On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 1:53 PM, David Rysdam <da...@rysdam.org> wrote: > 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)
"embedded" has always been a loosely-defined term. It means different things to different people. The above four items are rather more specific, although "specialty" is still squirrelly. At $WORK, we have "embedded" systems which are basically commodity PCs running vanilla Microsoft Windows, using a USB cable to plug into a $100,000 CNC machine. Other than that USB peripheral, there's no specialty hardware involved. ;-) When looking at want ads/etc., don't assume your experience isn't useful. Hiring entities rarely find people who are the exact ideal candidate, and are often more than happy to get a smart person who can learn what they don't already know. > If it's just a regular PC running in a kiosk, that's > completely different than what I was picturing. Could be. Could be a car nav/media system, which isn't far removed from a PC these days. May lack Internet, uses a touchscreen instead of hard keyboard/mouse, reboots a lot, but otherwise will be similar to a home Linux PC, or at least an Android phone. Could be an instrument controller, where your job will be to provide a Linux environment to run the instrument software, or maybe write software to take data from a driver and draw pretty pictures with it. Could be a vending machine which some PHB want to have a web interface on. Hey, it's their money. None of these are the traditional bitty-boxes that you're thinking of. They're running the latest ARM CPUs, plenty of RAM and HDD, an Ethernet interface and IP stack, and a Linux OS that's only slightly tailored to the platform. They might even run an X implementation for the UI. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
