Embedded Insiders

Send us a textAgile software development is a term we often hear about. But most folks that aren’t deeply into the thick of development don’t know what agile development is, or why they should be thinking about it. It’s not a new technique, but it is slowing gaining momentum. To get the real low-down, I spoke to one Bruce Douglas, a Chief Evangelist at IBM, and of the world’s recognized leaders in this space for this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion.For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textSmart technology is all around us. However, it hasn’t migrated to the industrial sector with nearly the speed that it could (or should). Why is that? That’s the question I asked of Ashish Syal, who is the Chief Engineer for IoT at Sierra Wireless in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion. Ashish, being a technologist, has a great handle on this space. https://www.sierrawireless.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textArm recently put up a website challenging RISC-V technology that stirred up quite the hornet’s nest. After hundreds of comments from developers within a matter of hours, the site was promptly taken offline. Meanwhile, Wind River continues its evolution as a company beyond Intel’s shadow. The Insiders discuss these and other industry goings on in this week’s Embedded Insiders podcast.For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textUntil recently, Wind River was a part of Intel. Now that Wind is an independent company (you knew that occurred, right?), what does the future hold and where will the industry powerhouse go? Those are the questions I posed to Wind’s CEO Jim Douglas in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion. https://www.windriver.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textOne half of the Embedded Insiders took to the Sensors Expo Conference this week, and the technology discussed there actually led to what happened in a real-life accident. You’ll likely recall the incident not too long ago where a woman was killed by an autonomous Uber vehicle. Do you know why that happened? Listen in to find out.For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textIndustrial IoT is a hot topic. If you question that, have a conversation with Alex Blochtein, the CEO of Contec, as I did for this week’s Five Minutes with…podcast. His company is on a roll, and I wanted to know why. If you want to know as well, give a listen. https://www.contec.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textLocation awareness is a term that’s in vogue. It’s sort of like positioning, but not exactly. And what’s the hop application for location awareness? Cattle tracking. Yup, you heard right. Cattle farmers have too much at stake (or should I say steak) to not invest in the latest technologies to maintain their investments. In this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion, I spoke to Dr. Jens Albers, the CEO of Nanotron Technologies where we discussed location awareness, cows, and a herd of other topics. https://nanotron.com/EN/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textIn the consumer space, a few of the industry giants have stepped up to take charge of the IoT, a la Google, Apple, and so one. But in the industrial space, that has not happened, for reasons that are discussed in this week’s Embedded Insiders podcast. Will it happen, and if so, who is the giant that’ll step up? Listen to the podcast and see if you agree with the “experts.”For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textThe Industrial Internet Consortium, aka the IIC, recently released a whitepaper titled Introduction to Edge Computing in IIoT. Hence, I thought it was a great opportunity to speak to the Co-Chair of the IIC’s Edge Computing Task Group, Todd Edmunds, so I could get a better understanding of the IIC’s involvement in standard setting, and what the whitepaper might mean to a developer of industrial IoT systems. And that’s exactly what I discussed in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion with Todd Edmunds, who works for Cisco as a Senior Solutions Architect in addition to his duties with the IIC. https://www.iiconsortium.org/index.htm https://www.iiconsortium.org/pdf/Introduction_to_Edge_Computing_in_IIoT_2018-06-18.pdfFor more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textCan you determine location by hearing an object or person’s position? Sort of, and that’s the technology that’s deployed by PoLTE. The company uses a sensing technology over a cellular medium to very accurately determine location. Hear more about it in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion with Ed Chao, PoLTE’s CEO. https://polte.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textThe Embedded Insiders talk Google, for two separate reasons. Are those two things connected? We’ll let you decide. First, Google announced its Android Things initiative. What’s the end game? Getting more devices into the Google Cloud? Probably. Either separately, or if you’re into conspiracy theories, not separately, Google Cloud has joined the LoRa Alliance. Not much detail here, so we were left to speculate, which is exactly what we did.For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textAccording to Jothy Rosenberg, the Founder and CEO of Dover Microsystems, processor technology is not keeping pace with the security that needs to be implemented, particularly in the case of cyber security. The key to fixing that problem is to address security at the “root level.” In this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion, Jothy explains what that means, why it is the case today, and what needs to happen to remedy the situation. https://dovermicrosystems.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textThis week’s Five Minutes with…discussion has to do with artificial intelligence (AI), and the guest is Robert Gendron, a Corporate Vice President, in charge of power components at Vicor. Power and AI? Doesn’t seem like a fit, does it? Actually, these two technologies are tied much closer than you might expect. Listen to find out why. http://www.vicorpower.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textThe IoT is all about gathering data. Until recently, finding ways to gather that data was the hard part. With the proliferation of end devices, both in the consumer and industrial sectors, that’s not the case anymore. Now we have the other problem—what to do with all this data we’ve collected, and how to store it and keep it safe. Virtium is one of those vendors that helps in that focuses on storage needs of for the industrial embedded space. In this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion, I speak to Gary Drossel, the Chief Technology Officer at Virtium, and we get into what it takes to store, analyze, and secure the mountains of incoming data. http://www.virtium.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textLast week, the Embedded Insiders spent some time at IoT World. And it turned out to be a worthwhile experience, and there were lots of new technologies to see. Check out this week’s Embedded Insider podcast to hear about the highlights.For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textUnitedSiC is a fabless company that designs silicon carbide (SiC) ICs. SiC technology is just starting to take off and according to this week’s Five Minutes with… guest, Chris Dries, the President and CEO of UnitedSiC, there’s very good reason for that. Hear his reasons why. And don’t go comparing to gallium nitride (GaN). http://unitedsic.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textIt was recently reported that routers were being hacked, and “Officials said they had high confidence that the Russian government was behind the campaign.” https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/16/politics/russian-hackers-network-devices-alert/index.html Hmm, is that what it’s come down to now? And what does this mean to life as we know it? Before everyone gets all up in arms over the issue, the most simple solution is for people to use better/stronger passwords on their routers. But as the hackers get more sophisticated, obviously the security must also get more sophisticated. As we looked at what the real solutions are to the problem, the Embedded Insiders spoke to Steve Hanna, a Senior Principal at Infineon, and also Chair of the Embedded Systems Committee at the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). As an expert on the topic, Steve laid out what people really need to do to make themselves secure. Note that the TCG has a webcast shortly on exactly this topic, called How to Secure Network Equipment Against Att

Send us a textSoftware insecurities are badly addressed by current “best practices.” Those are the words of this week’s Five Minutes with… guest Yannick Moy, a Senior Software Engineer at AdaCore. I couldn’t let that statement pass without some explanation, so that where the discussion began. And it got very interesting after that. https://www.adacore.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textSilicon Labs is just announced the acquisition of the Z-Wave assets from Sigma Designs. Did they really need another protocol, already having Bluetooth, ZigBee, and WiFi? I wondered if that sends a mixed message to engineers trying to sort through the various media. In this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion with Tyson Tuttle, Silicon Labs’ CEO, we walked through what it means for the design community and what it means for his company. https://www.silabs.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us a textGallium nitride, better known as GaN, is a power technology that seems forever locked in a battle with Silicon carbide, aka SiC. Is that battle a real one, or is it more a fabrication? Who better to answer that question than Larry Spaziani, a vice president at GaN Systems, who was this week’s guest in our Five Minutes with…discussion. https://gansystems.com/For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com