Skip to main content

Category Archives: Blog

Tis the Season for Tech Toys

Posted on December 16, 2015 - 4:14 am by

With our youngest just off to college, we’re well beyond Santa at our house, but I still like to do a bit of virtual window shopping for toys, especially to see what’s out there that appeals to my techie, gadget sense. So I was happy to see a write-up on gizmag in which Simon Crisp picked his Top Ten Eleven tech toys for the 2015 holiday season. (No, I’ve never heard of a “Top Eleven” list either.)

As a car buff, I liked the look of Anki Overdrive, a slot-less car track on which you control the cars via an Android or iOS device. Lego Dimensions is video game, but – as that word “Dimensions” implies – it also includes Lego bricks and figures that work with it via a physical portal. I like that it combines the virtual with the physical.

Anyone old enough to remember the old Mattel ViewMaster needs to know that this is not the static slide viewer of yore. There’s now a VR edition that’s a virtual reality viewer.  (You can’t expect kids today to be all that excited by a 3D picture of Old Faithful or Mount Rushmore now, can you?)

For Star Wars fans, Sphero has a robotic ball of BB-8 from The Force Awakens. Like many other techie toys, you’ll need an iOS or Android smart device to control it. (I guess those are now household givens for kids!) I can see that this one would captivate the kids, but drive the dogs crazy. If you prefer your robots to resemble dinosaurs, there’s the WowWee MiPosaur. This has the advantage that, while it requires a smartphone app if you want to operate it with any degree of precision, you can actually get it to do plenty through track ball and gesture controls. This makes it seem rather old-fashioned and quaint, doesn’t it? With Meccanoid, Mecanno has moved from the realm of the mechanical to the realm of the robotic. Wish I’d had one of these when I was a kid. If you’re sensing a robotics theme in this list, you’d be right. Dash and Dot will help younger kids learn about coding and robotics. The i-Que Intelligent Robot is “intelligent” enough to recognize your speech and answer questions. (It sounds a bit like “Embedded Barbie,” which I wrote about a couple of months back.)

Back to toys that require a smart device (in this case, an iPad), there are educational games – spelling, drawing, math, physics – from Osmo. As with Lego Dimensions, the games (most of them) need a physical playset in order to work. LeapFrom Epic is a tablet for kids too young (ages 4-8) for an iPad or other Internet-enabled smart device.

And then there’s the Parrott Airborne Night Mini-Drone. Easy enough to imagine that, for all the potential hazards we hear associated with them, there will be plenty of drones under the Christmas tree this year. And they probably won’t last that long under the tree: they’ll be out in the backyard, or in the park, in the field or on the beach. This one is on the low end – you can’t fly it that long or that high, and the pictures it takes aren’t great. (Not to mention that the only review on Amazon that I saw is one-star.) But tell me that people aren’t going to be having fun with drones this Christmas.

The Kitchen of the Future (according to IKEA)

Posted on December 9, 2015 - 5:00 am by

I recently came across an article (published last spring) on IKEA’s “Concept Kitchen 2025”, a collaboration between IKEA, IDEO and some university student designers. It’s all a bit Jetsons, but quite interesting, that’s for sure.

The centerpiece of the Concept Kitchen is, as it should be, the kitchen table. But the Table For Living isn’t just any old table.

“It packs a camera-equipped projector that both shows recipes on its surface and recognizes ingredients, giving you an idea of what to make with what you have on hand. There’s an induction cooktop hidden in the table, too, so you wouldn’t have to run between counters to get that hot stew ready.” (Source: Engadget)

Before picking out a recipe for you based on the tomato you have sitting around, the system will also factor in how long you have to devote to cooking. So I guess if you only have a couple of minutes, you’ll be advised to eat the tomato as-is, with a saltshaker to sprinkle on to taste. And if you have longer – and you’ve got pasta and cheese on your shelves – it might send you a recipe for a simple spaghetti dish.

