedded designs should be more than a collection of microcontrollers and discrete components, pulled together by board design tools and software development environments that are not aware of each other presence, let alone integrated together. Programmable devices are not new. Embedded software is older than most of us! And a lot of embedded design is highly focused on specific interaction between the software and peripherals. So why do we still not have tools that bring all this together and make our lives easier and more productive?

Oracle made a big noise in the Linux community yesterday by announcing its own spin on the Linux kernel on top if its so-called Unbreakable Linux. Oracle presented the announcement as offering a "modern" Linux kernel on top of its own clone of Red Hat. Underneath the hype, what's Oracle really offering, and what does it mean for Linux? For years, Oracle has ridden Red Hat's coattails and tried to present it as a good thing to its customers. Oracle rebrands Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), slaps its own support package on it, and lets Red Hat do all the heavy development lifting while it tries to poach Red Hat's customers. All perfectly legal according to the licenses that RHEL is shipped under, but a bit skeezy nonetheless. Or perhaps parasitic might be a better word.

Usually developers consider Java as a programming language, but Java is a complete operating enviornment including some parts belong to OS. If you have experience of porting Java runtime to embedded system. You will find that RTOS is not a necessary requirement for porting Java.

Most multiprocessing systems can be classified as either symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) or asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP). AMP involves the use of interprocessor communication to combine the efforts of multiple processors, each with its own local operating system and hardware resources. Also, AMP involves less OS overhead for each individual processor and a more traditional execution environment for applications. AMP seems like distributed system. The number of peripherals that are supported in today's multicore processors is quickly increasing. Symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) software is expected to be quickly available to support these peripherals. Basically any OS can be ported to a SMP platform, but the developers must take care of following issues for SMP OS. - Handling of task priority or implicit synchronization - Spinlocks and synchronization - Synchronization between tasks sharing memory - Synchronization between tasks and ISRs sharing memory - Synchronization between ISRs sharing memory

When we first reported on the Willow Garage PR2 robot, it was just a prototype. Earlier this year, Willow Garage started their beta program, which gave eleven lucky organizations two year access to PR2 robots in exchange for furthering work on open source robotics software. Now we've received word from Willow Garage that the PR2 is officially for sale to anyone who wants it. This is not a toy or hobby robot, of course, so don't expect a small price tag. The full retail price is $400,000 per unit. However, if your organization can demonstrate a proven track record in developing open source software and making contributions to the robotics community, you can get a hefty $120,000 discount on your PR2. For more see our previous stories on Willow Garage and the PR2.

What made me fall of my chair is the methodology/architecture part of this statement. It’s hard enough (but doable) to use RDF to map philosophically similar APIs. It’s a non-starter to use it to bridge architectural and methodological differences. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Semantic Web technologies in the context of modeling IT systems (see the “semantic tech” category of this blog). While I think they would be a great foundation I don’t see them ever coming anywhere near what Reuven describes.

This article features an example chapter from a new *Hot-off-the-Press* book on FPGA Design that just recently hit the streets in August 2010. This chapter is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher – Springer. This book -- FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-Based Design -- describes best practices for successful FPGA design. It is the result of the author’s meetings with hundreds of customers on the challenges facing each of their FPGA design teams. By gaining an understanding into their design environments, processes, what works and what does not work, key areas of concern in implementing system designs have been identified and a recommended design methodology to overcome these challenges has been developed.

We had to cover monads eventually, and there are many great monad tutorials out there (see, for example, here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tutorials#Using_monads). In fact, there are web resources concerned solely with organizing the many monad tutorials available in the wild, and developing new monad tutorials seems to be a popular sport in the Haskell community.Today, Ralf Lämmel's lecture goes back to the roots, essentially revisiting Wadler's "The essence of functional programming"—the 1992 paper that discovered monads and popularized their use in functional programming. Ralf Lämmel's lecture and accompanying code distribution show Wadler's seminal insight: those original scenarios and observations still make sense today. Indeed, Simon Marlow (a Haskell/GHC high priest @ MSR Cambridge) recently noted: "it's still the best monad tutorial" (see http://twitter.com/simonmar/status/21397398061).

An innovatice camera system could in future enhance security in public areas and buildings. Smart Eyes works just like the human eye. The system analyzes the recorded data in real time and then immediately flags up salient features and unusual scenes.  »Goal, goal, goal!« fans in the stadium are absolutely ecstatic, the uproar is enormous. So it‘s hardly surprising that the security personnel fail to spot a brawl going on between a few spectators. Separating jubilant fans from scuffling hooligans is virtually impossible in such a situation. Special surveillance cameras that immediately spot anything untoward and identify anything out of the ordinary could provide a solution. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin have now developed such a device as part of the EU project »SEARISE – Smart Eyes: Attending and Recognizing Instances of Salient Events«. The automatic camera system is designed to replicate human-like capabilities in identifying and processing moving images.

