Dennis Ritchie: farewell and thank you

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, the world has had a reason to reflect on the significant impact some people have. Someone who made everything Steve Jobs did possible also passed away recently. On the 12 October 2011, Dennis Ritchie, the father of The C Programming Language, died at his home in Berkley Heights, New Jersey.

Beginning in 1970 and with the help of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie began the design and construction of a new programming language. It was based on a language developed by Ken Thompson dubbed B. So the next language was called C. And the reason they wanted to create a new language? They wanted to write the kernel for the powerful multi-user operating system UNIX. that was to replace MULTICS which Bell Labs were ending their involvement with in 1969, the same year man first stepped on the moon. And in doing so, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the framework on which all our modern computer and communications infrastructure are based.

Dennis Ritchie

The C Programming Language

The importance of The C Programming Language cannot be underestimated. Not only did it make UNIX possible, but it made UNIX possible on multiple computing platforms. It was also the foundation for higher level languages such as C++ and Java as well as most of the core infrastructure of the Internet is based on programs written in C.

A few additional reasons why C is so important:

• Microsoft used it to create their initial software offerings
• UNIX is the origin for OSX and iOS
• 80% of all embedded software is still written in C
• Our business writes the Embedded Software we create in C

The C programming language, Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie

The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie, was the language manual for C and was so well written that it made picking up the language easy and was one of the reasons for the rapid uptake of the language.

So much of our modern world depends on the work of Dennis Ritchie. And I along with many others are grateful. He may not have been the public figure that Steve Jobs was, but he is leaving a larger and more enduring legacy.

Here are some further accolades for Dennis Ritchie:

• Without Dennis Ritchie there would be no Jobs
• Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Jobs Stood On
• Dennis Ritchie, The Father Of C And C0-Developer of UNIX
• Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie
• Dennis Ritchie, Computer-Programming Pioneer
• Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer
• What we can learn from Dennis Ritchie
• Dennis Ritchie: the other man inside your iPhone
• Dennis Ritchie: Remembering another Computing Genius
• Dennis Ritchie Biography
• Dennis Ritchie Bell Labs

And finally the 1998 USA National Medal for Science and Technology received by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson for their creation of the UNIX operating system and The C Programming Language.

And Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie explain what was behind the development of the UNIX operating system

We stand on the shoulders of giants. And Dennis Ritchie was a giant amongst giants.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Casey Business Awards

Casey Business Awards 2011

Shar Balmes Mayor of Casey

Paul Higgins aka Futurist Paul

Manufacturer Of The Year

• source all the components including electronics components, case, labels, batteries and machined and LASER cut items
• get the PCBs loaded (we can handle small quantities in house but once you get over 30 PCB sets it becomes cheaper to use a dedicated SMT line)
• program, test and calibrate the loaded PCBs
• fit labels to the front chassis and then fit all the connectors, indicators and switches
• fit the battery to the case
• assembly the unit including the seals (this is an IP65 rated product)
• apply serial numbers
• final assembly and test then pack in shipping cartons with labels and matching serial numbers
• ship to client who then sells them direct to their customers

ABB CQ900R Smart Controller

Industrial Electronics

Industrial Electronics Future Award 2011

Electronics News Future Awards Industrial Electronics

The Electronics News Future Awards are the premier Electronics Design awards in Australia, a point that was made at the awards ceremony by one of the sponsors, Kontron. Kevin Gomez, Editor of Electronics News, speaking about the winners in each category said “These 6 projects represent some of the most outstanding work being done in Australia today”.

Future Awards Industrial Electronics Trophy

As well as handing out trophies, there were 3 keynote speakers and a roundtable discussion on the future of Australian Electronics Manufacturing. Electronics News are covering the outcome of the discussion in detail in their October magazine. We look forward to their coverage of this very important topic.

Electronics News have recently released profiles of each of the winning entries at Future Awards 2011: The Winners and Senator the Hon Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research; declared that the companies profiled by Electronics News showed that Australia can Win The Innovation Race.

