4 ms·

I was hired to design embedded electronics in my last job. Came a project. I would have designed it with one microcontroller in the 50-120 MHz range, or two of

by wott 9y ago

I was hired to design embedded electronics in my last job. Came a project. I would have designed it with one microcontroller in the 50-120 MHz range, or two of those to make it easy to deal with all interfaces, and called it a day (on the electronic side) because almost nothing more was needed. It was basically just a glorified RS485 extender + Web -> RS485 interface. But our boss decided of the design: mandatory Linux and Python scripting, so we ended up with a Big Mama Ubuntu on a 1 GHz dual core processor with 512 MB DDR2 RAM... Because yeah, on the software side, you 'just' have to throw ready-made drivers and link pieces of ready-made software developed for the desktop. Supposedly... The board ended up with 1500 components, it took 1 extra year to get just half of the features kinda working, the rest of the features was discarded. And the power budget was blown, which probably led to interesting negotiations with other involved bodies, but I had already quit at that time. Obviously, 'embedded' meant very different things for me and for him.

joshvm 9y ago
It's fun being on the other end of the scale - the last major commercial project I did used an Atmel Atmega1284. Most other systems in this space go down the route of FGPA which is hell to support. I was actually amazed we got away with an 8-bit micro, but it was a great example of pushing the chip to its limits and comfortably achieving the goal of the project.
joe_the_user 9y ago
So, good case study At the end of the day, it has nothing to do with what's good design or with which generation's philosophy we're going on. It has a bit to do with bragging rights but also any company selling a trivial doo-dad has a lot to gain in the vague importance scale by including including a whole OS with their doo-dad. They don't quite know what, they may not quite be thinking "now at least we're as important as a Russian mafioso running a giant botnet" but inherently the management has some kind of dream that's more likely to be satisfied by a million Ubuntu instances than a million light bulbs. Just for example, they haven't got the gall or tech to put push ads from your light bulbs YET but I'd guess that's one of the things floating around some board tables somewhere ("but how to offer value with hmm.."). Those urges won't go away. They care more about themselves than the public or their customers? Who'd have thunk. Welcome to the "everything's adversarial" era...
honestoHeminway 9y ago
Let me guess, every missed milestone, was traded with the customer against additional features (for free of course?). Some CEOs just try to postpone the day of deafeat to infinity by allowing customers to glue stuff to the device. Its like the captain of a sinking ship deciding to freeze all the water in it - making it float by the virtue of beeing a iceberg with scrap on the side. It ponzi-scheme kinda works for a hellish year, and then it usually implodes under the weight of a crust of hacks.

by wott 9y ago

joshvm 9y ago

It's fun being on the other end of the scale - the last major commercial project I did used an Atmel Atmega1284. Most other systems in this space go down the route of FGPA which is hell to support. I was actually amazed we got away with an 8-bit micro, but it was a great example of pushing the chip to its limits and comfortably achieving the goal of the project.

joe_the_user 9y ago

So, good case study At the end of the day, it has nothing to do with what's good design or with which generation's philosophy we're going on. It has a bit to do with bragging rights but also any company selling a trivial doo-dad has a lot to gain in the vague importance scale by including including a whole OS with their doo-dad. They don't quite know what, they may not quite be thinking "now at least we're as important as a Russian mafioso running a giant botnet" but inherently the management has some kind of dream that's more likely to be satisfied by a million Ubuntu instances than a million light bulbs. Just for example, they haven't got the gall or tech to put push ads from your light bulbs YET but I'd guess that's one of the things floating around some board tables somewhere ("but how to offer value with hmm.."). Those urges won't go away. They care more about themselves than the public or their customers? Who'd have thunk. Welcome to the "everything's adversarial" era...

honestoHeminway 9y ago

Let me guess, every missed milestone, was traded with the customer against additional features (for free of course?). Some CEOs just try to postpone the day of deafeat to infinity by allowing customers to glue stuff to the device. Its like the captain of a sinking ship deciding to freeze all the water in it - making it float by the virtue of beeing a iceberg with scrap on the side. It ponzi-scheme kinda works for a hellish year, and then it usually implodes under the weight of a crust of hacks.