CeBIT 08

The CeBIT show was truly a spectacular event. I would compare it to the Comdex show of years ago. It was largely IT focussed, with many things being split off into separate shows now. This included:

- embedded systems totally moved to Embedded World
- consumer electronics largely moved to a Berlin show
- competing Auto electronics shows
- competing industrial shows

The coolest things for me?

- 3D Plasma TV - not shabby, good view angle
- Lane change and wander warning electronics for cars
- A rack of Sun servers (complete rack, 19" style) running on 1095-1097W ... thank multicore.
- Low cost bluetooth chips from Korea ($4.80 USD in 10k without negotiation)
- 50 Chineese vendors charged for IP violations with a 5 year penalty in jail waiting for them!!!

I think trade shows are still fashionable in Europe - its too bad we don't have travel budgets for this in North America any longer. It was educational.

Embedded World 08

Embedded World 08 was an exciting event - many thousands of attendees, all major exhibitors and much more. There was exciting new technology too - PIC32 was being pushed along with new MSP430 solutions and new offerings from nearly all the microcontroller vendors including: Renesas, Fujitsu, Luminary, Toshiba, NEC, and many more. Clearly microcontrollers, DSCs and DSPs are still hot.

One of the most interesting things I saw was the Luminary products. They are going to challenge the traditional microcontroller vendors with Arm M3 Cortex designs (32 bit design) at 8 bit prices. It should be interesting to watch.

The most interesting part for us was the fact that nobody knows that there is a tiny tiny embedded Linux compatible RTOS called Unison or DSPnano that they could use in the microcontroller space where other solutions simply don't exist. The microcontroller vendors understand the need but the customers don't know there is a solution. That is our challenge.

And Elke Antonia Bergmann, thank you for the great job at the show! You're the best! Now how can I hire more people with this attitude?

Technology Changes For Robots

Robots need to be low cost but today's technologies are not getting us there fast enough. The main reason for this is that the architectural approach is incorrect. Robots need completely distributed systems to reduce cost and allow computational engines to become more specialized.

Typical robots today (of the experimental and service varieties) use a central cpu, often an x86 variant, and run Linux of some flavor. They may have some type of RTOS to try and provide better performance to replace Linux but the basic message is that they require a big board and have expensive processors.

A far superior approach is to separate the system into four subsystems. One subsystem is dedicated to motion control, a second is dedicated to power management, third is dedicated to sensors and the forth is the brain of the system. These four subsystems are interconnected and all must be there for complete functioning of the robot.

By separating the systems out, there is a big advantage in that the motion control and any lower bandwidth local sensors near them can be run by a single microcontroller. This single microcontroller can be extremely low cost and a distributed bus or network can be used to communicate among the controllers. This provides high precision motion control in a distributed architecture at very low cost.

In the case of low bandwidth sensors, they are layered on top of the motion network cutting costs. For high bandwidth sensors, a direct high bandwidth connection to the core logic processor is required. For example, Ladar and vision systems require high bandwidth connections to the core logic processor, presumably with integrated hardware based accelerators to speed this processing.

A power management system is required to control power sequencing, special mechanical locks, recharging, and various other power related features. This network can coordinate actions based on the oversite of the core logic processor. This off loads all the power management tasks from the core logic processor, avoiding real-time power management interrupts and improving power management response. Again this is a low cost $2-3 dollar processor for each supply including networking costs.

In terms of the core logic processor, this is a real challenge. The current approaches simply don't offer the kind of performance which is really required. In addition the cost for these processors is generally high. We all need to create new technologies to overcome this unknown.

Sometimes People Surprise Me

When people are angry reasonable people do unreasonable things. For the past month I have been dealing with the fallout of a malicious attack on our internal systems web site and support server.

To our customers I offer my sincere apology for the demise of our web site for the past week. We have done our best to restore it quickly but all takes time. It will return very soon.

Initially I thought that these attacks were simply prompted by anger, but upon further investigation I discovered that fraud was at the heart of their plans. All our customers can rest assured that the perpetrators of these crimes will be dealt with by the courts and will be held responsible for their crimes.

To all of you out there, I recommend the following:

• separate system administration from operational personnel
• triple check all backups
• never subcontract system administration work short term
• automate changing all passwords so it can be done across your systems instantly if possible

RoweBits Year In Review

The best of the year was:

- violin playing robots from Toyota started just 3 years ago
- Fanuc fast arms - prize winner in Japan
- utility experiment proving power negotiation pays - driving smart everything electrical in the future
- more and better robots everywhere

The best from RoweBots was:

- Launch of DSPnano v2 - DSP RTOS for tiny tiny Linux compatible DSP applications
- Completion of Unison v4 - RTOS for tiny tiny Linux compatible applications
- Tighter robotics focus with lower cost software solutions packaged for applications - coming soon!

Autonomous Robots Starting To Become Real

A recent post related to portable supercomputers shows just how easy and inexpensive it is becoming to produce high performance computers capable of doing advanced analysis on their environment using smart sensors.

If you can build a machine so inexpensively ($2470) which can have twice the power of deep blue and be a checkable airline bag, we are definitely close to a breakthrough.

According to James Albus (of NIST) another two orders of magnitude should do it and service robots should be possible.

Coming to your home sometime soon....

And now the floodgates start to open... Tilera Ships

Hey;

Finally the new Sun chip has some competition. There is a good link dealing with this product here.

I am a bit surprised that the chip doesn't just have memory, not L2 if it is intended for embedded applications. I think the real story is that it is intended to be more general purpose but the embedded market for H.264 and other applications seemed a bit easier to penetrate near term.

In the future expect to see chips like this optimized for embedded applications.