I was going to say that the cheese would be in your fridge, but in the Concept Kitchen, fridges may be a thing of the past. Instead, food will be stored in smart containers. It will come in a package with an RFID sticker on it. You place the food in the smart container, slap the RFID sticker on the outside, and place it on a smart shelf (equipped with sensors).  “The shelves will simply ‘read’ the sticker’s RFID storage instructions and adjust the temperature accordingly.” (Source: ConceptKitchen2025)

The kitchen also features a composter and a non-organic waste system that will figure out your waste materials, crushing it, vacuum packing it, and sealing it in a bio-polymer tube. No more big blue recycle boxes on the curb! Then there’s the sink that includes the ability to reuse relatively clean “grey water”, while sending “badly contaminated black water” to a treatment facility. (I’m having a hard time coming up with something in your kitchen that might result in “badly contaminated black water.” That’s got to be some pretty lousy cooking…)

Wish I’d found more technical details on the camera set up, etc. But even without getting into the nitty-gritty, it’s very interesting to read about possible future usage of sensor, camera, RFID and other technologies. Who knows, maybe when they start to implement Concept Kitchen 2025, they’ll ask Critical Link for some help.

Securing the IoT

Posted on December 2, 2015 - 5:00 am by

One of the downsides of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the often flimsy security that comes along with them. This is especially true on the consumer side. Before we ever heard of the IoT, there was M2M (Machine to Machine). Security was a concern because M2M was doing important “stuff” – e.g., supply chain management, traffic control. Many IoT apps are consumer based and are not considered especially critical. More focus is typically paid on the user experience than on the apps technical underpinnings. The developers of these apps aren’t likely to be security experts, and they may be working on their own or part of a small team without deep security knowledge. Thus, in many cases security gets short shrift. Overall, whether the “things” in the IoT are in your house or on your person, or in industrial, transportation, or health care setting, security needs to be factored in.

An article by Ben Dickson that appeared in Tech Crunch earlier this week took the security issue on.

He led with an interesting finding:

“According to a survey by Auth0 [an identity management company], more than 50 percent of consumers and 90 percent of developers are skeptical about IoT security. (Source: Tech Crunch)”

Securing the IoT will be a complex endeavor, and to help us parse through the issue, Ben broke things down into a number of categories (and lists some vendors, which I won’t get into here).

Dealing with network connectivity threats. The fact that IoT devices are always on/always connected “makes them especially vulnerable to breaches from outside attackers or from compromised devices sharing the same network.” Given lack of security expertise on the part of many IoT app developers – and the pressures they feel to get products quickly to market – the answer may be ready-made, off-the-shelf network security packages that can be plugged and played.

On device data protection. Some data needs protection more than other data. (You probably care more about your health information than you do about info on what sports teams you follow.) Encryption technology will be moving onto IoT devices.

Device isolation. “Without isolation, IoT devices allow attackers to move laterally across a network after they gain an entry point. This way, hackers infiltrate one device and start probing the entire system until they find the real prize, e.g. a database or repository that contains sensitive customer or business data.” To remedy this situation, one company Dickson mentioned is developing a home WiFi router with a built-in intrusion detection system.

Other security issues include the number of IoT devices on which the firmware can’t be patched or updated; another is all that data being grabbed from IoT apps and sent to the cloud.

Lots to think about here…

Engineering and the VW Scandal

Posted on November 25, 2015 - 5:45 am by

As an engineer who’s also a “car guy”, I’ve monitored the VW emissions scandal with some degree of sadness. I’ve always been proud of being an engineer, and one of my points of pride has been that our profession has a reputation for honesty – almost to a fault (as in being blunt, which some might say is an engineering characteristic). Sure, there are black hat hackers who use their engineering smarts to no good end, but mostly we’re an honest bunch.

So I was disappointed when, earlier this fall, there was the major news that VW had been cheating on the emissions testing for its diesel vehicles. I’ve seen the finger pointed at “rogue software engineers”, but also (and, to me, more likely) at pressure from management. Whether the engineers were acting on their own, giving in to management pressures, or following “orders from headquarters,” it was engineers who did the ugly deed.

Of course, it was also engineers who uncovered the fraud: University of West Virginia researchers working on a project for the International Council on Clean Transportation. Their curiosity and thoroughness – another couple of characteristics associated with engineers – prompted them to really drill down on the claims VW was making.

Then a couple of weeks back, we learned of yet another emissions scandal – this one involving 800,000 gasoline-fueled vehicles sold in the European market.

“An internal investigation at Volkswagen has seen engineers begin to come forward and admit they had a hand in the cheating. Tweaking tire pressures and mixing fuel with motor oil are just two of the ways they’ve explained this was done. Apparently mixing fuel and motor oil allows a vehicle to run more smoothly and produce lower emissions, as does raising tire pressure by 3.5 bar.” (Source: geek.com)

This time, the engineers who fessed up pointed directly at the now-resigned CEO for setting a way too aggressive:

… “a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 30% by this year. A goal that Volkswagen engineers knew they had little chance of achieving legally, but ‘did not dare to tell him.’”