The embedded world is constantly changing. You might not have noticed, but if you take a minute to recall what a microcontroller system was like 10 years ago and compare it to today's latest microcontroller systems, you will find that PCB design, component packages, level of integration, clock speed, and memory size have all going through several generations of change. One of the hottest topics in this area is when will the last of remaining 8-bit microcontroller users start to move away from legacy architectures and move to modern 32-bit processor architectures like the ARM Cortex-M based microcontroller family. Over the last few years there has been a strong momentum of embedded developers starting the migration to 32-bit microcontrollers and, in this multi-part article, we will take a look at some of the factors accelerating this migration.

Microsoft Technical Fellow and C# creator Anders Hejlsberg explains the new C# and VB.NET asynchronous programming model, available as Async CTP now, which makes async programming much easier for .NET developers.

Developed by Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization and other local institutions, the robot may sound boring (when compared to humanoids, for example), but it’s actually pretty cool. The main bullet points are that it automatically detects how ripe the strawberries are (which fruit is ready for harvesting) and that it cuts the stalks without damaging the strawberries.

RoweBots Research, Inc., a supplier of tiny embedded POSIX RTOS products, today announced the launch and release of UnisonTM Version 5 and the open-source version of Unison Version 4. These two ultra-tiny embedded-Linux and POSIX compatible RTOSs open Renesas Technology Corp.’s SH-2A Microcontroller (MCU) family to Linux and POSIX compatible development for the first time.

The ARM Cortex™-M4 processor is the latest embedded processor by ARM specifically developed to address digital signal control markets that demand an efficient, easy-to-use blend of control and signal processing capabilities. The combination of high-efficiency signal processing functionality with the low-power, low cost and ease-of-use benefits of the Cortex-M family of processors is designed to satisfy the emerging category of flexible solutions specifically targeting the motor control, automotive, power management, embedded audio and industrial automation markets. The Cortex-M4 processor features extended single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions, optimized SIMD arithmetic, saturating arithmetic instructions and an optional single precision Floating Point Unit (FPU). These features build upon the innovative technology that characterizes the ARM Cortex-M series processors…

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java

The Control Gallery is a directory of over 900 controls and components to use in your own applications. You will find everything from simple controls to full e-commerce components.

Today's FPGAs are doubling in capacity every 2 years and have already surpassed the 5 million equivalent ASIC gate mark. With designs of this magnitude, the need for fast flows has never been greater. At the same time, designers are seeking rapid feedback on their ASIC or FPGA designs by implementing quick prototypes or initial designs on FPGA-based boards. These prototypes or designs allow designers to start development, verification and debug of the design—in the context of system software and hardware—and also to fine tune algorithms in the design architecture. Quick and intuitive debug iterations to incorporate fixes are of great value. The ability to perform design updates that don't completely uproot all parts of the design that have already been verified is also a bonus! Whether the goal is aggressive performance or to get a working initial design or prototype on the board as quickly as possible, this paper provides information on traditional and new techniques that accelerate design and debug iterations.

Ice Energy has a novel solution for the electricity challenges of the 21st century: Make Popsicles. Put another way, the company wants to freeze water at night in refrigerator-like boxes adjacent to commercial air conditioners and then thaw it during the day, when power demand is highest. This would theoretically allow AC-hungry commercial buildings in warm climates to cut energy use during heat waves, by shutting air conditioners down while still providing cool air to buildings from melting ice. After seven years of development and testing, the Windsor, Colo.-based company signed an agreement recently with the Southern California Public Power Authority here to deploy some 6,000 Popsicle-making units at 1,500 locations in the utility's service territory around Los Angeles. Ice Energy says the units, called Ice Bears, will lead to a 30 percent fuel reduction for the utility through avoided use of so-called peaker generation plants, which are only turned on when demand is highest.

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still—and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful three-dimensional protein). They could watch the action unfold, so to speak, in a test tube but weren’t sure how close the pace conformed to real life. A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, however, have developed a system to move the observation out of in vitro and into in vivo.

Microsoft Research who brought us some wonderful technologies such as the incredible Photosynth continue to impress with a much improved web mapping application integrated with the company's new Bing search engine. During the TED 2010 conference, Microsoft engineer Blaise Aguera y Arcas demoed the new Bing augmented reality maps showing real-time registration of video taken with a smart phone and street-view type maps. He showed how the live video can be overlayed over the static images and additional information about the area can be accessed via a Web interface. Much of this is made possible because of the advanced computer vision technology that has been developed in the past decade at Microsoft Research. The Seadragon technology is the back-end that makes it possible to manipulate such vast amounts of data in real-time. Microsoft has also integrated Photosynth and Worldwide telescope into their maps product. You are probably wondering what does this have to do with robotics other than the fact that it is a very impressive application? I can imagine robots using Bing maps to keep localized within a city. One of the most difficult and important problem in robotics is that of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Bing maps solve the mapping problem and the new vision techniques (with a bit of help from GPS) can be used to solve the localization problem. The registered video can be used by a robot to localized itself when it goes out to buy your weekly groceries.  You can watch the 10-minute demo below; I bet that it won't be long before Microsoft makes these new features available to us all for free.