Pebble Bay Offers Advice on Embedded System Design at Embedded Live

Pebble Bay Offers Advice on Embedded System Design at Embedded Live

Pebble Bay are pleased to announce that their engineers will be available to offer in-depth, unbiased advice on hardware and software choice at the upcoming Embedded Live event at Earls Court, London on 20th and 21st of October 2010

Pebble Bay is a world leading embedded systems engineering consultancy that specialises in assisting technology companies with their embedded system development. Pebble Bay works with a broad range of clients and technologies and its engineering team are recognised worldwide as one of the leading embedded systems companies for their knowledge and experience in this field.

“Our knowledge mainly comes from hands-on experience,” said Ian Willats, Managing Director at Pebble bay. “We work with a variety of hardware, operating systems and development tools on a daily basis. Choosing the right package for a given project can be challenging and sometimes you don’t know if you’ve made the right decisions until quite late in the project. At the show, we’ll have our engineers available to discuss with delegates the nature of their future projects and how we would approach hardware choice, development tools and software issues.”

Pebble Bay have also launched a series of embedded systems development workshops. Mainly aimed at software developers new to embedded development and hardware engineers that require an insight into software/hardware integration, these workshops will assist engineers in understanding the fundamentals of developing code for embedded systems. The workshops will cover topics ranging from cross development to hardware/software interfacing.

“We’ll be able to share our experience of the various hardware options that are out there,” said Ian. “Whether it is a single board computer, a bespoke computer board or even a chassis based system, we’ll be able to offer some guidance as to the relative merits of such solutions. Microprocessor choice is a very similar challenge. In making these decisions there are many ‘trade-offs’ to consider, such as speed and power consumption, footprint and functionality, the availability of device drivers and third party software, development tool costs and such like. It’s fair to say that we’ve been there and got the t-shirt. We understand the cost and heartache of a bad decision in these areas and many of the pitfalls to avoid.”

Pebble Bay is renowned for its work with both real-time operating systems and a range of non-real-time solutions. Whether it’s VxWorks, Linux, QNX, OSE or Integrity, the team at Pebble Bay can offer impartial advice based on extensive experience working with a wide range of RTOS’s. They can advise on the issues of board support packages, device driver development, real-time performance, code size, reliability and development tool support.

“Definitely some operating systems suit certain projects better than others,” said Ian. “Some offer a more deterministic performance, another might offer better support graphics, and another might offer a more secure system. Again, our knowledge on these matters comes from first-hand experience of working closely with this software, so this is a great opportunity for engineers to come along and pick our brains. Furthermore, we do not sell any tools or OS’s, so we are completely impartial on these matters.”

As a taster for this new seminar series, Pebble Bay will be presenting a workshop which introduces the fundamental principles of interfacing with hardware in an embedded system, including an overview of device drivers. It discusses plenty of essential practical techniques along with traps for the unwary and how to avoid them. The aim of the session is to de-mystify what can be considered a black art for those who have little or no experience of hardware interfacing. This workshop also includes demonstrations on an embedded target system.