I would hope that, if I were in this position, I would have blown the whistle earlier. But the culture of not pushing back, and not speaking up, may have been too strong at VW. Disastrously so.

In any case, all the reading I’ve been doing about VW got me to thinking about Critical Link’s Ethics Policy, which says that:

Critical Link was founded and has been built on the highest standards of technical excellence and ethical business conduct.  The success of the Company is a reflection of our adherence to those standards. Critical Link depends on the judgment and high personal standards of each of its employees in conducting business with integrity and in compliance with the law.

As a representative of Critical Link, each individual employee has a personal responsibility for both the integrity and the consequences of his or her actions.  Additionally, Critical Link makes every effort to ensure that we select partners, suppliers and vendors who we do business with that share our ethics and values.

Of course, there are words on paper, and words in action, but we believe we have both going for us.

Still, it never hurts to think these things through, especially in light of the completely unethical actions on the part of VW, actions that may even be jeopardizing the company’s long term viability.

I’m still proud of my profession but, as I said, it never hurts to think these things through every once in a while.

 

More on ARM and the Internet of Things

Posted on November 18, 2015 - 5:49 am by

In September, I had a post on ARM and the Internet of Things (IoT). We’re interested in ARM, of course, because we have a number of ARM-based SOMs – the MitySOM-5CSx, the MitySOM-335x, and the MityDSP-L138 – and because, over time, I believe that the IoT will become synonymous with computing, and we’ll no longer talk about IoT at all!

We didn’t attend last week’s ARM TechCon, so I didn’t get to hear Mike Muller, ARM’s CTO give his keynote. One of his focuses was on the security issue, which has been an ongoing issue for IoT  apps – especially the consumer-oriented ones that have been leaving people’s homes and wallets vulnerable.

At the conference, ARM:

“… announced a Web service that uses a smartphone to authenticate and provision a consumer IoT device securely. Next year, ARM plans to add more Web services for provisioning and managing IoT devices.

One goal of the new services is “to make IoT look like the mobile Web not embedded control” for millions of app developers because “they are the people who will drive most of the innovation in the future,” Muller said.

Last year, ARM launched Mbed, its own operating system for IoT nodes. “We see a huge hole in the ecosystem of [OSes] working with all the standards and security — it’s a multiyear effort so these devices get easy to build,” said Christian Flautner, manager of ARM’s IoT initiative in a press Q&A after the keynote.” (Source: EE Times)

We’re not on the consumer-based end of the app spectrum, but no one’s going to argue that better IoT security isn’t going to be a good thing.

Muller had other things to say, including some discussion of ARM-based servers. ARM believes that, by 2020, they’ll have 25% of the server processor market, as well as 45% of the processors embedded in communications gear by that date. This latter dovetails with the growing interest we’re seeing in ARM processors from our clients. We still have customers using DSP, but the future looks more ARM-based.

 

 

Electronics obsolescence and military technology

Posted on November 11, 2015 - 5:00 am by

Today, we celebrate Veterans Day.  So now is as good a time as any to focus for a bit on military technology. An article by Editorial Director John McHale in Military Embedded Systems 2015 Resource Guide raised an interesting and provocative point. In Tech mergers & military electronics obsolescence, McHale writes that one repercussion of the recent semiconductor merger and acquisition activity may well be that components used throughout the military technology supply chain may become obsolete earlier than planned. An acquiring company may have other plans for a product than the plans that the company being overtaken had in mind. A long life expectancy can easily be replaced by an end-of-life strategy.

McHale cites an older but telling example, one dating back to 2008.

“…when Apple Inc. bought PA Semi (Palo Alto Semiconductor), which made low-power 64-bit processors called PWRficient – high performance, low power, and loved by the military embedded computing com­munity – but Apple only wanted the engineering talent, not the products. Defense electronics suppliers then had to scramble and relaunch product families with Intel and Freescale tech, but they still suffered losses as a result.”

