Embedded Computing Design

Physical AI is a term that’s in vogue right now. It refers to the application of AI to systems that directly interact with and influence the physical world. Unlike Cloud-based AI models that analyze data and produce insights, physical AI closes the loop between perception, decision-making, and actuation. It senses its environment, processes that data locally or at the Edge, and then potentially drives such equipment as motors, valves, pumps, or actuators. In short, it turns algorithms into action.

You need some sort of UI on your system. It may be quite elaborate, or it may be very simple. In either case, designing that UI should not be a barrier to entry for an embedded system. Enter LVGL, or Light and Versatile Graphics Library, an open-source embedded graphics library that aims to (and accomplishes) eliminating that barrier. 

To understand why this is even an issue and how designers can get past it, Rich and Vin spoke to Gabor Kiss-Vamosi, the Founder and CEO of LVGL, on this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin.

Hello Embedded Professionals, Engineers, and Developers! Welcome to In Case You Missed it, the weekly news show all about Embedded technologies and solutions from Embedded Computing Design.

It’s always fun the weeks after CES, when some of the cooler the products you’ve seen on site in Las Vegas show up for real-life testing. This year, I took a look at two products, both wireless devices that are aimed at protecting the home.

Bluetooth claims to own the low-power wireless space with its Low Energy (LE) flavor. A newer, yet older entrant in the space wants to claim that throne. That would be Low Energy UWB, or LE-UWB. And now you understand the reference to newer-older. 

There are many different ways to look at the tangled web of AI. For example, tackling from the inference perspective is one way of looking at the puzzle, as not everyone is doing that. 

Avnet recently surveyed part of its core audience, and the topic was AI’s Impact on Engineering. It doesn’t get much closer to home than that. 

The user interface, aka the HMI, is oftentimes the only interaction a user has with a platform. Hence, it represents your brand, and it needs to look great and work great.

There’s no moss gathering under the Connectivity Stands Alliance, as the group recently announced the latest rev of the ZigBee spec, version 4.0. This new version enhances the security efforts from the previous generation, and also takes a hard look at smart energy in the latest devices. 

One of the keys, as you’ll hear, is the backward compatibility that’s been maintained. Faisal Bhaiyat, the Co-Chair of ZigBee Working Group, Connectivity Standards Alliance, and also a Senior Software Architect with Silicon Labs, fills me in on the details on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

High-performance computing at the Edge involves systems that bring server-class processing closer to where data is generated. Instead of sending private information to the Cloud, devices at the network’s Edge, gateways, sensors, industrial controllers, cameras, and embedded AI platforms, run complex workloads locally. This is beneficial for applications like medical imaging, Edge servers, networking, and enterprise-level LLM (Large Language Model) deployment, and includes markets such as healthcare, industrial automation, smart cities, robotics, automotive, and advanced consumer devices. Its growth is driven by tighter latency requirements, rising data volumes, stronger privacy demands, and the need for more efficient, scalable distributed compute architectures.