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First Impressions of Google Glass 2.0

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014 Michael Barr

Last week I took advantage of Google’s special 1-day-only buying opportunity to purchase an “Explorer” edition of Google Glass 2.0. My package arrived over the weekend and I finally found a few hours this morning for the unboxing and first use.

Let me begin by saying that the current price is quite high and that the buying process itself is cumbersome. To buy Google Glass you must shell out $1,500 (plus taxes and any accessories) and you can only pay this entrance fee via a Google Wallet account. I didn’t have a Google Wallet account setup until last week and various problems associated with setting up Wallet and linking it to my credit card had prevented me from using an earlier Explorer email invite. Google absolutely needs to make Glass cheaper and easier to purchase if they are to have any hope of making this a mainstream product.

Upon opening the box and donning Glass, I was initially at a loss for how to actually use the thing. There were instructions for turning it on in the box, but I had to find and watch YouTube videos on my own (like this one) to grok the touchpad controls “menu”/UI paradigm. I also quickly came to learn that Glass is only useable when you have at least all of the following: (a) a Google+ account; (b) an Android or iOS smartphone; (c) the My Glass app installed on said smartphone; and (d) a Bluetooth-tethered or WiFi connection to the Internet. (Well, and also the USB charging cable and a power supply–given the very short battery life I’ve experienced so far)

At the present time there are very few apps available. Here’s a master list of what is currently just 44 “Glassware” apps. And none of either the built-in capabilities or those apps strikes me as the kind of must-have feature that’s likely to drive widespread adoption of Glass as a mainstream computing platform with a vibrant application developer community.

I’ll finish out the negatives by saying that the current form factor makes you look like an uber-geek (when you are not too busy being physically attacked for some assumed offense) and that the touchpad area on the right side of your head gets surprisingly hot during normal use.

Now for the few positives. First, the location of the heads-up display just above your line of sight feels right for an always-available computer. As someone who walks for miles every day for exercise, I would so love to replace my handheld smartphone form factor with a heads-up display like this. So it’s too bad that browsing the web and reading email aren’t viable on Glass’ meager 640×360 display. I think there are probably dozens of hands-on jobs in which those who do them would be made more productive with a screen (and the right application) in this form factor. I also think the heads-up wearable form factor feels like a great place for quick reference information, such as maps/navigation, pop-up weather alerts, etc., while the wearer is otherwise busy walking, biking, or even driving.

A second positive is that the voice recognition is really very surprisingly good. Dictation, for example, seems to work far better on Glass so far than it ever has on my iPhone 5. You can’t always talk to Glass (hint: generally only when the words “ok glass” are on screen or there is a microphone icon), but when you do talk Glass seems to listen quite well. Good dictation is key, of course, because there is no obvious way to edit the things you’ve drafted if they are misspelled or improperly formatted; you either hit send or start over. And the only application launcher is your voice via “ok google” home screen/clock.

Giving Glass instructions such as “okay glass, listen to ” is an extremely intuitive user interface. And so far that music feature combined with a $10/month “All Access” Google Play music account seems like the only thing I might like to use everyday. I also like the idea of dictating SMS and email messages or taking and sharing photos while doing other things with my hands, though the SMS feature doesn’t work when Glass is paired with an iPhone and the only multi-person sharing option seems to be via Google+. So far the SMS, email, and outgoing call features are not impressing me enough to see me using them regularly or even to convince me to entrust Google with access to my full iPhone contacts database. And searching through a lot of contacts appears to be a real chore too, unless they match with voice recognition on the first try.

In terms of applications that seem interesting, Evernote seems a reasonable near-term substitute for the lack of a To Do list interface to Toodledo or RememberTheMilk. And I sure do like the idea of receiving pop-up extreme weather alerts based on my location. Some of the simplistic sample games (such as balancing blocks on your head) are fun and I could see this form factor perhaps changing multi-player gaming in a few interesting ways. But that’s about it for the interesting apps so far.

To summarize my thinking, Google Glass so far makes me think about the Apple Newton. Everyone knew that Apple was on to something with the Newton MessagePad, way back circa 1993. But the Newton was also too far ahead of its time in terms of cost and size relative to practical usefulness. Eventually Apple came back and did the “communicator” platform right more than a decade later with the iPhone, which it has continued to improve even more dramatically in the half decade since. I think the same is likely to be the hindsight experience for Google Glass in terms of it being an agreed precursor of what’s to come in terms of a heads up wearable but a near term flop. If it does fail, let it be known that Forbes says Google dug its own grave by putting it out there in too many hands too soon.

