Embedded Systems Engineering Standards Column vol 15.5 August September 2008 A Standard Individual: Education, Education, Education By Chris Hills

These are my own personal views and not those of my company Phaedrus Systems see www.phaedsys.com which is where the full version of this column, with links etc, resides under the Documents tab.

It has been an interesting month and somewhat busy. I got invited to the Engineering, Physics and Science Research Council (EPSRC) event at Westminster, Tiffin on the Terrace at Parliament. It was about “Engineering Tomorrow” It seems people really are worried about the lack of engineers in the UK. However it is partly governments own fault. Having made the academic world far more commercial it is more cost effective for UK Universities to teach foreign students than British ones. So the system is shooting itself in the foot.  

 

More to the point it seems the National Curriculum is not helping either. It appears that it is harder to gain engineering qualifications than many other subjects such as media studies www.iop.org/Media/Press Releases/press_30373.html but when students get to universities they find even these hard won qualifications are not a suitable grounding for a degree in Engineering, electronics or computing.   Universities are finding the “top up” courses they used to run for things like maths for some students are now required for all students and it is more than just a “top up”.   However students from private schools seem to be fairing better because their schools tend to use a curriculum that predates the National Curriculum by a decade or so. 

 

 

There are4 even universities offering cash incentives/bribes http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article4547583.ece   to female students who take science courses because they are “under represented” on the [highly under subscribed] science courses.

I am not surprised when science and Engineering is held in such poor esteem in the UK . Ask any Chartered Engineer how many people know what a C.Eng is…. In the industry let alone out side the industry.   However that is a failure that can be laid at the door of the likes of the IET and BCS.

 

However many employers are finding that when the New Graduate arrives on their doorstep to start work they are missing many vital skills, particularly in the real time and embedded areas.  In fact I believe there are only 2 universities in the UK offering dedicated embedded systems undergraduate courses.  This stems from most universities using either Microsoft Windows or Linux for all their computing. The former is used because they have a site license and latter is often used because it is “free”.  Neither is real-time or embedded in any useful sense for teaching embedded or real-time courses.

 

Then there are some of the product specific “qualifications” such as the Microsoft MCSE, now to be replaced with new ones such as MCTS and MCITP.

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17419   Whilst these are good for specific products they usually assume you have the surrounding skills and do not teach generic methods.

By the way, do note that in the UK the Privy Council decides which post and pre-nomials are legal to use and the Microsoft ones are not. So strictly they should not appear on you business card after your name any more than Cycling Proficiency should.

 

 

Not only are we short of new graduates to make matter worse it appears that there is an exodus of our brightest professionals http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1579345/Biggest-brain-drain-from-UK-in-50-years.html  about 10% of the UK professionals are now abroad. Apparently only Mexico has a higher level of exodus.   This means that there really is a skills shortage.  

 

There has been a quite a problem for the Nuclear industry several articles in the press http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article4375481.ece
and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/23/nuclear.greenpolitics  explaining the government is even considering pay increases way above inflation for remaining people and as a means to try and attract some back. The situation is apparently so bad in the nuclear sector we don’t have enough people to even assess the designs available to decide what we should be using never mind the people to design and build them power stations we urgently need.  However not to worry as the government has a “fast track” system for them according to the Times…

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4327220.ece

 

On the other hand are the government shooting themselves in the foot if not blowing a large three mile hole in the country. 

 

 James Dyson who delivered the wonderful Dimbelbey Lecture in late 2004  http://www.phaedsys.com/information/ese/e se0501.html about keeping the IP and R&D in the UK  wanted to build a £56m design and engineering school a technical collage in Bath intended to take 2,500 teenagers a week on a diploma course to reduce Britain’s shortage of engineers. However, he has been dogged, for four years by delays caused by local government. It is now likely to go to the US where other backers are welcoming it with open arms.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article4493878.ece

 

 

This lack of engineers has manifested itself over the last year in dealing with customers. These days I am more often asked if I can find people to operate the tools I sell as much as selling the tools.  I have been called by agencies looking for people to fill roles more than I am by agencies trying to place people.  It has got so desperate we are now listing known good contractors and consultants on our resources page of the web site.  http://www.phaedsys.com/resources/index.html

 

A rather interesting email crossed my desk last week. I was about an interview with Peter Gluck of NASA discussing the Phoenix Mars Lander http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/the-software-behind-the-mars-p.html  The full text is there as well as the audio file. It’s worth listening to.  Interestingly, they use the waterfall method and C. All the flight software is in C.  Apparently Lockheed Martin use Ada for military projects but C for space projects.  Peter said “Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA.”   That was lunched in 1997, so it appears C has been the language for space exploration for the last decade.