Back in the day, the military was a driving force for technology development. This is no longer the case. Today, “the military is a consumer of technology just like the rest of us and is also subject to the whims of commercial markets.” Today, contractors and subs use off-the-shelf components, not bespoke parts built explicitly for military applications. This is fine from an initial cost and efficiency perspective, but not so fine if you’re building an application that’s got to last for 30 years. I.e., well beyond the shelf-life of your typical consumer app.

With everything that’s been going on – Intel/Altera; Avago Technologies/Broadcom; NXP/Freescale – more obsolescence and more disruption are likely to ensue.

As McHale points out, “defense electronics suppliers get obsolescence.” The question becomes how the inevitable changes and swap-outs needed when something that contains obsolescent components needs to survive long term.

Anyway, I’d like to close with a shout out to the millions of veterans who’ve served our country over the years, with a special nod to all the Critical Link employees who have served so honorably in the military, as well as to all our family members who have also served our country.

I’ll end with saying that it’s an honor for us Critical Link have played our small role over the years in working on components for defense systems.

Happy Veterans Day to all!

 

Kangaroo Collision Avoidance

Posted on November 4, 2015 - 5:00 am by

To me, kangaroos are one of those goofy-looking animals that manage to put a smile on your face. But if you live – and drive – in Australia, they’re not a laughing matter. In fact, it’s reported that there are 20,000 vehicle accidents involving kangaroos. Based on the differences between Australia’s population and the US population, that would translate into 275,000 kangaroo-vehicle collisions.

Kangaroos on the road are not as dangerous as deer are in the US. Here, there are roughly 200 human fatalities each year in accidents involving deer; there’s rarely a kangaroo-related human death Down Under.

Nonetheless, it’s considered a major problem for drivers in kangaroo-heavy areas.

Up until now, Australian drivers could install roo bars – metal grills – on the front of their vehicles. But there’s now a more high-tech solution on the horizon.

Volvo is studying kangaroo behavior so that it can fine tool its sensors to better respond to how kangaroos behave:

“Martin Magnusson, Senior Safety Engineer at Volvo Cars notes, “In Sweden we have done research involving larger, slower moving animals like moose, reindeer, and cows which are a serious threat on our roads. Kangaroos are smaller than these animals and their behavior is more erratic. This is why it’s important that we test and calibrate our technology on real kangaroos in their natural environment.”” (Source: Car and Driver)

Volvo will be adapting their existing object-detecting technology, which combines a radar sensor to detect objects with a camera to identify which way the object is moving. The car then automatically applies the brakes. Even if the object – another car, a human, or a kangaroo – is hit, it’s at a slower rate, so the impact is less.

“”The system processes 15 images every second and can react to an emergency in half the time of a human,” the company said. “It takes 1.2 seconds for an attentive driver to detect danger and then apply the brakes, compared to about 0.05 seconds for the computer system.”” (Source: CNET)

The automotive industry is among the most aggressive in terms of using technology. It’s been making cars easier to drive (hands-off parallel parking) and safer to operate (collision avoidance technology).

Unfortunately, most of the animals killed by cars are dogs and cats. Because hitting such a small animal doesn’t tend to cause a lot of vehicle damage or many fatalities (other than to the pets), there’s little specific focus on technology that will help prevent these types of accidents, which are certainly devastating for pet owners.

Maybe someday.

In the meantime, maybe Volvo can turn its attention to deer-collision avoidance. Not as big as moose, not as erratic as kangaroos, but pretty dangerous.

As someone who lives in deer country, I know plenty of people who’d welcome it.

Trick or Treat

Posted on October 28, 2015 - 4:57 am by

One of the things I miss most about having little guys around is the excitement around Halloween. Deciding on the costumes. Carving the pumpkins. How thrilled the kids are to be out after dark, going crazy. Going through the loot bags to see what the night’s haul was. (Grabbing a few goodies once the kids are in bed.)

Let’s face it, few holidays are as much out-and-out fun as Halloween is.

Even though Halloween is not quite the big deal it used to be at our house, I still got a kick out of looking through Makezine to check out their ideas for the holiday.

If you’re not familiar with Makezine, it’s pretty straightforward. As their tagline says, “we are all makers,” and Makezine brings together “Makers who bring a DIY mindset to technology.”

All the Halloween ideas on the site aren’t all that techie in the current sense. Some are mechanical, like Jeremy Brandt’s pumpkin with the hand-cranked moving eyes and tongue. As Jeremy points out, if you didn’t feel like hand cranking, you could add a motor. Better yet, you “could potentially hook up a passive infrared sensor and even lights to react to trick-or-treaters automatically.”