Introducing Barr Group

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012 Michael Barr

In the ten months since forming Barr Group, I have received many questions about the new company. As we enter the new year, I thought it a good time to use this blog post to answer the most frequently asked questions, such as:

  • What does Barr Group do?
  • Who are Barr Group’s clients?
  • How is Barr Group different than my former company?
  • Who is our CEO and what skills does he bring?
  • What is my role in Barr Group?

If I had to describe Barr Group (http://www.barrgroup.com) in a single sentence, I would say that “Barr Group helps companies that design embedded systems make their products more reliable and more secure.” We do sell a few small items–such as the Embedded C Coding Standard book and Embedded Software Training in a Box kit–but our company is not really about our own products. Rather, we achieve our mission of improving embedded systems reliability and security by delivering business-to-business services of primarily three types: (1) consulting, (2) training, and (3) engineering.

Barr Group serves clients from small startups to well-known Fortune 100 companies that make embedded systems used in a wide range of industries. Representative clients include: Adtran, Medtronic, Renesas, TI, and Xerox. Barr Group’s staff has expertise and experience in the design of medical devices, industrial controls, consumer electronics, telecommunications, transportation equipment, smart grid technologies, and many other types of embedded systems.

Barr Group’s consulting services are sold to engineering managers, engineering directors, or vice presidents of engineering. Typical consulting engagements are short-duration/high-value projects aimed at answering strategically important questions related to embedded systems architecture and embedded software development processes. For example, in the area of architecture for reliability and security we offer services specifically in the following areas: system design review, software design review, system (re)architecture, software (re)architecture, source code review, cost reduction, reverse engineering, and security analysis. Of course, we often address more targeted issues as well, including embedded software development process improvements. Because we are unaffiliated with any processor, RTOS, or tool vendor, all of our advice is independent of any external influence; we aim only to find the best path forward for our clients, favoring alternatives that require only 20% of the effort to achieve 80% of the available benefits.

Barr Group’s training courses are designed to raise the quality of engineers and engineering teams and many of them include hands-on programming exercises. We teach these courses both privately and publicly. Private training is held at the client’s office and every engineer in attendance works for the client. By contrast, any individual or small group of engineers can purchase a ticket to our public training courses. Our Spring 2013 training calendar includes four week-long hands-on courses: Embedded Software Boot Camp (Maryland), Embedded Security Boot Camp (Silicon Valley), Embedded Android Boot Camp (Maryland), and Agile and Test-Driven Embedded Development (Florida).

Barr Group’s engineering design services include outsourced development of: electronics (including FPGA and PCB design); device drivers for operating systems such as MicroC/OS, VxWorks, Windows, Linux, Android, and others; embedded software; mechanical enclosures; and everything in between. In one representative project that was recently completed, a cross-functional team of talented Barr Group engineers worked together to perform all of the mechanical, electrical, software, reliability, and security engineering for a long-lived high voltage electrical switching system for deployment in a modern “smart grid” electrical distribution network.

In relation to my earlier company, which was founded in 1999, the principal difference in all of the above is Barr Group’s additional focus on embedded systems security, compared with reliability alone. Like Netrino, some members of our engineering staff also work as expert witnesses in complex technical litigation–with a range of cases involving allegations of product liability, patent infringement, and source code copyright infringement.

Finally, under the new leadership of seasoned technology executive (and fellow electrical engineer) Andrew Girson, Barr Group has added a suite of Engineer-Centric Market ResearchTM services, which assist IC makers, RTOS vendors, and other companies serving the embedded systems design community improve their products and marketing by better understanding the mind of the engineer. These services have been specifically enabled by the combination of Mr. Girson’s skills and expertise in strategic technical marketing with Barr Group’s extensive contacts in the embedded systems industry, including the over 20,000 Firmware Update newsletter subscribers.

My role in Barr Group is chief technology officer. The switch from my role as president of the old company to CTO of the new company has freed up considerably more of my time to work on engineering and expert witness projects. The extra time allows me to focus on sharing my technical expertise with as many clients as possible while also developing the other engineers who work individuals projects.

All in all, it has been great fun (if a lot of work) launching the new company this year. I look forward to another successful year for Barr Group in 2013. Please don’t hesitate to contact me or call us at (866) 653-6233 if we can be of assistance to your company. And happy new year!