On a similar vein one of my customers contacted me regarding choice or RTOS for a deeply embedded project.  He mentioned his trials and tribulations with using RTOS in the recent past.  His conclusions are interesting.

 

Some of my thoughts after looking at Linux for the development of a piece of Laboratory Test equipment.  (Now completed and shipping.)  Comments based on 3 years ago but I doubt things have changed much.  (I can’t remember the prices of the various drivers and add-ons we needed but from what I remember there were about 5 ranging in price from $15-$70 per shipped product, and an unknown development time to integrate each licensed component.  I guess there may have been “free versions” but we didn’t find them before abandoning the idea of using Linux, as imply too expensive and too risky.

 

When investigating an operating system for a piece of laboratory test equipment we looked at Linux assuming it would be low cost, and flexible.  A PC with Linux and development kits was £5,000, then found we needed to find and add drivers for example for JPG and GIF support.  All of which seem to require a lot of searching of how to rebuild our version of Linux to integrate these drivers, also each of these drivers had a per installation license fee.

 

After considering the costs of the development environment with a Linux starter kits, and the time needed to find and rebuild Linux with the appropriate drivers and add-ons, and then the cost of add on licenses for every shipped units Linux looked just too expensive : in development capital, development effort, and license cost on a per unit basis.  Also the idea of having to pay a license to half a dozen different vendors for each shipped product was far from appealing.

 

We swapped to WinCE – the platform builder tool is £750 and you can use it while developing for free, only paying for it when shipping product,  Visual studio is £600 and offers powerful GUI tools.  The WinCE license was $3 (£3) per sold product, (prototypes, demos, exhibition versions, trial products not requiring any license.)   So upfront costs were low, we had well used powerful tools and only started to pay license costs when product was shipped to paying customers, and then at such a low rate as to be insignificant.

So WinCE offered more powerful tools, lower development costs, and lower license costs than Linux, and that is to say nothing of the lower development costs because of better support, and better tool etc.

 

As you know we normally used Keil, Segger and other products where we have support.  In general the value of support should something go wrong is worth the price, and the idea of implementing a project that if a few weeks before we are due to ship a show stopper issue is found that we have no support to fix is a prospect I find scary and not worth the risk.  Some support does come with the £5,000 starter kit, but then we got that for our £1,100 WinCE starter kit.

 

Conclusion

For the right product WinCE is an excellent choice and amazingly low cost.  Linux is not as free as people would like you to believe, although for someone who does not have to pay for development time and is not shipping products (students and hobbyists) I am sure Linux is powerful and free for them, but as a developer of commercial embedded systems where time to market is important, unit cost is important, and development time needs to be minimised, Linux does not look attractive.  Perhaps if we were Linux experts the balance might be different but the entry fee for Linux was a lot more than for WinCE.

 

OK, so Windows is not always the bad guy and Linux is not really free.  In the end he has just bought a purpose built embedded RTOS. IT was far more cost effective than trying to strip down either Linux or windows and still get the reliability and not have to release the source code

 

From last month… internet on melt down usage and demand of bandwidth growing faster than capacity   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/07/nweb107.xml  Perhaps there should be two internets. One for video, music, retail shopping (and of course the porn) that is charged at a different rate to the traditional internet the rest of us use for business, research (other than porn !)  and email.  

 

Whilst on the subject of the internet a new search engine has been launched with 4 times as many pages as google but no tracking!   www.cuil.com... The cynics may say there is no tracking [yet] because it is a new systems and they will get round to it later!

 

Finally whilst looking at al the new innovations Nissan announced  it will soon sell cars with accelerators that push back when drivers try to put the pedal to the metal. Japan Times.  I am sure it will work flawlessly but even if it does should software be intruding to this level?
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20080806a6.html

 

Hopefully we will see you all at the Embedded Systems Show. Stand 336 at the back so do glance at the other stands on the way to see us.  I am also presenting on the first day “Debugging is Difficult: so why do it? Apart from seeing my presentation it is a chance to see all that is new and innovative as well as the regular stuff in the embedded world and of course the coffee and doughnuts.

 

  

 

Author Details and contact

 

Eur Ing Chris Hills BSc CEng MIET MBCS MIEEE  FRGS   FRSA is a Technical Specialist and can be reached at This Contact

 

Copyright Chris A Hills  2003 -2008
The right of Chris A Hills to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988