If you walk in the door of a doctor’s office here in the USA, the chances are there will be a sign admonishing you to turn off your phone. Most people probably assume this has something to do with common courtesy – and I’m sure that’s part of it. However the larger issue is the fact that cell phone transmissions can play havoc with an EKG.
What’s this got to do with embedded systems? Well yesterday I was trying to debug a piece of code – only to be faced with a debug environment that would just randomly crash, taking down the debugger with it. Naturally my first thought was that I had made a stupid coding error. However, after some serious head scratching I noticed that I had placed my Blackberry down next to the ribbon cable leading from the emulator to the target. If a cell phone can mess up an EKG being performed 10 m away, I’m sure it can really do a number on a high speed debugger interface when it’s a mere 10 cm away. In short, not a smart idea. Removal of the cell phone solved the problem.
What’s the lesson here? Well the obvious one is that cell phones have no business in a laboratory. However, upon reflection there is a larger issue. I take great effort to make my code as hygienic as possible. However, my workbench is usually a disaster area with extraneous stuff all over the place. Maybe it’s time I literally cleaned my act up in this department. If I had I’d have noticed the phone a lot sooner.