Trends in Embedded Software Design

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012 Michael Barr

In many ways, the story of my career as an embedded software developer is intertwined with the history of the magazine Embedded Systems Design. When it was launched in 1988, under the original title Embedded Systems Programming (ESP), I was finishing high school. Like the vast majority of people at that time, I had never heard the term “embedded system” or thought much about the computers hidden away inside other kinds of products. Six years later I was a degreed electrical engineer who, like many EEs by that time in the mid-90’s, had a job designing embedded software rather than hardware. Shortly thereafter I discovered the magazine on a colleague’s desk, and became a subscriber and devotee.

The Early Days

In the early 1990s, as now, the specialized knowledge needed to write reliable embedded software was mostly not taught in universities. The only class I’d had in programming was in FORTRAN; I’d taught myself to program in assembly and C through a pair of hands-on labs that were, in hindsight, my only formal education in writing embedded software. It was on the job and from the pages of the magazine, then, that I first learned the practical skills of writing device drivers, porting and using operating systems, meeting real-time deadlines, implementing finite state machines, the pros and cons of languages other than C and assembly, remote debugging and JTAG, and so much more.

In that era, my work as a firmware developer involved daily interactions with Intel hex files, device programmers, tubes of EPROMs with mangled pins, UV erasers, mere kilobytes of memory, 8- and 16-bit processors, in-circuit emulators, and ROM monitors. Databooks were actual books; collectively, they took up whole bookshelves. I wrote and compiled my firmware programs on an HP-UX workstation on my desk, but then had to go downstairs to a lab to burn the chips, insert them into the prototype board, and test and debug via an attached ICE. I remember that on one especially daunting project eight miles separated my compiler and device programmer from the only instance of the target hardware; a single red LED and a dusty oscilloscope were the extent of my debugging toolbox.

Like you I had the Internet at my desk in the mid-90s, but it did not yet provide much useful or relevant information to my work other than via certain FTP sites (does anyone else remember FTPing into sunsite.unc.edu? or Gopher?). The rest was mostly blinking headlines and dancing hamster; and Amazon was merely the world’s biggest river. There was not yet an Embedded.com or EETimes.com. To learn about software and hardware best practices, I pursued an MSEE and CS classes at night and traveled to the Embedded Systems Conferences.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of any books about embedded programming. And every book that I had found on C started with “Hello, World”, only went up in abstraction from there, and ended without ever once addressing peripheral control, interrupt service routines, interfacing to assembly language routines, and operating systems (real-time or other). For reasons I couldn’t explain years later when Jack Ganssle asked me, I had the gumption to think I could write that missing book for embedded C programmers, got a contract from O’Reilly, and did–ending, rather than starting, mine with “Hello, World” (via an RS-232 port).

In 1998, a series of at least three twists of fate spanning four years found me taking a seat next to an empty chair at the speaker’s lunch at an Embedded Systems Conference. The chair’s occupant turned out to be Lindsey Vereen, who was then well into his term as the second editor-in-chief of the magazine. In addition to the book, I’d written an article or two for ESP by that time and Lindsey had been impressed with my ability to explain technical nuances. When he told me that he was looking for someone to serve as a technical editor, I didn’t realize it was the first step towards my role in that position.

Future Trends

Becoming and then staying involved with the magazine, first as technical editor and later as editor-in-chief and contributing editor, has been a highlight of my professional life. I had been a huge fan of ESP and of its many great columnists and other contributors in its first decade. And now, looking back, I believe my work helped make it an even more valuable forum for the exchange of key design ideas, best practices, and industry learning in its second decade. And, though I understand the move away from print towards online publishing and advertising, I am nonetheless saddened to see the magazine come to an end.

Reflecting back on these days long past reminds me that a lot truly has changed about embedded software design. Assembly language is used far less frequently today; C and C++ much more. EPROMs with their device programmers and UV erasers have been supplanted by flash memory and bootloaders. Bus widths and memory sizes have increased dramatically. Expensive in-circuit emulators and ROM monitors have morphed into inexpensive JTAG debug ports. ROM-DOS has been replaced with whatever Microsoft is branding embedded Windows this year. And open-source Linux has done so well that it has limited the growth of the RTOS industry as a whole–and become a piece of technology we all want to master if only for our resumes.

