poking around for opportunities

roger.levasseur at comcast.net roger.levasseur at comcast.net
Wed Jan 7 14:43:20 EST 2015


I would say things have expanded out - no doubt that there are still very
specific products that meet your list of properties; Once upon a time my
employers application did serve as its own OS.  Moving it to Linux opened
the door to lots of flexibility, capabilities, and portability. 
The purpose built boards with ARM keep power consumption low and the
housing small.  Has what it needs for software, so it isn't just a 
$YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO Linux desktop with all software options installed.

One older model uses 32M of RAM, no swap, so you need to be smart about
how you program, as well as which software packages are selected (such
as Busybox).

     -roger

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Rysdam" <david at rysdam.org>
To: "roger levasseur" <roger.levasseur at comcast.net>, "Tyson Sawyer" <tyson at j3.org>
Cc: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 7, 2015 1:53:40 PM
Subject: Re: poking around for opportunities

roger.levasseur at comcast.net writes:
> The embedded stuff that I've been working on over the last 10 years
> have CPUs (ARMs) that in terms of compute power, RAM, and storage that
> outclass PCs and Workstations that I worked on during the 1990s. It
> was a big deal when that first 1GB SCSI disk drive became available to
> put into a workstation. Now we're swimming in storage with ever larger
> SDHC storage cards.

I've been assuming that "embedded" meant some significant subset of the
following properties:

    1) realtime
    2) re-entrant/parallel/interrupt-driven
    3) specialty hardware
    4) specialty OS (if there's an OS there at all)

Despite my earlier joke and my Arduino/Pi experience, I don't actually
feel comfortable putting "embedded" on my resume. However, now if
someone asks me I can at least be intelligent enough to ask what they
mean by that term. If it's just a regular PC running in a kiosk, that's
completely different than what I was picturing.


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