Archive for October, 2006

Knowledge versus Understanding

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 Nigel Jones

Every month or two a ‘Technical Recruiter’ from one of the larger placement companies calls me up to see if I’m available for work. Most of the time I’m not, and so the conversation terminates quite quickly. However, once in a while I am available, and so the inevitable request for an updated resume is made. After sending an updated resume, the ‘Technical Recruiter’ calls back to discuss what you have to offer.

Well, for the first time in several years I recently went through this rigmarole. The conversation with the recruiter was both illuminating and yet rather depressing. To paraphrase, the conversation went like this:

Recruiter: “What RTOS experience do you have?”

Me: “VxWorks, MicroC/OSII, Embedded Linux, various bespoke systems”

Recruiter: “No others? ”

Me: “Isn’t it more important that someone understands the benefits and limitations of an RTOS rather than knowing the particular API of a specific RTOS?”

Recruiter: After a long pause. “Our clients like someone that can hit the ground running.”

I see two possibilities here.
1. The ‘technical recruiter’ has no technical knowledge and is nothing more than a matcher of acronyms and buzz words.
2. His clients really are saying to him, we need someone with experience of XYZ RTOS.

If it’s the latter, then it appears that knowledge is a more highly prized commodity than understanding. Personally, given the choice between someone that knows an RTOS API and someone that really understands priority inversion, can discuss the pros and cons of RMA as a scheduling algorithm, and can explain the implications of making an RTOS call from within an ISR, then I’d take the latter any day. Of course, one might claim that an experienced user of XYZ RTOS should be aware of these sorts of issues. However, in my experience, large swathes of the folks out there using an RTOS really don’t have a clue about what it’s doing for them – and what it’s costing them.

Thus my point is this. Next time you are looking for help, think about what you’d like the person to understand – as well as what they should know. I suspect you’ll end up with better help.

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Fuse Blown

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 Nigel Jones

As a professional developer of embedded systems, I use a lot of sophisticated tools and best practices in order to create the best embedded applications I can. Today, however, I ran into an issue which makes a mockery of much of what I (and presumably you) do.

So what is this issue you ask? Well, in case you are unaware, two very popular microprocessor families (PIC & AVR & probably others) require one to configure multiple parameters in their microcontrollers via fuse bits. These parameters typically cover critical hardware parameters, such as oscillator type and frequency, brown out settings, code protection bits and so on. These fuse settings are NOT programmable from within the application and hence are typically outside the programmer’s direct control. Thus a solution based upon devices in these families consists of both the programming image (i.e. the binary representation of your code) and also the fuse bit settings.

Now, this wouldn’t be too bad if there was some way to combine both sets of information in to one master programming file. In fact both Microchip and Atmel allow one to do this within their IDE’s. However, what happens when one needs to have the microprocessors programmed on a high speed production gang programmer? Well, I found out today – and it isn’t pretty.

The procedure is to supply an Intel Hex record file for the application, and to provide the programming house with an email detailing the required fuse settings! So, after using all the sophisticated tools at my disposal to craft a working embedded system, I ultimately have to rely upon the manual transcription of configuration bits in to a programmer to ensure that the end product is actually programmed the way I need it to be.

This is patently absurd! We need an industry standard programming file that allows both the program image and the configuration bits to be defined, independent of the manufacturer, so that we can be confident that devices are programmed the way we want them to be. (Incidentally, checking a first article device is only of limited benefit, since in many cases, we want to set a lock bit that prevents anyone (including oneself) from reading anything about the device).

Does anyone out there have any ideas on how we can get this problem solved?

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