FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we bring you a duo of dynamic articles of interest for your embedded development desires.
First up, we take a look at Wind River's mid-summer announcement blitz and examine the implications for the industry's
future. If WR is any indication, our embedded software development environments will contain a mixture of open source and
proprietary components that allow us to take advantage of many of the best features of both worlds.
Next up, we have a contributed piece from Arun Mulphur and Zijad Galijasevic of The Mathworks that discusses the
development of embedded motor control applications. An increasing number of systems require sophisticated control of
motors and the model-based design techniques discussed in this article can help you get those applications running faster
and more reliably.
Also, for those of you that might occasionally seek the geeky (or at least the Rube Goldbergian),
we're transmitting this editor blurb today from inside an Airstream trailer in a remote location in the Utah desert. Atop
our roof sits a high-gain cellular antenna connected to a 38dB bi-directional amplifier/repeater which seems to provide
adequate signal for a Palm Treo to establish a GPRS connection. That GPRS connection is used by a laptop which, in turn,
is serving up a shared connection via a portable Linksys Wi-Fi hub to my laptop. If anyone out there in technophile
land can think of a more convoluted solution to this problem, please drop us an e-mail at
comments@embeddedtechjournal.com
Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Wind River Zooms In
Increased Focus on Consumer and Networking
In a flurry of midsummer nights' press releases, the industry's largest
device software company further defined its future directions, giving the rest of the industry
something to ponder as it redefines the commercial and open-source co-existence model. Wind River has
been re-inventing itself continuously for the last few years, changing from offering highly
proprietary, mostly closed solutions to leading the charge for open source adoption, cooperation, and
interoperability. The move has been well received by the market as the big company's participation has
boosted the open source movement for embedded software development and has given developers of
embedded software (or "device software" according to WR) a host of new options in creating
their embedded systems. [more]
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Model-Based Design Shortens Development Time of Motor Control Applications
by Arun Mulpur, Ph.D. and Zijad Galijasevic, Ph.D., The MathWorks, Inc.
Introduction
Sophisticated motor controllers are being used in an increasingly wide range of applications to provide more complex
and accurate motion control, reduce energy consumption, and deliver many other benefits. These controllers are often based on 16- and
32-bit digital signal controllers (DSCs) that provide some application libraries but still require tools and methods for developing
and implementing advanced motor and motion control algorithms and integrating various control functions and peripherals. Development
time and expense is increased by the fact that errors in design and integration are usually not detected until code is run on actual
hardware. [more]
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