So what does the future hold? What will the everyday experiences of embedded programmers be like in 2020, 2030, or 2040? I see three big trends that will affect us all over those timeframes, each of which has already begun to unfold.

Trend 1: Volumes Finally Shift to 32-bit CPUs

My first prediction is that inexpensive, low-power, highly-integrated microcontrollers–as best exemplified by today’s ARM Cortex-M family–will bring 32-bit CPUs into even the highest volume application domains. The volumes of 8- and 16-bit CPUs will finally decline as these parts become truly obsolete.

Though you may be programming for a 32-bit processor already, it’s still true that 8- and 16-bit processors still drive CPU chip sales volumes. I’m referring, of course, to microcontrollers such as those based on 8051, PIC, and other instruction set architectures dating back 30-40 years. These older architectures remain popular today only because certain low-margin, high-volume applications of embedded processing demand squeezing every penny out of BOM cost.

The limitations of 8- and 16-bit architectures impact the embedded programmers in a number of ways. First, there are the awkward memory limitations resulting from limited address bus widths–and the memory banks, segmenting techniques, and other workarounds to going beyond those limitations. Second, these CPUs are much better at decision making than mathematics–they lack the ability to manipulate large integers efficiently and have no floating-point capability. Finally, these older processors frequently lack modern development tools, are unable to run larger Internet-enabled operating systems, such as Linux, and don’t feature the security and reliabiltiy protections afforded by an MMU.

There will, of course, always be many applications that are extremely cost-conscious, so my prediction is not that they will disappear completely, but that the overall price (including BOM cost as well as power consumption) of 32-bit micro controllers, with their improved instruction set architectures and transistor geometries, will win on price. That will put the necessary amount of computing power into the hands of some designers and make our work easier for all of us. It also helps programmers accomplish more in less time.

Trend 2: Complexity Forces Programmers Beyond C

My second prediction is that the days of the C programming language’s dominance in embedded systems are numbered.

Don’t get me wrong, C is a language I know and love. But, as you may know firsthand, C is simply not up to the task of building systems requiring over a million lines of code. Nonetheless, the demanded complexity of embedded software has been driving our systems towards more than a million lines of code. At this level of complexity, something has to give.

Additionally, our industry is facing a crisis: the average age of an embedded developer is rapidly increasing and C is generally not taught in universities anymore. Thus, even as the demand for embedded intelligence in every industry continues to increase, the population of skilled and experienced C programmers is on the decline. Something has to give on this front too.

But what alternative language can be used to build real-time software, manipulate hardware directly, and be quickly ported to numerous instruction set architectures? It’s not going to be C++ or Ada or Java, for sure–as those have already been tried and found lacking. A new programming language is probably not the answer either, across so many CPU families and with so many other languages already tried.

Thus I predict that tools that are able to reliably generate those millions of lines of C code automatically for us, based on system specifications, will ultimately take over. As an example of a current tool of this sort that could be part of the trend, I direct your attention to Miro Samek’s dandy open source Quantum Platform (QP) framework for event-driven programs and his (optional) free Quantum Modeler (QM) graphical modeling tool. You may not like the idea of auto-generated code today, but I guarantee that once you push a button to generate consistent and correct code from an already expressive statechart diagram, you will see the benefits of the overall structure and be ready to move up a level in programming efficiency.

I view C as a reasonable common output language for such tools (given that C can manipulate hardware registers directly and that every processor ever invented has a C compiler). Note that I do expect there to be continued demand for those of us with the skills and interest to fine tune the performance of the generated code or write device drivers to integrate it more closely to the hardware.

Trend 3: Connectivity Drives Importance of Security

We’re increasingly connecting embedded systems–to each other and to the Internet. You’ve heard the hype (e.g., “Internet of things” and “ubiquitous computing”) and you’ve probably already also put TCP/IP into one or more of your designs. But connectivity has a lot of implications that we are only starting to come to terms with. The most obvious of these is security.

A connected device cannot hide for long behind “security through obscurity” and, so, we must design security into our connected devices from the start. In my travels around our industry I’ve observed that the majority of embedded designers are largely unfamiliar with security. Sure some of you have read about encryption algorithms and know the names of a few. But mostly the embedded community is shooting in the dark as security designers, within organizations that aren’t of much help. And security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

This situation must change. Just as Flash memory has supplanted UV-erasable EPROM, so too will over-the-net patches and upgrades take center stage as a download mechanism in coming years and decades. We must architect our systems first to be secure and then to accepted trusted downloads so that our products can keep up in the inevitable arms race against hackers and attackers.