We also appreciate the support from VECCI and ManufactureLink with their coverage of this success as well as the Star News Group.  The articles are at:

• Industrial Electronics Award VECCI
• National Industrial Electronics Award Manufacture Link
• Industrial Electronics Award Berwick Gazette
• They’re Bright Sparks Pakenham Gazette

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Casey Business Awards

In 2010 the City Of Casey had their inaugural Casey Business Awards. They awarded us Casey Business of the Year and also gave us the award for Business and Professional Services which we shared with A Better Dental Care. As part of the awards ceremony they had 10 second videos prepared for each finalist and a 15 second video prepared for each category winner.  So we have 3 videos to show covering our awards as finalist for Casey Manufacturer Of The Year, as finalist and winners of the Casey Business and Professional Services Award and our award as Casey Business Of The Year for 2010.

Although we went to some length to describe what we do, which is Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development for Australian Electronics Manufacturers who still make their products in Australia, some of the voiceover comments didn’t quite come out right. It makes it all the more obvious how clear and consistent you have to be in explaining what you do.

So if you need an Electronics Product then we can do way more than is articulated in these videos but you do get a chance to see us in action.

This first video covers our finalist selection for Casey Manufacturer Of The Year 2010.

This second video includes both the finalist and winner videos for the Casey Business and Professional Services Award 2010.

This third video was prepared to cover our win as Casey Business Of The Year for 2010.

We have found the City Of Casey to be a very supportive environment for local businesses and are pleased to be working with them now as a member of the Casey Economic Development Partnership.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Casey Business Of The Year 2010

Manufacture Link has recognised Successful Endeavours win as Casey Business Of The Year 2010 in their website news article Successful Endeavours wins 2010 Casey Business of the Year .

Manufacture Link is an initiative aimed at increasing the opportunity for local manufacture by allowing members to create company profiles that reflect their capabilities and to also post requests for quotation so that other members can bid on work they might not have found out about any other way.

We are very committed to manufacture in Australia and in particular we provide Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development for Australian Electronics Manufacturers.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Software Testing

I recently met with an Australian Software Development company, PepperStack, and we got onto the subject of Software Testing. As someone who began their career as an Electronics Hardware Engineer, one of the things I learnt was that you have to test thoroughly to be sure everything is working as it should be. With Electronics, if you make a mistake with an Engineering Calculation you can easily destroy things. This is sometimes referred to as “letting the smoke out”. So it was good to meet with others who believe in the same level of rigorous software unit, module and system testing that we do.

Some Engineering Humour

Which reminds me of a joke I once heard:

There are 3 Engineers in a car going for a drive. The first is a Mechanical Engineer, the second an Electronics Engineer and the third is a Software Engineer. Fortunately the Mechanical Engineer is driving because the brakes fail and they are going downhill.  The Mechanical Engineer eventually brings the car safely to a halt and gets out to examine the hydraulic systems.  The Electronics Engineer gets out and checks and body computer, ABS system and the power train CAN bus.  The Software Engineer stays in the car and when queried about it says that they should all just get back in the car and see if it happens again!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go at Software Engineers. The process of finding and eliminating faults is a very important part of the development cycle and is something that needs up front thinking and not just responding to symptoms.  And the more complex or sophisticated a system is, that harder it is to fully test every possible response to every possible stimuli and after a certain point it becomes impractical to have 100% Test Coverage (every line of code has been executed through all of the possible states).  The reason this is a bigger problem with Software Development is that the flexibility of software means that it is inherently complex and it takes skill and planning to manage that complexity so it is testable.

So here is the issue. More than any other discipline, faults can be experienced by an end user of a product under a situation or scenario you could not have proactively tested against before release.  There are many potential reasons for this including:

• change of hardware or operating system environment
• new standards or protocols
• the sheer number of potential combinations of drivers, peripherals, software and users
• the product being used for a purpose it wasn’t originally designed for
• gamma ray corruption of a memory location – I am getting esoteric now but in some areas like avionics and space this is a big threat

So how do you reduce the likelihood of these problems occurring?

