VolksEEG Project: Initial Hardware Architecture
The initial hardware architecture for the prototype VolksEEG uses an Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense, which connects to a PC via USB for UI (User Interface). Through several additional chips, this provides power to and acquires data from the ADS1299 ADC.
An important topic I mentioned in my introduction to the project is isolation, ensuring there is no conductive path for current through the patient. The architecture is therefore split into...
Introducing The VolksEEG Project
IntroductionThe VolksEEG project is an open-source project with the goal of creating an electroenchephalogram (EEG) machine, fully cleared by the FDA for standard clinical use. All designs will be freely available for others to manufacture.
The project was founded by Alan Cohen, a medical device systems engineer with an electrical engineering/software (EE/SW) background in Boston, USA, and Dr. Bryan Glezerson
Video-Based STEM Embedded Systems Curriculum, Part 2
Contents:- Introduction
- Lesson Plan 1: Introducing Arduino
- Lesson Plan 2: Circuit Drawings With Fritzing
- Lesson Plan 3: Basic Electronics
- Coming Soon
This post continues from part 1. It contains the first three lesson plans.
Lesson Plan 1: Introducing ArduinoThis lesson is first because Arduino is the simplest programming environment, yet allows lots of interaction with hardware. In...
Video-Based STEM Embedded Systems Curriculum, Part 1
Contents:- Introduction
- Adapting To Your Circumstances
- Suggested Policies
- The Video Educators
- Equipment, Books, and Supplies
- Lesson Summary
- Suggested Teaching Method
Review: Prototype to Product
Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market, by Alan Cohen, is a must-read for anyone involved in product development, whether in a technical, management, or executive role.
I was reminded of it by Cohen's recent episode on Embedded.fm, 388: Brains Generate EMF, which is worth listening to a couple times through, especially if you're interested in medical device development. And in fact his first episode there,
The 2021 DSP/ML Online Conference
The 2021 DSP/ML Online Conference is just around the corner and this year again, the program is packed with opportunities to learn.
By registering for the conference, not only will you have full access to all talks, workshops, and Q&A sessions at this year's event, but you'll also gain instant access to all talks from last year's edition.
We've asked the speakers to tell me a few words about their sessions, here are some of the answers we've...
Definite Article: Notes on Traceability
Electronic component distibutor Digi-Key recently announced part tracing for surface-mount components purchased in cut-tape form. This is a big deal, and it’s a feature that is a good example of traceability. Some thing or process that has traceability basically just means that it’s possible to determine an object’s history or provenance: where it came from and what has happened to it since its creation. There are a...
Learning From Engineering Failures
Contents: IntroductionI'm an informal student of engineering failures. They guide a lot of my attitude and approach towards engineering.
This is rooted in two of my favorite quotes:
- George Santayana: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- Louis...
Acceptance Tests vs. TDD
Contents:Embedded Online Conference 2021 - Watch the Speakers Share their Thoughts on the Value for Attendees
Over the last few weeks, we've had a chance to chat with some of the speakers at the upcoming Embedded Online Conference. We asked them to share their thoughts on conferences and the Embedded Online Conference in particular. Here are their answers edited together in one video:
If you are not registered yet for the conference but are considering it, please make sure to use the promo code ER149 to save more than 40% on your registration...
Finite State Machines (FSM) in Embedded Systems (Part 3) - Unuglify C++ FSM with DSL
Domain Specific Languages (DSL) are an effective way to avoid boilerplate or repetitive code. Using DSLs lets the programmer focus on the problem domain, rather than the mechanisms used to solve it. Here I show how to design and implement a DSL using the C++ preprocessor, using the FSM library, and the examples I presented in my previous articles.
Back from ESC Boston
NOT going to ESC Boston would have allowed me to stay home, in my comfort zone.
NOT going to ESC Boston would have saved me from driving in the absolutely horrible & stressful Boston traffic1.
NOT going to ESC Boston would have saved me from having to go through a full search & questioning session at the Canada Customs on my return2.
2017/06/06 update: Videos are now up!So two days...
Cortex-M Exception Handling (Part 1)
This article describes how Cortex-M processors handle interrupts and, more generally, exceptions, a concept that plays a central role in the design and implementation of most embedded systems.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Extension Fields
An introduction to the pairing of points on elliptic curves. Point pairing normally requires curves over an extension field because the structure of an elliptic curve has two independent sets of points if it is large enough. The rules of pairings are described in a general way to show they can be useful for verification purposes.
Crowdfunding Articles?
Many of you have the knowledge and talent to write technical articles that would benefit the EE community. What is missing for most of you though, and very understandably so, is the time and motivation to do it.
But what if you could make some money to compensate for your time spent on writing the article(s)? Would some of you find the motivation and make the time?
I am thinking of implementing a system/mechanism that would allow the EE community to...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XIV: Gold Codes
Last time we looked at some techniques using LFSR output for system identification, making use of the peculiar autocorrelation properties of pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) derived from an LFSR.
This time we’re going to jump back to the field of communications, to look at an invention called Gold codes and why a single maximum-length PRBS isn’t enough to save the world using spread-spectrum technology. We have to cover two little side discussions before we can get into Gold...
Spread the Word and Run a Chance to Win a Bundle of Goodies from Embedded World
Do you have a Twitter and/or Linkedin account?
If you do, please consider paying close attention for the next few days to the EmbeddedRelated Twitter account and to my personal Linkedin account (feel free to connect). This is where I will be posting lots of updates about how the EmbeddedRelated.tv live streaming experience is going at Embedded World.