And That’s a Wrap

Whatever the future holds, I am certain that embedded software development will remain an engaging and challenging career. And you’ll still find me writing about the field at https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code and http://twitter.com/embeddedbarr.

Building Reliable and Secure Embedded Systems

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 Michael Barr

In this era of 140 characters or less, it has been well and concisely stated that, “RELIABILITY concerns ACCIDENTAL errors causing failures, whereas SECURITY concerns INTENTIONAL errors causing failures.” In this column I expand on this statement, especially as regards the design of embedded systems and their place in our network-connected and safety-concious modern world.

As the designers of embedded systems, the first thing we must accomplish on any project is to make the hardware and software work. That is to say we need to make the system behave as it was designed to. The first iteration of this is often flaky; certain uses or perturbations of the system by testers can easily dislodge the system into a non-working state. In common parlance, “expect bugs.”

Given time, tightening cycles of debug and test can get us past the bugs and through to a shippable product. But is a debugged system good enough? Neither reliability nor security can be tested into a product. Each must be designed in from the start. So let’s take a closer look at these two important design aspects for modern embedded systems and then I’ll bring them back together at the end.

Reliable Embedded Systems

A product can be stable yet lack reliability. Consider, for example, an anti-lock braking computer installed in a car. The software in the anti-lock brakes may be bug-free, but how does it function if a critical input sensor fails?

Reliable systems are robust in the face of adverse run-time environments. Reliable systems are able to work around errors encountered as they occur to the system in the field–so that the number and impact of failures are minimized. One key strategy for building reliable systems is to eliminate single-points-of-failure. For example, redundancy could be added around that critical input sensor–perhaps by adding a second sensor in parallel with the first.

Another aspect of reliability that is under the complete control of designers (at least when they consider it from the start) are the “fail-safe” mechanisms. Perhaps a suitable but lower-cost alternative to a redundant sensor is detection of the failed sensor with a fall back to mechanical braking.

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is one of the most effective and important design processes used by engineers serious about designing reliability into their systems. Following this process, each possible failure point is traced from the root failure outward to its effects. In an FMEA, numerical weights can be applied to the likelihoods of each failure as well as the seriousness of consequences. An FMEA can thus help guide you to a cost effective but higher reliability design by highlighting the most valuable places to insert the redundancy, fail-safes, or other elements that reinforce the system’s overall reliability.

In certain industries, reliability is a key driver of product safety. And that is why you see these techniques and FMEA and other design for reliability processes being applied by the designers of safety-critical automotive, medical, avionics, nuclear, and industrial systems. The same techniques can, of course, be used to make any type of embedded system more reliable.

Regardless of your industry, it is typically difficult or impossible to make your product as reliable via patches. There’s no way to add hardware like that redundant sensor, so your options may reduce to a fail-safe that is helpful but less reliable overall. Reliability cannot be patched or tested or debugged into your system. Rather, reliability must be designed in from the start.

Secure Embedded Systems

A product can also be stable yet lack security. For example, an office printer is the kind of product most of us purchase and use without giving a minute of thought to security. The software in the printer may be bug-free, but is it able to prevent a would-be eavesdropper from capturing a remote electronic copy of everything you print, including your sensitive financial documents?

Secure systems are robust in the face of persistent attack. Secure systems are able to keep hackers out by design. One key strategy for building secure systems is to validate all inputs, especially those arriving over an open network connection. For example, security could be added to a printer by ensuring against buffer overflows and encrypting and digitally signing firmware updates.

One of the unfortunate facts of designing secure embedded systems is that the hackers who want to get in only need to find and exploit a single weakness. Adding layers of security is good, but if even any one of those layers remains fundamentally weak, a sufficiently motivated attacker will eventually find and breach that defense. But that’s not an excuse for not trying.

For years, the largest printer maker in the world apparently gave little thought to the security of the firmware in its home/office printers, even as it was putting tens of millions of tempting targets out into the world. Now the security of those printers has been breached by security researchers with a reasonable awareness of embedded systems design. Said one of the lead researchers, “We can actually modify the firmware of the printer as part of a legitimate document. It renders correctly, and at the end of the job there’s a firmware update. … In a super-secure environment where there’s a firewall and no access — the government, Wall Street — you could send a résumé to print out.”

