Go Embedded!

INAST-4C launch aboard India’s GSLV-F02, failed. It’s a bad feeling for Indians in general and professionals like us in particular. In last 10 years ISRO had a clean slate with all successful launches to it’s credit. However, this is “rocket science” after all and things can and do go wrong. I feel bad for those engineers and scientists whose years of efforts have gone down in a failed mission like this. I hope that India’s press does a bit more than just reporting “307 crores went down the drain”. In such times, I think we should strengthen the spirits and morale of our great team at ISRO.

http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Jul10_2006.htm

Pascal Stang’s contribution to programming with AVR microcontrollers is well known. For those of you looking to start in this area, please refer to his homepage at:

http://hubbard.engr.scu.edu/embedded/

I came across a nice website which sells easy to interface hardware kits for hobbyists. USB is used to interface the kits with PC and API is provided for ease of programming. Can be a nice starting point for anyone dabbling with embedded systems. Best of all – the prices are reasonable.

http://www.phidgets.com/index.php

I recently had an opportunity to interact with a graduate student who had worked at GMRT at Pune, India on Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope on a project involving Polarimeter – a complex device that is used to measure extremely weak signals from distant dead stars know as pulsars. This system gathers inputs from 26 giant antennas. The amount of information to be processed is phenomenal. These inputs are then processed inside a DSP + FPGA – custom designed with algorithms to filter noise and then fed to a correlation block which processes them to generate data of a meaningful observation. It was a facinating thing to see Embedded Systems playing a role in such a complex system. What I could see was that there is lot of opportunity of hardware-software co-design in such a system and though the folks at GMRT are very knowledgeable about electronics of things – ES software is where there is lot that can be improved. For those requiring additional information, visit GMRT website and possibly visit the center as well!

http://www.ncra.tifr.res.in/