The most successful this live broadcasting experience will be, the better the chances that I will be able to do it...
Book Review: "Turing's Cathedral"
My library had Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson on its new acquisitions shelf, so I read it. I’d recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of computing.
Turing’s Cathedral primarly covers the period in early computing from 1940-1958, and bridges a gap between a few other popular books: on the historic side, between Richard Rhodes’s
Who else is going to Sensors Expo in San Jose? Looking for roommate(s)!
This will be my first time attending this show and I must say that I am excited. I am bringing with me my cameras and other video equipment with the intention to capture as much footage as possible and produce a (hopefully) fun to watch 'highlights' video. I will also try to film as many demos as possible and share them with you.
I enjoy going to shows like this one as it gives me the opportunity to get out of my home-office (from where I manage and run the *Related sites) and actually...
Fit Sixteen (or more) Asynchronous Serial Receivers into the Area of a Standard UART Receiver
Introduction
This article will describe a technique, available in many current FPGA architectures, to fit a large amount of logic into a small area. About ten years ago now (Feb/Mar 2005), I helped develop a multi-line Caller ID product. The Multi-Channel Asynchronous Receiver (MCAR) FPGA core developed for that product will be used to illustrate the technique(s) needed to fit a 16 channel MCAR into a single Spartan II XC2S30-5VQ100 FPGA.
To stay true to the original design, I...
A wireless door monitor based on the BANO framework
Introduction
I have been thinking for a while about a system to monitor the states of my flat and my garage doors from a remote place. Functionnaly, I wanted to monitor the state of my doors from a remote place. A typical situation is when I leave for holidays, but it can also be useful from the work office. To do so, I would centralize the information on a server connected on the Internet that I could query using a web browser. The server itself would be located in the appartement, where...
Launch of Youtube Channel: My First Videos - Embedded World 2017
I went to Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg with an ambitious plan; I would make video highlights of several exhibits (booths) to be presented to the *Related sites audience. I would try to make the vendors focus their pitch on the essential in order to produce a one to three minutes video per booth.
So far my experience with making videos was limited to family videos, so I knew I had lots of reading to do and lots of Youtube videos and tutorials to watch. Trade shows are...
Libgpiod - Toggling GPIOs The Right Way In Embedded Linux
Overview
We all know that GPIO is one of the core elements of any embedded system. We use GPIOs to control LEDs and use them to monitor switches and button presses. In modern embedded systems, GPIOs can also be used as pins for other peripheral busses, such as SPI and I2C. Similar to the previous article on interacting with peripherals on an SPI bus in userspace via SPIdev (https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1485.php), we can also control GPIOs from userspace on an embedded...
Examining The Stack For Fun And Profit
Well, maybe not so much for profit, but certainly for fun. This is a wandering journey of exploration and discovery, learning a variety of interesting and useful things.
One of the concerns with an embedded system is how much memory it needs, known as the memory footprint. This consists of the persistent storage needed for the program (i.e. the flash memory or filesystem space that stores the executable image), and the volatile storage needed to hold the data while executing over long...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XII: Spread-Spectrum Fundamentals
Last time we looked at the use of LFSRs for pseudorandom number generation, or PRNG, and saw two things:
- the use of LFSR state for PRNG has undesirable serial correlation and frequency-domain properties
- the use of single bits of LFSR output has good frequency-domain properties, and its autocorrelation values are so close to zero that they are actually better than a statistically random bit stream
The unusually-good correlation properties...
Finally got a drone!
As a reader of my blog, you already know that I have been making videos lately and thoroughly enjoying the process. When I was in Germany early this summer (and went 280 km/h in a porsche!) to produce SEGGER's 25th anniversary video, the company bought a drone so we could get an aerial shot of the party (at about the 1:35 mark in this video). Since then, I have been obsessing on buying a drone for myself and finally made the move a few weeks ago - I acquired a used DJI...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XVII: Reverse-Engineering the CRC
Last time, we continued a discussion about error detection and correction by covering Reed-Solomon encoding. I was going to move on to another topic, but then there was this post on Reddit asking how to determine unknown CRC parameters:
I am seeking to reverse engineer an 8-bit CRC. I don’t know the generator code that’s used, but can lay my hands on any number of output sequences given an input sequence.
This is something I call the “unknown oracle”...
Scorchers, Part 3: Bare-Metal Concurrency With Double-Buffering and the Revolving Fireplace
This is a short article about one technique for communicating between asynchronous processes on bare-metal embedded systems.
Q: Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A: to To other side. get the
There are many reasons why concurrency is
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part VI: Sing Along with the Berlekamp-Massey Algorithm
The last two articles were on discrete logarithms in finite fields — in practical terms, how to take the state \( S \) of an LFSR and its characteristic polynomial \( p(x) \) and figure out how many shift steps are required to go from the state 000...001 to \( S \). If we consider \( S \) as a polynomial bit vector such that \( S = x^k \bmod p(x) \), then this is equivalent to the task of figuring out \( k \) from \( S \) and \( p(x) \).
This time we’re tackling something...
Ada 2012 Comes to ARM Cortex M3/M4
Ada, that old dinosaur? I thought Ada was dead!
Admit it, at least a few of you had that thought, right? Well, far from being dead, the Ada language has been evolving, improving, and helping to save lives, property and money around the world for the past 30 years. And what's more, the latest version of the language, Ada 2012, will soon be coming to a two-dollar microcontroller near you.
A Personal Dream Come TrueOK, maybe that's going too far -...