Security is a brave new world for many embedded systems designers. For decades we have relied on the fact that the microcontrollers and Flash memory and real-time operating systems and other less mainstream technologies we use will protect our products from attack. Or that we can gain enough “security by obscurity” by keeping our communications protocols and firmware upgrade processes secret. But we no longer live in that world. You must adapt.

Consider the implications of an insecure design of an automotive safety system that is connected to another Internet-connected computer in the car via CAN; or the insecure design of an implanted medical device; or the insecure design of your product.

Too often, the ability to upgrade a product’s firmware in the field is the very vector that’s used to attack. This can happen even when a primary purpose for including remote firmware updates is motivated by security. For example, as I’ve learned in my work as an expert witness in numerous cases involving reverse engineering of the techniques and technology of satellite television piracy, much of that piracy has been empowered by the same software patching mechanism that allowed the broadcasters to perform security upgrades and electronic countermeasures. Ironically, had the security smart cards in those set-top boxes had only masked ROM images the overall system security may have been higher. This was certainly not what the designers of the system had in mind. But security is also an arms race.

Like reliability, security must be designed in from the start. Security can’t be patched or tested or debugged in. You simply can’t add security as effectively once the product ships. For example, an attacker who wished to exploit a current weakness in your office printer or smart card might download his hack software into your device and write-protect his sectors of the flash today so that his code could remain resident even as you applied security patches.

Reliable and Secure Embedded Systems

It is important to note at this point that reliable systems are inherently more secure. And that, vice versa, secure systems are inherently more reliable. So, although, design for reliability and design for security will often individually yield different results–there is also an overlap between them.

An investment in reliability, for example, generally pays off in security. Why? Well, because a more reliable system is more robust in its handling of all errors, whether they are accidental or intentional. An anti-lock braking system with a fall back to mechanical braking for increased reliability is also more secure against an attack against that critical hardware input sensor. Similarly, those printers wouldn’t be at risk of fuser-induced fire in the case of a security breach if they were never at risk of fire in the case of any misbehavior of the software.

Consider, importantly, that one of the first things a hacker intent on breaching the security of your embedded device might do is to perform a (mental, at least) fault tree analysis of your system. This attacker would then target her time, talents, and other resources at one or more single points of failure she considers most likely to fail in a useful way.

Because a fault tree analysis starts from the general goal and works inward deductively toward the identification of one or more choke points that might produce the desired erroneous outcome, attention paid to increasing reliability such as via FMEA usually reduces choke points and makes the attacker’s job considerably more difficult. Where security can break down even in a reliable system is where the possibility of an attacker’s intentionally induced failure is ignored in the FMEA weighting and thus possible layers of protection are omitted.

Similarly, an investment in security may pay off in greater reliability–even without a directed focus on reliability. For example, if you secure your firmware upgrade process to accept only encrypted and digitally signed binary images you’ll be adding a layer of protection against an inadvertently corrupted binary causing an accidental error and product failure. Anything you do to improve the security of communications (i.e., checksums, prevention of buffer overflows, etc.) can have a similar effect on reliability.

The Only Way Forward

Each year it becomes increasingly important for all of us in the embedded systems design community to learn to design reliable and secure products. If you don’t, it might be your product making the wrong kind of headlines and your source code and design documents being poured over by lawyers. It is no longer acceptable to stick your head in the sand on these issues.

Beer and Boards at ESC Silicon Valley

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 Michael Barr

It really looks like I’ve picked the wrong year to miss ESC Silicon Valley (due to a schedule conflict). (The last time I wasn’t at ESC, it was 1997 and White Zombie was still together. The first thing I’d really liked to have seen is Steve Wozniak‘s keynote speech. The second thing I’m really sad to miss is the just announced “Beer and Boards” party/giveaway.

Beer and Boards sounds really fun. Here’s how it works: Every “All Access” attendee will get to choose one of three free development kits to take home:

Once you select your preferred kit you will receive information on the time and place for the relevant Beer and Boards party, at which you will get to drink free beer at a special meet-and-greet with one of your kit’s designers to talk about your new kit and its capabilities. Three boards spread out over three days.

Nerds drinking beer! I love it. What will they think of next?

Before you register for this year’s ESC, be sure to check out my earlier post Save Big on Embedded Systems Conference Registration. Also, remember to use the promo code BARR20 to save an additional 20% off registration and be entered to win a free seat at a future Embedded Software Boot Camp or one of 20 free copies of the Embedded C Coding Standard.