The Life of an Intern
As a student you feel fortunate to have an opportunity to get an internship, but to get an amazing internship, such as DISTek, is a true blessing. DISTek is the ultimate playground for embedded systems programming nerds that love manipulating hardware through software and who relish at the thought that their work will eventually end up on a microcontroller of an agricultural or off-road vehicle. To my delight, within an hour on my first day, I was assigned to a CAN bus project, based around ISO 11783, working side by side with full time employees on a real product intended for real customers. After receiving a binder full of ISO standards and a quick, but quite necessary, pep talk from my new coworkers I was set to start programming… or so I thought.
Teamwork as a TACO
You wouldn’t have to look too far to find various forms of media dedicated to teaching you how to overcome your shortcomings. If you are having problems meeting people you can find seminars that will show you how to be more outgoing. If you are always on the go and can’t settle down you can find books that will teach you how to focus. If you are stressed out about your best friend’s health issues you can find a web site that will let you know that it’s ok to not get so involved in other people’s lives. All this seems to me like rowing against the stream so I’m very pleased when I find sources of information that show us how to harness our strengths instead of fixing our weaknesses.
Dirty Jobs: Code Reviews for Embedded Software
“I enjoy doing code reviews!” said no embedded software development engineer, ever.
Nobody in their right mind takes pleasure in combing through hundreds of lines of Consolas 9.5 gibberish they didn’t even add, modify, or remove. There are no rewards. No incentives. Only an engineer at the other end of the diff-viewer who thinks you’re just trying to get under his skin, thinks you’re a know-it-all, or assumes your stylistic preferences are a personal criticism.
Okay, that may be a bit aggressive, but nonetheless, can be very true.
Introduction to Task Controller
Does anyone walk beans anymore? Early in my life, my dad’s three favorite herbicides for beans were my sister, my brother, and me. We spent many hours walking miles in the hot summer sun and learned many interesting plant names in the process: hemp dogbane, pigweed, velvetleaf, lambsquarter. Over the years it apparently became more economical to plant the beans closer together which made walking them nigh impossible, and my job morphed from walking the beans to driving the truck with the water and herbicides for filling the sprayer. Since I am less involved with the farm these days, I no longer know the costs of various chemicals, but I know even in the mid-90s that a small canister might go for $400. With inflation and the increased costs of raw materials, I am sure some of the chemicals are even higher cost now.
Every dollar saved in spray (or seed or fuel or …) is a dollar toward the bottom line profit, so naturally as these input costs go up the motivation to reduce waste of those inputs goes up. Technology has existed for quite some time to give farmers the ability to reduce waste with variable-rate-application and section control. But what has only more recently become available is the ability to integrate various manufacturers’ equipment together to achieve these technologies using ISOBUS. ISOBUS terminals have become increasingly common in tractor cabs to offer a nice GUI to the operator to manually control implements. With ISOBUS Task Controller, a single device in the cab can control the variable-rate or section control capabilities of an implement. Task Controller has the additional capability of recording data … either total data such as for a baler, or Geo-logged data as the implement is pulled through a field.
The Eruption of Disruption
At the AEM Annual Conference last year, Peter Diamandis, CEO of XPRIZE, made a bold prediction to those of us in the audience. He predicted that a decade from now 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be put out of business by disruptive technologies. Although that probably sounds extreme to many of us, I’m sure that former employees at Kodak, Blockbuster, and Borders are less blown away the prediction.
Getting Over the HIL of Embedded Systems Software Testing
In recent years Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) testing has become a standard part of the embedded software development process. Two trends in the embedded software development world, reduced time to market and an increase in complexity has created the need for better, more dynamic test platforms. HIL platforms provide a way to test the embedded software of a microcontroller in a real time, accurate way prior to integration on the final system.
Book Report: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
Who wouldn’t like a 4-hour workweek? Sounds appealing to me. From reading the cover, I thought there had to be some gimmick. There are many products advertising something too good to be true and I thought that this book would be one of them. Judging this book by its cover would have been a mistake.
This book provides ideas on how a person can spend less time working, but still accomplish their goals. I feel the book is better suited for a reader who is or wants to be an entrepreneur but also offers valuable ideas to those who don’t work for themselves. The key points I took note of include:
How well do you sleep at night?
What are the nightmares that cause software engineers to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat? Is it a bad dream about finding their prized toy collection with all of the action figures out of the box? Maybe it’s a mythical sink hole that swallows up the town of Riverside, IA (the future birthplace of Captain James Kirk)? Or, could it be something work related?
DISTek recently surveyed engineers, engineering managers, and engineering executives from companies that manufacture off-highway equipment on the technical outlook for the industry. In the survey we asked respondents about their largest concerns with future on-vehicle technology. The largest concern, selected by 3 out of every 4 respondents, was reliability.
Wanted: A new corn-growing catch phrase
The “Knee-high by the fourth of July” phrase needs to go. It is long overdue for a new phrase because this one has not been a good measuring stick for corn for decades. The only grass (corn is a grass, for those who did not learn that tidbit of info as a farm kid) that should be knee-high on the fourth of July is the grass on the edges of my yard when I do not get out the string-trimmer. These days, waist high is probably the minimum acceptable height for most areas of the country,
Debugging: The Little Things
Recently I was working on some embedded software that someone else wrote. I needed to add some new functionality to the code, and I was working through how the existing code was working. In particular, the software was parsing a file, and the previous developer had done a good job of sending out diagnostic messages to the terminal, and the code was parsing a line of the file as a bad record.
Well as a good little developer, the first thing I did was
LabVIEW with Mobile Devices
The growing use of mobile technology in people’s personal lives has started to influence how they want to approach their work. Individuals have immediate information at their fingertips and now are looking for the same immediate access in their work environment. Documents, e-mail messages, calendars and meeting reminders are already available, but how do users get real-time access to the applications being used around them? Some existing applications send out text messages and email, but just as personal mobile usage has moved beyond these simple communication methods so can the business world.