Improving Software Quality

With many new products having Electronics and Embedded Software and the Software Development requiring 80% of the effort, it is important to delivery it as quickly and fault free as you can. The main weapons in your Software Quality arsenal have been known about for a long time but are, in our experience, just not used.  These are:

• Architectural Design – work out how the data and execution flow will happen and how you will manage the constraints
• Functional Decomposition – divide and conquer but with an emphasis on how each module fits into the system and how the interfaces work in detail
• Error handling - who will decide what to do with response codes – again this is data and execution flow and part of the architecture. In many cases exception management is at least 50% of the project.
• Have an Integration Test Plan – some thing that proves the data and execution flow matches the architectural design.  Too often “it builds” seems to be good enough here.
• Unit Test modules – so you remove all the issues before adding them to the integration
• Do the Integration Tests before you try system testing
• Design modules so you can integrate them as shells then add functionality down the track
• Have NVM and configuration data available at the beginning of the project and not as an after thought at the end
• Have a System Test Plan and use it
• Use some of the good practices of Test Driven Development – run the tests every time you change the code
• Have a rationale for what level of Code Coverage you can accept
• Have a rationale for what level of Churn you can accept – Churn is the percentage of the lines of code that have changed in the past time period.  Usually either a week or month depending on the size of the project.
• Use automated software quality tools. For instance we use both PC-Lint and RSM to automated many software quality metrics which saves a lot of time in Code Reviews
• Use Code Reviews, also known as Software Peer Review.  It really does save time.

Next I plan to look at what you can learn about software testing from a Squash Racquet.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Casey Business Awards

The City Of Casey are holding there inaugural Casey Business Awards and at the Casey Business Breakfast this morning Successful Endeavours were nominated as finalists in 2 categories.

Casey Business Awards

The 2 Casey Business Awards categories are:

• Manufacturer Of The Year
• Business and Professional Services

We fall into the Business And Professional Services category with our Electronics and Embedded Software development services where we design products for Australian Electronics Manufacturers  so they can achieve Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia at a good profit margin.

The Manufacturer Of The Year award category recognises that for some of our clients, we also manufacture the product the product and delivered to them programmed, tested and calibrated; ready to sell.  This includes products like a DNP3 enabled power controller product for the US Smart Grid market which is made right here in Berwick as well as the Award Winning Borgtech CPL2 Corrosion Protection Data Logger with Wireless Data Logging.

It was an honour to be recognised by our city council together with other small business owners in the City Of Casey, a municipality in the outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  We will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner.

Cranbourne News 5th August 2010 Best in Business

 Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

An Engineering Problem in Disguise

A funny thing happened to me the other day during the Christmas shopping rush at our local shopping centre in Endeavour Hills.  Our daughter had purchased some clothes for her nieces for Christmas and used the self serve checkout. When she got home she discovered she had not had one of the security tags removed so she asked for my help.

OK, I might be an Electronics Hardware and Embedded Software Engineer but I did do a year of Physics and Chemistry at Deakin University before switching to Engineering and I have had a role in the design of Multidisciplinary Systems with Electromechanical Actuators and Variable Frequency Motor Drives including Multi-Axis Robotic Handlers.  So I thought, “How hard can this be?”

The first step was to review the problem and identify the information.  Those familiar with Edward De Bono‘s Six Thinking Hats will recognise this as the White Hat stage.

I had:

• circular plastic sealed tag with an alignment  feature – a hole through it to accept a tapered pin
• a metal pin with a large head inserted into the centre of the plastic disk
• no other visible connection points

So assuming the tag was made at a minimum price, needed to be aligned correctly to be released and could be disconnected without an external power source; I concluded that the release mechanism was probably magnetic.  So I got a magnet and did some experiments and I could hear something click inside the security tag as I moved the external magnet around.  Now I am very confident that it is a Magnetic Latching Mechanism.  But no orientation of a single magnet released the pin.

I got 2 magnets and worked around the unit until the pin released and the problem was solved.

Having released the tag I gave the garment to my daughter to wrap in Christmas paper and put the tag with pin inserted back into it by the front door.  Since we were shopping the next day I thought I would return the tag.  At the very least it would get recycled.

What’s so good about being an Engineer?

