It seems to me that many of the 'regular' contributors are very savvy in the art of embedded design. I was wondering just what projects they are doing, or have done in the past that are worthy of mentioning?
I think our readers might be interested in such works, and give the casual reader something to ponder: especially since they are taking advice from these 'regular' contributors.
--Cpt. Vince Foster 2nd Cannon Place Fort Marcy Park, VA
P.S. I'm an irregular contributor
"compressors"
they certainly can explode...!
http://www.keil.com/condb/consultant.asp?id=1027
Andy,
Nice photo of you and your [wife?].
That is an nice quantity of uCs. (I'm an STM32 fan) What did they do? Any pictures of these widgets?
Oh... www.antronics.co.uk/.../index.htm
By sheer coincidence I have made a project (a rotary knitting machine) that involved 51 '51s. Otherwise the processor count has been 1-7
LED signs Amber and Color CDMA cell phones Leak detection system Remote terminals Postal Scales Densitometers Rotary knitting machine Automatic dosage of chemicals control for huge mixers (up to 3000 gal) Golf cart engine testing automation General industrial automation Dissolution meter
.. my current quick recall
Erik
erik,
I find that many engineers don't like doing muli-processor designs. I have no problem with that, but the resistance to do it I find odd. Fifty one 8051! thats a lot.
My list includes:
Time and attendance terminals (of various complexity) Barcode reading (specifically the decoding of raw data) TCP/IP protocol stacks (from basic principles) Access control (from single door through to >500 door) Loads of loggers (temperature, pressure etc)
Including Z80, 6502, 8051 (numerous variants), V25, V55, 80x86, STR9 and now on the LPC3250.
"Time and attendance terminals ... Loads of loggers"
If you combined them for a firm of lumberjacks, could that be a logger's logger logger...?!
Fifty one 8051! thats a lot For pattern knitting, a rotary knitting machine has 48 "selectors" each controlled by 8 "flapflippers". each selector was equipped with a '51, and a PC interface card had 3 each 51s driving 16 "flapflipper" controllers. Then PC code (in the DOS days I did that too) to interpret a pattern template and send the apprpiate controls to the machine.
I find that many engineers don't like doing muli-processor designs. I guess that is because they are ONLY taught using a multitasking OS and thus have no perception of the advantages of multiprocessor over multitasking.
There is a lot of resistance to going outside whatever box they happen to be in.
(I'm back from the doctors... I'm sane. <whew>)
That sounded like a fun project.
And yes, some people are afraid of multi-controller designs because they have a hard enough time with just one controller.
What really hurts their brains is when you arbitrate between processors using FPGAs as a gateway, with a migration path to incorporate the uCs into the FPGAs.
I enjoyed the number of different projects listed in these posts. Like Eric, my first computers used little glass thingies called 'valves'. At least across the pond they were called valves. So, I have many project memories but none that intentionally went "boom". One more memorable project was a simple battery charger/controller for 2000 Amps at 880 Volts. Another project where I re-discovered the difference between a flame front and a flow front while extinguishing a hydrogen torch. For that project, I was invited to remove my prototype far from the lab area. A third effort was moving material on an air track while operating in a partial vacuum.
But, going back over some war stories, the one thing that jumps foremost to mind is the fantastic tools that we have today. Compilers, wizards, embedded logic analyzers and debuggers make todays efforts more fun and a lot more effective. As the good Cpt. mentions, multicore processors embedded in FPGA fabric are very exciting to work with. Again the tools are awesume and the vendors continue to out perform each other and we get the benefit. Al Bradford
WHERE IS TH
Me too, although indirectly: automotive air conditioning.
And I once had the honour to work on a tiny part of a rather big thing that's going to the ISS to measure cosmic particles. Using a DalSemi 8051 derivate programmed in assembler, of all things.
[nitpick] Not exactly. "Explosion", by the strict definition, involves a chemical reaction, not just pieces flying around :-)
What compressors certainly can do, is burst. Most of the time other parts of the pressurized system will burst first, though, as the compressor will typically be the toughest part of it. [/nitpick]
It's in th
One 'horror story' slash 'war story' I had was when we were building a machine that had 800+ amps at 128 volts via batteries.
When it was time to hook up the high-power wires, an engineer was going to cut the wires and hook them up to the fusing system.
Suddenly another engineer was screaming "DIFFERENT LENGTHS !! DIFFERENT LENGTHS !!!"
But alas the first engineer, Lee, cut both the positive and negative wires the same length as he had both +/- wires in the same wire-cutters ("dikes") at the same time.
While I was working on another part of the system, my face was about 16 inches from the activity going on.
The dikes detonated/exploded.
I saw an ultra bright light and then it rained red balls of molten metal all over us and the equipment.
Lee, the Senior and High Power Expert (he really was The Man for that kind of work we did), was the guy who cut the wires and sustained some hospital worthy wounds on his hand.
We dubbed the remaining remnants of the dikes as "Lee's Ammeter" and had it mounted on a placard with such verbiage.
This machine was controlled by a Ti DSP (TMS320C206--"Code Composer" and not Keil) feeding three 9-hp custom built motors through a specially designed high-power controller board (Lee's Design). I designed the CPU section (PWA and it's firmware). It used the PWM and a pulse width/duty cycle input from a remote control unit. It was a fairly simple project on my end.
Lee's only job was to hook up the high-power to our machine. (I don't like dealing with that much power, so we called our expert in to do it: Lee).
Lee recently died of a heart attack: a man with a wall of placards and awards from the various branches of the military for outstanding engineering work. The aerospace business lost a great asset, and I lost a good friend.
Lee's Ammeter wasn't exactly a shinning moment... it did indeed explode. Other than Lee, my face was the closest, yet I was un-harmed (whew).