When it comes to determining a new enterprise embedded platform to control the functionality of an off-highway vehicle, there are many considerations that need to be contemplated. This blog article, …
There are some things in life that we take for granted. Food, clothes, cars, homes, the Vehicle System Network Database… OK, well maybe not the Vehicle System Network Database, but it got your attention, didn’t it? So let me tell you a little bit about the Vehicle System Network database, something we work with here at DISTek on a daily basis.
Whether you’re beginning your career or looking to become more proficient in embedded software and systems, there are plenty of useful resources to help you. With over 25 years of embedded programming experience here at DISTek, I thought I’d take a few minutes and share some practical tips to enhance your skills.
I find that in today’s age of IDEs like Visual Studio, Eclipse, Code Blocks, etc., that many developers get hung up on linker issues. This is completely understandable as many languages have moved away from the compiler/linker paradigm toward single compilation units or virtual machine code. Also, these modern development environments hide many of the steps that it takes to get a working executable out of working code. The result is that most of the C developers I run into are very familiar and are even experts in the C language itself, but unexpectedly struggle when presented with a build configuration issue.
Welcome to part two of my blog series on software architecture. The previous blog focused on an overview of software architecture in general. Part three will focus on software architecture that I have found to be beneficial. For now, let’s review four common software architecture pitfalls that I have encountered:
Recently, I was assigned to a project that assisted a customer in rapidly designing a micro controller embedded system capable of wired communication with other devices. Our involvement in the development of this project allowed the customer to focus on higher-level details, which were then built off of our implementation.
Software Architecture Overview Software Architecture is a key component in developing a long term, successful embedded system device. However, the topic of what is included in software architecture is complex. …
Safety is a challenging status to achieve and maintain, thus the need for the guidelines that collectively fall under the heading of Functional Safety (FS). DISTek has always been conscience of safety as it applies to the products developed for our customers. This includes implementing the various requirements and guidelines associated with Functional Safety, as expressed in documents, such as ISO 25119.
Here at DISTek we just competed our 24th full calendar year as a company, which means our 25th anniversary happens in 2017. We are excited to think about our future as we pass this milestone, but it is also healthy to step back and review what we did in 2016. We took some bumps and bruises along the way – as did many in the industries we serve – but we also had some exciting successes.
Welcome back to the blog! Today, I will be talking about how to operate a Cognex smart camera via a LabVIEW program. The way I will be communicating with the camera is via TCP/IP. There are other potential ways to communicate with the camera from LabVIEW, but this was determined to be the best way, giving us the most control over the camera. I will walk through some basic terminology that is necessary to discuss building a Cognex vision test. Then, I will create and set up a vision test and finally, I will briefly describe how to program LabVIEW to send/receive information to the camera and to trigger an image acquisition.
As promised, here’s my Part Two blog posting regarding the raspberrry pi.
The default kernel in Raspbian Jesse, the latest release of the raspberry pi’s official OS, could use a tune-up before being fit for duty running time-sensitive machine controls. On a vanilla Linux kernel program, latencies depend on everything running on the system making consistent and punctual tasks difficult to guarantee. The RT PREEMPT patch is a popular fix for this problem. The patch converts Linux into a fully preempt-able RTOS. If you want to control physical processes with your pi, as I intend to in DISTek’s training curriculum update, this is the way to go. But how big of a difference does it make on a pi?
Recently, I’ve been launching a little office project to develop a new training curriculum for DISTek engineers. Because it is hands-on training, it will require a toolchain. Since our customers use everything from off-the-shelf professional solutions to home-brewed ones, it’s important to prevent the nuances of a new toolchain from being a distraction in the training’s purpose of conveying good software practices and controls concepts.