At the shops, I went to the help desk and offered them the tag.  They were very confused.  I explained that it had been accidentally left on one of the items we purchased so I took it off and was returning it to them.  The stunned reply was, “You took it off yourself”?  “Yes” I said.  “I’ll have to call security” was the next reply.  So I said, “It’s all right, I’m an Engineer“.  “Oh, that’s fine then” was the reply and I wandered off to collect some final groceries for Christmas dinner.

So apparently there was a connection in the shop assistants mind that made being an Engineer something special.  They may not have know what that connection was.  And that got me wondering about Engineers and what is so special about us.  Here is a bit of a list of my initial thoughts if I ignore specific Engineering Disciplines:

• we create the future by designing and constructing the machines and systems that it requires
• we routinely solve complex problems that others do not know even exist
• we do all of this because we want a better world and are prepared to do our part to achieve it
• we have learned that covering up a symptom is not the same as solving the underlying problem

You might have some thoughts of your own so please leave a comment.

And of course, I hope you had a Merry Christmas in 2009 and that 2010 is a very good year for you all.  Happy New Year!

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

How Does Sleep Save Energy?

For this post, we will look specifically at Embedded Software techniques to save power and energy.  This is a well known Power Saving Strategy which doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.  It is also something you have to design into the Power Management Plan from the beggining.

For this example, we will use the MSP430 from TI which has some of the best Power Saving and Power Consumption figures in the industry.  We have used them to create devices that run from a pair of AAA batteries for 2 years and which have time based control algorithms so that they can’tbe used in a purely event driven mode.  Here is how it works:

Low Power Sleep Mode

This shows the power consumption versus time.  In Low Power Sleep Mode the consumption is close to zero.  Almost no power consumed.  Then depending on what is happening it wakes up to varying degrees.

Get the best Electronic Sleep

So this is how you take advantage of this:

• make the time between wake ups as long as possible
• make the time awake as short as possible
• only turn on the peripherals needs for a particular wake period

Now if you system only has to wake once every minute then you can get low power operation from a lot of different processors.  If it wakes many times a second then you need a processor that gives you lots of ways to reduce power during wake, reduce the time awake, and increase the interval between wakes.

MSP430 Sleep

So back to the MSP430. It has Power Conservation features that allow it to do all three better than most.  Here is the list:

• Digitally Controlled Oscillator DCO allows it to wake and run quickly
• Can run a Timer from a 32KHz crystal making interval timing very low power
• Can use the DCO to set the run speed and so shorten the wake time
• Lot’s of Power Down Modes so you can always find one that suits your application
• Peripherals can be Shut Down when not in use
• Can run down to 1.8V – more on that later but it can also help here

Low Power System Architecture

To take advantage of all this, you have to develop the System Architecture so that  takes advantage of this.  An example from a very long life application we did runs like this:

• 32Hz Oscillator runs a timer that generates a 1 second wake
• User input keys set up to wake on change of state from high to low
• Use DCO at 1MHz to quickly wake, execute & sleep again
• Use State Machines to allow modules to execute predictably with eratic timing
• Have early exit tests to prevent unnecessary Code Execution

The result is an application that runs a process with User Interaction, LED Indicators, and a 2 week cycle where the average Power Consumption is 20uA at 2.7V or 54uW.  Of this, less than half is the processor executing the software and the single biggest energy use is the intermittently flashed LED Indicators.

To learn more, check out this more comprehensive article on “Low power MCU selection criteria and sleep mode implementation” from embedded.com which provides more examples.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Electronics Manufacturers are the people we serve

A common question we are asked is what sort of Electronics Manufacturers do we Develop Products for?

So I thought I would compile 3 lists:

• The first is a list of the Electronics and Embedded Software product types we have worked on
• The second list is a list of the industries we have Developed Products for
• And the third list is the Technologies we have worked with so far

I might have to regularly update this third list since knowledge and technology are constantly expanding.  Before I do the lists I’d like to present a video that specifically addresses this last point.  This is very much worth thinking about.  Enjoy.

Electronics and Embedded Software Products

Did you notice the section from 1:45 to 2:15?  We are being prepared for jobs that don’t yet exist, technologies that haven’t been invented, and problems we don’t even know we will have!

Here is the list of some of the Electronics and Embedded Software Products that do already exist and which we have helped to create:

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