Category Archives: Blog

Off and on, I’ve been seeing articles on energy harvesting. Energy harvesting (sometimes called energy scavenging, which doesn’t sound quite as good) occurs when energy from ambient sources – solar, wind, thermal – is captured for use in small wireless devices, like a Fitbit or even a smartphone, and in sensor networks, that have very low energy requirements. Unlike energy sources tied to extractive fuels like coal and oil, the energy sources tapped by energy harvesting is free.

One of the articles that I saw a couple of months ago, which was sitting on my blogging back burner, was one on the development of artificial “trees”. Of course, when you hear the words artificial and tree together, you think artificial Christmas tree (or at least I did), but the artificial trees in question here are “tree like structures” that don’t really look like trees. You tell me: does this look like a tree?

The trees have been developed by University of Ohio researchers, and will “be used at the small scale to power sensors that monitor the structural integrity of buildings, bridges and other civil engineering structures.”

“’Buildings sway ever so slightly in the wind, bridges oscillate when we drive on them and car suspensions absorb bumps in the road,’ said project leader Ryan Harne, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State, and director of the Laboratory of Sound and Vibration Research, in a statement. ‘In fact, there’s a massive amount of kinetic energy associated with those motions that is otherwise lost. We want to recover and recycle some of that energy.’ Harne envisions tiny “trees” feeding voltages to a sensor on the underside of a bridge, or on a girder deep inside a high-rise building. In this way structural monitoring systems could be powered by the vibrations they are monitoring.”
(Source: EE Times)

This is certainly an interesting application, and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of them.

What’s held energy harvesting back has been that it has been more costly when compared to battery power, but this is changing. But as prices go down – and devices become less power hungry –  adoption will be more widespread. This will impact the semi-conductor market. According to Semico Research firm, energy harvesting “will drive semiconductor sales worth $3 billion in 2020,” substantial growth from the $200 million value in 2015.” (Source: EE Times)

One great thing about energy harvesting – other than the free part – is that the sources of energy are renewable. Whether those artificial trees really look like trees won’t matter. They’ll be tapping into – make that scavenging – an excellent source of power.

Many years ago, I heard it said that, at the time of the introduction of the steam engine in England, the changes over just one generation were so profound that a parent born before the Industrial Revolution had more in common with someone from the Stone Age than they did with their own children. With technology moving so fast, it’s sometimes hard not think that the same thing is happening now. Maybe the changes aren’t quite as profound – as someone who was born during the era when computers became a daily reality, I still do have plenty in common with my digital native kids. (They may think of me as Stone Age, but I know better.)

Major changes do seem to be occurring more rapidly than they did when the steam engine led to the emergence of a manufacturing economy.

These musings came to mind when I saw an article on neuro computing on EE Times.

The article was about IBM’s “brain-like chips”, which are being used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) “for simulating the deterioration of our aging nuclear arsenal—currently the most difficult problem for supercomputers to solve worldwide.”

The new neuro computing technology will be concentrated in areas of importance to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): cyber security, nuclear deterrent, non-proliferation.

According to Dharmendra Modha, IBM fellow and chief scientist for brain-inspired computing at IBM Research-Almaden:

“NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program will evaluate machine learning applications, deep learning algorithms and architectures plus conduct general computing feasibility studies. ASC is a cornerstone of NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without underground testing.” (Source: EE Times)

IBM’s neuromorphic computer packs an awful lot of punch in a small form factor, and with low power consumption:

“The 16-chip neuromorphic system represents 50 times the computing power of today’s computers,” Modha told us. And consumes just “1/10th the power of a dim lightbulb.”

This neuro computing – which IBM has branded True North – deploys “deep learning supported by hardware that emulates 16 million neurons and 5 billion synapses.” IBM believes that their approach will prove better than massive multicores and other processing schemes.

The article gets into some detail on how TrueNorth works, and is definitely worth a read. (There’s also an info-graphic if you don’t have time to read the full piece.)

I’ve seen an awful lot of technology changes in my lifetime. With our smartphones, we’re all carrying the equivalent of yesterday’s mainframe in our pocket. And there’s no underestimating the changes that have been brought about by the growth of social media. At Critical Link, we’re constantly seeing changes in computing power, size, and power consumption, and incorporating these changes in our SoMs.

But “50 times the computing power” and “1/10^th the power of a dim lightbulb”?

Easy to see how you can start to feel like you’re a Stone Ager!

Once again, we’ve posted an article on the ARM Connected Community info forum. This time, we explored the Total Cost of Ownership for a single board solution vs. a System on Module (SOM) solution.  Our analysis turned out to be pretty interesting. If you just look at the recurring costs of both approaches, the single board will be lot cheaper. But when you factor in the engineering costs, things look different, and a SOM becomes the way to go for many industrial and medical applications (those with large, but not astronimcal, consumer-market level volumes).  There are other benefits as well, including time to market and the fact that using a SOM will let your engineering staff focus on what’s unique about your product, without having to worry about reinventing the wheel. That’s our job, and with our SOMs, we’ve done it!

