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Peggie: University of Oxford, UK - Shell Eco-Marathon Finals in Rotterdam

Posted by Robert Owen,
22 May 2013
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I arrived to find "Peggie" in bits with all the team members brandishing tools and furiously working on the insides of the dolphin-shaped vehicle! "Is there a problem?" I asked nervously. Senior (in years) team member Mike snapped back, "It's a puncture, and you've got to take out the front axle to mend it.” So I retired to a safe distance to watch...

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"Peggie" is the vehicular baby of Oxford University's Energy and Power Group. But as "EPG" doesn't roll off the tongue, it became "PEG" and then "Peggie". Peggie is about 2.5 metres long, coloured blue, and really does resemble a dolphin shape. It holds one driver (petite ladies only please) and a bunch of masterful technology. It has traction control, regenerative braking, power management, and even a special APP running on a Samsung smartphone. It really is "alive with technology" (apologies to Citroen, but you've got nothing on Peggie).

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The Peggie team are veteran contestants in Shell's "...

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Cortex-M0+ a year after: smaller, thriftier and smarter!

Posted by Thomas Ensergueix,
20 May 2013
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As usual it happened late on Friday afternoon. A couple of weeks ago a message arrived in my inbox from one of our latest ARM® Cortex™-M0+ partners: “We’re using 90LP and a similar configuration to your “min” with just a couple of additional and relatively small options and we can’t match your reported dynamic consumption (11.2µW/MHz). We can’t figure out what’s wrong, can you please help to find out what we may have missed?”

For a fraction of a second I wondered whether I should pretend I was already gone and come back to them on Monday? Well...no, I wanted to get to the bottom of it, and we start exchanging mails: How many tracks for the cell library? Target synthesis frequency? Which precise processor options? And after each exchange, I got even more confused. So focused on the details I had missed the right question from the start: “How far are you over the 11.2µW/MHz?”; answer “Well in fact we are 7% below your figures, around 10.4µW/MHz, and we were not expecting to match your marketing values, even less to be lower. Could it be some parts of the processor are not synthesized or clocked?”

It was now my turn to make a late Friday afternoon call to our implementation manager: “Let me check and try some experiments, I should have something for you on M...

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The Continuing Hazards of Dhrystone

Posted by Richard York,
16 May 2013
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Many years ago now (more than I like to admit) I wrote a paper on the hazards of Dhrystone, both in terms of its very narrow scope (the loop has only about 400 instructions, more than 20% of which are within two C library string functions) and because there is absolutely no policing of the strict and clear rules that were originally laid down by the author.

At the time it was a very useful exercise, it helped us talk through with customers what to check for so that there was a fair comparison made from product to product. Until quite recently I always felt that we should stick to the rules, not keen to quote anything other than 100% clean, legal numbers. However, now Dhrystone has become a more and more misused marketing tool so a range of results from legal to extreme has become necessary if customers are going to use it as part of their benchmark process.

Before I go on, here is a quick reminder of those original rules as I read them:
Source code used must be completely unaltered with no hand optimisation allowed, other than in the standard C library functions.The two source code modules must be compiled independently and then linked. In the ARM world that means multi-file compilation is banned.No modifications to headers, adjusting them to be ANSI ...

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Make versus buy: it's about risk management!

Posted by Guest Partner Blog,
15 May 2013
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DSP Concepts provides tools and engineering services to help our customers accelerate their development of embedded audio products and technology.
The question whether to “buy” or “make” is a perennial one that plagues us from the most mundane everyday life choices to very complex business decisions. Should I mow my own lawn or hire a landscaper? Should my company develop technology in-house or outsource? Unlike personal preferences, in business, everything boils down to risk management and cost. The wrong choice places company bottom line, competitiveness, and eventually careers in jeopardy.

“There are ‘known knowns’. There are ‘known unknowns’. But there are also ‘unknown unknowns’.” – Donald Rumsfeld (Feb 12, 2002)

Often product companies like to focus on technical risks. However, to take a proactive role in risk management, we must pull back to see the broader picture. Robert Cooper had investigated the causes of success and failure in new products for 25 years and found that most products fail to be commercially successful due to market risks, and not technical risks. 1 Engineers tend to think more narrowly of just tec...

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Accelerated Internet of Things (IoT) development with ARM mbed and Xively

Posted by Dominic Pajak,
14 May 2013
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Every day people encounter inefficiencies and inconveniences in life that could be vastly improved with imagination and a little embedded electronics. Increasingly these ideas are being made a reality – efficient ARM-based microcontrollers start at a tiny 2mm x 2mm, under $0.50, and can be embedded into almost any object to make them smart and Internet connected.

The Xively Jumpstart Kit, announced today, is designed to help bring these (Internet of Things) IoT products to market even faster. The kit combines the ARM mbed microcontroller platform with Xively Cloud Services™ – making it easy to create an ARM microcontroller-based design and connect it to the cloud. (Xively leverages LogMeIn’s cloud, which already connects over 250 million devices worldwide.)

Creating Internet connected devices
mbed is the fastest way to develop connected devices with ARM microcontrollers. It provides free online tools, libraries and interfaces to a wide variety of sensors and comms (3G, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB, WiFi, 802.15.4,etc.). Importantly, mbed also provides a clear route to production, and allows expor...

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