Please join many of our fellow DISTek employee-owners on Tuesday, October 10th, 2017 from noon until 4pm as we host an American Red Cross Blood Drive. We’re located in the Cedar Falls Technology Park at 6612 Chancellor Drive, Cedar Falls, Iowa.
The Present – Part 1
The 2000s were a tumultuous decade, bookended on the front end by the dotcom bubble bursting, Enron collapsing with Arthur Anderson, and the September 11th attacks, and on the backend with the financial crisis and the great recession. In the world of technology, we saw the quick spread of broadband internet and the broad adoption first of cell phones and PDAs before the two merged by the end of the decade into the smartphone. The internet seemed to get its legs in this decade with the advent of such tools as Google Maps, Wikipedia, YouTube, and social media.
Every software engineer knows there are strengths and weaknesses to every programming language/architecture. Trade offs must be made to improve certain aspects of the system. AUTOSAR is no different. The key is finding the right tool for the job by determining which aspects you need more of and which you don’t. During my time working with AUTOSAR, I’ve found some aspects that AUTOSAR does well and some that it doesn’t. I’ll start with a brief overview of what AUTOSAR is and then jump into the nitty-gritty.
When DISTek began its 25th year in business back in March, we knew we wanted to celebrate this rather significant milestone, maybe have a party, take in a ball game, go out to dinner, or have a family picnic. 25 years ago, any of these ideas would have been possible with not much more effort than calling the wife, locking up the office, and heading uptown. Ah, the simpler times of yesteryear!
Food production, specifically agriculture, is a crucial component in the expansion of civilizations. As populations grow, the need for more food rises. The gathering of data is the new frontier in advancement for agriculture technology. The more known about the field the better it can be nurtured. Precision agriculture is defined as “the application of technologies and principles to manage spatial and temporal variability associated with all aspects of agricultural production for the purpose of improving crop performance and environmental quality.” [1].
Acquiring and/or logging high speed data, using the traditional DAQmx scaling approach, will consume considerable amounts of memory due to its use of the double precision data type. Each sample collected will consume eight bytes of memory whether being stored in memory or on disk. This size is fine when collecting data at lower rates, but if you are collecting data at a rate of 1 MS/s, eight bytes per sample is too much for most systems to handle.
Last Friday, June 23rd, DISTek participated in Take Your Dog To Work Day. This annual event was created by Pet Sitters International in 1999 as a way to celebrate what great companions dogs are, as well as to promote and bring awareness to adoptions. The event encourages employers to experience the joys of pets in the workplace for one Friday each summer to support their local pet communities. Here at DISTek, we were lucky enough to have several furry friends show up with their owners for a day at the office.
For the first time in its 22 year history, NIWeek was held in May instead of August. What did that mean for attendees? No triple digit temperatures for starters.
Once again, the AEF put on another successful ISOBUS Plugfest last month. Approximately 130 individuals associated with electronics for Ag equipment spent the week of May 8th at the Embassy Suites in Lincoln, NE. The key attraction is the Plugfest itself, during which nearly 1000 combinations of implement ECUs and displays were tested.
Along with two other employees at DISTek, I received the privilege to be a judge at the Iowa regional FIRST Robotics Competition. The theme this year was steampunk and teams needed to work cooperatively to power a Victorian era steam powered airship.
In the early 1990s, the world was in a state of change. Germany was reunified in 1990, the dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in 1991, Yugoslavia was breaking apart in 1992, while here in the USA another presidential election cycle was brewing. It was into this world that DISTek was born on April 1, 1992. Company founder, Matt Dickinson, brought his experience in electronics for the agricultural, aerospace, and factory automation industries and setup DISTek as a contract provider of embedded electronics engineering services for off-highway equipment.
Have you ever wished you were a Jedi with the power of the force such that with the wave of your hand, droids would fall backward? I created a simple LEGO® MINDSTORMS® robot to provide that power to anyone. This LEGO robot with the program I call “The Force” has been a hit among children at STEM fairs.