Anyway, as we mentioned with respect to our prior article, there’s nothing particularly ARM-related about it, so don’t be turned away if you’re not doing any ARM development. The article can be found here.

For all the software guys and gals out there, earlier this week, I saw a somewhat funny, somewhat cranky, and mostly insightful article by Jack Ganssle, which appeared on embedded.com.  His topic? How we name things – functions, variables, parameters, macros, identifiers – when we code.

Now coders tend, by their very nature, to be logical and to think things through. So it’s not as if no thought is given to naming. It’s just that, as Jack points out, what might seem logical to us may not be so logical to someone picking up the code and trying to figure out what’s going on when, years later, they inherit it.

Jack starts out with a critique of the names for the logging levels for the Linux printk function, starting with KERN_EMERG.

“What, exactly, does EMERG mean? Emergency? Emerging? Emergent? The latter sounds like part of the title of a horror movie.”

Okay, this is funny, but I think that most of us would see this and think “emergency,” which is, in fact, what it stands for. Still, the point it well taken.

He’s not arguing, by the way, for long names that spell everything out in hopes that this approach will “yield self-documenting code (which isn’t true).”

But all this abbreviating we do doesn’t help much either, since it can cause confusion. As in “emergency” vs. “emerging.”

As he says:

“The code has to do two things: work, and express its intent to a future version of yourself or to some poor slob faced with maintaining it all years from now after you’re long gone. If it fails to do either, it’s junk.”

Let’s all keep in mind that the naming goal should always be clarity, and sometimes it’s best to add a few characters to help eliminate confusion.

The article is definitely worth a look, as are the comments.

Anyway, I was discussing this topic with a friend, and she told me about a couple of mainframe software coders she worked with back in the day. One would write error messages using non-English words, and/or throw in literary references. Her favorite was the message that said “something gang agley here,” which combined a foreign language that few were familiar with (Scots) and a nod to Scots poet Robert Burns, who wrote “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley,” which means often go awry. A couple of things worth noting here: error messages really aren’t the place to show off your obscure knowledge, and, two, an error message that says ‘something’s gone wrong’ isn’t exactly being informative, now is it?

The other guy she mentioned also got creative with error messages, but he went in for insults. As in “if you’re getting this error message, you’ve done something really stupid.” Just what one of your end-users or customers wants to see!

So, if you’d like to do some thinking about how you go about naming, take a look at Jack’s column. And when you’re writing error messages, keep in mind that the purpose is to inform, not confuse or insult.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Li-Fi lately, which is getting plenty of hype in the tech press. And why wouldn’t it be getting hyped? It promises to be 100x faster than standard Wi-Fi speeds. Which would make it pretty darned fast. We’re talking instantaneous download of full-length videos here. (Or, as it said in the article I saw on Yahoo on this topic, speeds that are speedy enough to “download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second.” Not that I have the need to “download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second, but cool technology nonetheless.)

Just what is Li-Fi?

For starters, the “Li” stands for Light, as in Light Fidelity, based on Visible Light Communication (VLC), which uses visible light between 400 and 800 terahertz.

“The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs — which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second — to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the “digital equivalent of Morse Code”.”

Much of what’s been happening with Li-Fi occurred in labs, but it started coming into real-world settings in 2015, when testing occurred in some museums and malls in France, which is a hub spot for Li-Fi. It’s also been tested out in other countries – Belgium, Estonia, and India were named, and:

“Dutch medical equipment and lighting group Philips is reportedly interested in the technology and Apple may integrate it in its next smartphone, the iPhone7, due out at the end of the year, according to tech media.”

So Li-Fi will be getting here sooner rather than later.

Proponents of the technology point out that as the IoT expands – the predicted number of devices by 2020 that I’ve seen floating around is 50 billion – Wi-Fi will start running up against a depleted supply or radio wave spectrums.

On the downside, Li-Fi (unlike Superman’s vision) cannot go through walls, which would mean, if you had it in your home, you’d need to be set up for it in every room where you wanted access. Devices would also have to be equipped with a dongle or some other type of add-on technology in order to work. This would up the cost, at least in the short term. If Li-Fi takes off, the technology to make it work would eventually become embedded.

So, of course, we’ll be working with it!

Despite the limitations, there are a number of areas where Li-Fi will be very useful right off the bat. For example: a hospital setting, given that it wouldn’t interfere with medical equipment. And because “Li-Fi can potentially be directed and beamed at a particular user”, it would be good for security and privacy.

For now, it’s mostly lab science, but this may be the year that Li-Fi starts to break through.

Let there be Li-Fi!

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If you’d like to read more, I found that Science Alert, Hackaday, and Tech World had interesting pieces.