mbed Blog

A few weeks ago, Ariel Lutenberg and his hard working collaborative put on an impressive event in Buenos Aires that attracted over 500 eager embedded engineers to learn about, discuss and develop with embedded systems; not bad for a first attempt!

The agenda included an excellent mbed workshop, involving programming mbed-based line following robots as part of an introduction to working with microcontrollers; you'll have to wait until part 2 where we'll have some details (and videos!) from Lucas and Joaquin, the workshop organisers.

Congratulations to Ariel and everyone involved for pulling off such a successful event! Let's hope this leads to SASE2011.

So in our first guest blog, here is Ariel with a great writeup of SASE2010:

Argentinean Symposium on Embedded Systems (SASE); a link between industry and academy

By Ariel Lutenberg, PhD. Professor, Buenos Aires University and SASE 2010 general manager

Between March 3th-5th of 2010, the Argentinean Symposium on Embedded Systems (SASE 2010, http://www.sase.com.ar) was held at the University of Buenos Aires. The event was sponsored by 32 universities, 10 agencies and institutions, and 13 companies (including ARM Ltd. and NXP Semiconductors Inc.). About 500 people from Argentina and other countries participated in the several activities that were organized: 35 tutorials, 6 plenary sessions, 5 workshops, a student project’s contest and a prize for new products proposals.

The tutorials covered several areas, ranging from “Microcontroller architectures and technologies” to FPGA basics and advanced applications, and including software oriented topics like “Embedded internet” or “Linux for embedded systems”, and interface technologies, such as USB, I2C, CAN and JTAG. There were also tutorials about hardware related topics, like “Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries technologies” and “How to design electronics for high quantities manufacturing”, and also more introductory level tutorials, like “Programming microcontrollers in C Language”. These wide offer attracted people from academia and industry, thus achieving one of  SASE objectives that was to bring close this two sectors.

Another objective of the event was to promote the interest of young professionals and engineering students on embedded systems, and that was successfully achieve by means of two different activities.

1) The “mbed workshop”, that was oriented to people whose previous experience was only about programming 8 bit microcontrollers in Assembly language and the usage of C language for computer programs, and who after the nine hours workshop were not only able to program the 32-bit Cortex-M3 microcontroller of the mbed rapid prototyping kit in C language, but also used this platform to program the control algorithm of a line follower car that was provided to the participants and use these cars to participate in a race that was organized between more than 30 cars!

2) A student project’s contest, where thirteen high level design were presented, including an FPGA simulator for Nuclear plant processes, a Low power access method for IEEE 802.15.4, different FPGA softcores implementations, an adaptive audio equalizer, and several automotive robots.

Also, a goal of  SASE was to spread the more recent advances and trends on embedded system technologies, and it was achieve by means of world class tutorials such as “Implementing Cortex A-8 technology in a FPGA”, by Steve Ravet from ARM, or “Twenty years of experience in designing complex embedded systems”, by Erio Schweickardt from INVAP, who covered the company experience in designing satellites, nuclear plants and radars.

The key note was the plenary session that closed the event, which was presented by Ramon Alonso, an eighty years old Argentinean that during the ’60s was assistant director of the MIT instrumentation lab team that designed for NASA the Apollo Guidance Computer, the heart of the Apollo series of spacecrafts, the missions that first took the man to the moon. Ramon presented an informal lecture where talked about the Apollo program and chat with the audience about the extremely interesting experience he got during those days, were the first modern computer was designed, using for the first time integrated circuits, and revolutionary solutions, as the introduction of the first ROM program, which was implemented using a ferromagnetic rope style memory.

For SASE 2011, we expect to offer even more tutorials and workshops, receive the sponsorship for even more companies, universities and institutions, and to account with more than 700 attendees from all Latin America, and hopefully from other continents, too.

Looking forward to see you all at SASE 2011,

Best regards,

Ariel Lutenberg.

For more information visit www.sase.com.ar or write an email to info@sase.com.ar

Details of the mbed workshop to come...

Sixth former Will Reynolds from The Perse School in Cambridge won the 'Google Technology Trailblazer Prize' at the Big Bang 2010 science fair in Manchester last Friday for his mbed based mimicking robot arm.

The aim of the fair is to inspire a wide range of people to engage with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

Will's exhibited project was a mimicking robotic arm, that sensed and recreated the rotational movements of a user's hand through the use of MEMS sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. He created his project during his Nuffield Science Placement with the mbed team last summer.

Will at his exhibition stand	The robot arm

Will has the opportunity to spend two days at one of the Google research sites in Europe where he will be able to take part in tours, workshops and get involved in some hands-on work.

Hitex is holding a one day conference and exhibition at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham to be held on Wednesday 19th May 2010. Over the course of this one day conference you will get an overview of the key developments in the rapidly expanding area of ARM based Microcontrollers

The conference features key silicon, development tools and training companies speaking on a wide range of topics. These include optimizing low power applications, creating LCD GUI interfaces, developing safety-critical applications, a demonstration of the CMSIS coding standard, rapid prototyping and a peak into the future with the Cortex-R profile processor.

The event will take the form of 40 minute short presentations from each of the invited speakers with a keynote presentation from ARM. A tabletop exhibition will be running alongside the formal presentations.

For more information visit http://www.hitex.com/index.php?id=1504&L=1

mbed will be at Makerfaire! (March 13-14, Newcastle, UK)

If you're there, come over and say hi!

For the uninitiated, a Makerfaire is where:

We'll be showing off demos, running an 'mbed workshop', and perhaps other things too. Watch this space and our twitter feed for updates.

I've just released a new site update which adds amongst other things, the following requested features:

• Favouriting
• Private messaging

Favourites

To bookmark a handy forum thread, program, page or even user, simply click the star icon. You can see all your favourites in your My Home area. This will form the basis of more interesting things to come regarding ranking of items.

Private messaging

On any user's home page, simply click send private message, and you can send that user an email. Your email address will not be revealed to the user you are messaging.

Enjoy!