Embedded Computing Design

In our last article in this series, we focused on how our hardware becomes obsolete, both intentionally and by nature of industry expansion. To round out our obsolescence trilogy, we’re going to shift focus to the software side of things.

In our last article we talked about how tech becomes obsolete, with a focus on planned obsolescence. Today, we’re going to move on to a different form of obsolescence: hardware advancement.

We see entropy’s influence wherever we go, whether it be our need to replace worn out clothing, buy new car tires, or have to continually clean our houses. Obsolescence is the technology outcome of entropy.

In our last article, we talked about licensing, open source, and how to protect your code. Now that we know how to properly open up our code to the world, it’s time to figure out how you could theoretically make a profit from it.

For almost as long as software has existed, the question of free software and open source has been contested. Many developers align themselves with the ideology that all software should be free to access, modify, and redistribute under the banner of open source.

We’ve come a long way in our journey through your computer. Today we’ll be ending that journey by discussing some of the firmware and software that helps your computer run.

In our last article, we talked about the core components that make your computer… well, compute — the CPU/GPU, RAM, and hard drive. So, now it’s time to move on to some of the more niche hardware concepts.

Time-Sensitive Networking, better known as TSN in the embedded community, is the IEEE 802.1Q defined standard technology that provides deterministic messaging over standard Ethernet networks.

Mission-critical systems increasingly rely on Ethernet connectivity between modules or devices.

In our last article, we covered the differences between hardware, software, and firmware. Today we’re going to take a deeper dive into the different pieces of common hardware and how they make your computer work.