Further up the tech chain, there’s Dale Rooney’s instructions on how to set up a music and light display using an MSGEQ7 audio frequency analyzing chip, three MOSFETs, and an Adafruit Mini Audio FX board to trigger music and drive RGB lighting strips timed to the music. Cool!

Then there’s Andrew Terranova’s animatronic skull candy jar. It uses Passive Infrared sensors that can tell when a trick-or-treater is approaching. The top of the skull pops open and invites a kid to take a piece of candy. (Not for real little ones, that’s for sure.)

There’s also info on how to create a costume for your drone and, if you want something a little less complicated (but probably harder to do) instructions on how to make an origami bat.

Bwahaha!

Anyway, have fun taking a look at Makezine. And Happy Halloween.

 

 

 

 

TI Announces Sitara AM57x

Posted on October 21, 2015 - 5:22 am by

Don’t know if you caught TI’s announcement last week, but there’s a new kid in town in their Sitara processor family.

“Sitara AM57x processors are designed for a broad range of embedded and industrial applications through their unique heterogeneous architecture including ARM Cortex -A15 cores for high-performance processing and running a high-level operating system (HLOS). Additionally, AM57x processors integrate TI’s C66x digital signal processors (DSPs) for analytics and real-time computation, programmable real-time units (PRU) and ARM Cortex-M4 cores for control functions, and video and graphic accelerators for advanced user interfaces and multimedia applications.” (Source: TI news release)

TI believes that the AM57x will be a game changer for the embedded market. Time will tell if this turns out to be the case, but this SoC is certainly going to pack a performance punch. As we continue to see the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) evolve, there will certainly be demand for the advanced SoC offers. Beyond the industrial IoT, the applications that the AM57x is aimed at include factory automation, machine vision, human machine interface, robotics, and medical imaging.

Along with the Soc, TI is bringing out a new Processor SDK which will work across TI’s Sitara and DSP portfolios.

We’ve worked with the Sitara family before. Our MitySOM-335x is based on the Sitarta AM335x ARM Cortex-A8-based processor, and the MitySOM-1808 features the Sitara AM1808 ARM-based CPU.

The AM57x is generating plenty of interest, and some of our clients have been talking to us about it. We have no immediate plans for building a SoM based on the AM57x, but we’re keeping an eye on it, and an ear to the ground for opportunities.

28,000 Sensors? That’s one really smart building.

Posted on October 14, 2015 - 5:00 am by

The Edge in Amsterdam is the world’s greenest building. BREEAM – the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology, a British rating system – awarded The Edge a sustainability score of 98.4, the highest ever given.

It may also be the world’s smartest building.

What makes it so smart is the sensors – all 28,000 of them – keeping tabs on motion, light, temperature, humidity, infrared…

The building’s main tenant is Deloitte, and they built a smartphone app that pretty much determines where each employee is going to spend their day. When you arrive at work, it directs your car to its parking space. (Sensors in the garage turn the lights on to guide your way, then dim once you’ve passed through.) Once you’ve parked, the app assigns you to your short term home away from home:

“Workspaces are based on your schedule: sitting desk, standing desk, work booth, meeting room, balcony seat, or “concentration room.” Wherever you go, the app knows your preferences for light and temperature, and it tweaks the environment accordingly.”(Source: Bloomberg)

In what sounds to me an awful lot like musical chairs, there are 2,500 Deloitte employees who work at The Edge – and only 1,000 desks. Obviously, this doesn’t encourage much personalization of the workspace. In fact, you don’t even get your own locker, just a place to stow your gear for the day.

On the plus side, the coffee machines remember how you take your coffee or like your espresso.

Everything in the building is tracked, from when to change the towels in the rest rooms to when to fill the coffee machines to how many people are working each day. On days when fewer people are there, parts of the building will be shut down. And throughout the day, sensors track activity. At the end of the days, the cleaners (and cleaning robots) are sent to the areas that got the most use during the day. (By the way, one of the ways they figure out whether a room is occupied is to monitor the carbon dioxide levels.)

I’m not all that wild about the musical-chairs workspace, but the building is pretty cool. (Here’s a link to The Edge site.  And there’s a more technical article on Gizmag that you might be interested in.)

Product Quote Engineering Support Inquiry General Contact Email Us