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stroll down the showroom floor at the
Embedded Systems Conference always
subjects you to so much variety. There are some vendors, like
Microchip, Motorola, and Texas Instruments, that always promises to be
informative and entertaining. The smaller booths, however, tend often
become be a question of indecision as to whether or not you should stop by
- sometimes its not obvious that the vendor has anything you may be
interested in.
ST-Microelectronics had the best
real-world demo of the big-name vendors.
The interior of a Jeep Grand Cherokee dominated the central space of their
booth. While some car companies, such as GM, already have GPS navigation
capabilities in their high-end vehicles, and while some semiconductor
vendors will gladly tell you about their car multimedia system
strategies, ST has married full-on Navigation and Speech Recognition with
a GSM digital cellular interface. The L&H voice recognition system for
the navigation and for dialing the cell phone appeared to be speaker
independent for all comers, and only experienced difficulty when Godzilla
was playing too loud in the back seats. No, I'm not talking about precious
little ones, I'm talking about a DVD of the 1998 film "Godzilla"
playing on the two Sharp color LCD displays that were in the back of the
headrests of the two front seats, with audio coming from the surrounding
Bose® speakers.. The LCD displays also had full internet access (ST people spotted a guy checking his email from the back seat) and
could also play music DVDs. At one point, the Bee Gees were heard above
the din of the Conference, and it was quite a sight to see exhibitors in
the surrounding booths moving to the beat (NOTE: THIS SHOULD NOT
BE TAKEN AS AN ENDORSEMENT BY THE EDITORS MICROCONTROLLER.COM OF THE BEE
GEES!)
Microcontroller.com's
Coolest Booth Award
But of all the booths there, there was one that I have to point out
qualifies as the Coolest Booth. If you were locked on the conference
floor overnight, this is the booth that you would spend most of your time
at - its the one where you would play with all the demos and just
experiment all night.
 The
award easily goes to the Parallax Booth.
Parallax makes the Basic Stamp
microcontroller project board, which allows you to program Scenix SX and
Microchip PIC microcontrollers using the Basic programming language. The
products are very popular in small, single threaded, quick time-to-market
applications. Parallax had samples of all of their project boards which
are in the form of the stuff we all like to play with - robot projects, a
weather station, educational boards, lots
of cool stuff. The booth was always busy; everywhere you turned,
people was playing with something. But most important, most of the
projects were educational, something that is sorely lacking in this
industry. They teach principles of robotics,
data acquisition, motor control, and others.
The Word from the
Showroom Floor
Lots of seat-of-the-pants marketing goes on at the Embedded Systems
Conference. One thing that was immediately obvious: the semiconductor and
3rd party marketplaces have adapted and embraced the internet rapidly.
Datasheets and product literature are readily available from the web sites
of most vendors. Samples and datasheets can be ordered online. But while
this is certainly a boon the working engineer, in the long run some
products will suffer. Without the personal interaction with a sales person
or support technician, vendors can easily lose touch with the marketplace
and miss market trends or, even worse, the embedded market may evolve more
slowly as conventional marketing becomes more difficult. None of this
appears to be a challenge to Microchip - I spent a fruitful half-hour with
Ron Cates, their product marketing manager, and Eric Sells, Public
Relations manager for Microchip. The reason for Microchip's success is that they know their target market
engineers so well, they probably know our favorite pizza
toppings, a marketing advantage well understood by the most popular
8-bit microcontroller supplier, Motorola (Note: while I did speak with Mot
at the conference, we did not discuss pizza).
But the internet has really sifted out the good
from the bad in the embedded marketplace. The difficulty of separating the
good vendors from the bad vendors is less of a mystery now. Public &
private web sites, news groups, and email have made it impossible for
vendors with troubled products to keep their problems unknown, while the praises of
quality vendors are well broadcast to the internet community. The result:
No More Secrets.
Next installment - Why
are we Embedded the Web Again?
plus Trends
in Development Tools
-Bill Giovino
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