The results are in. We asked you what your design preferences are, and you made it quite clear. I’m referring to the Annual Embedded Reader Study produced by Embedded Computing Design. We asked questions like “What IoT application are you focused on?” and “What programming language are you using?” and so on.

There were 15 questions in all, and rather than go through them here, let’s look at the results. I won’t post all the responses here, but I’ll provide the highlights. If you want the full study, shoot me a note.

“My current embedded project is designed in:”

The astounding takeaway here is that the third highest response had to be added to the selections because of the high number of responses it received in last year’s “Other” category. Who woulda thunk that Python would score so high?

How about (paraphrased) “Where do you turn when you have a design-related question?”

For as long as we have been conducted studies of this type, the Number 1 response has always been some form of “the engineer in the next cube.” Last year, that response tied with “search engines.” And this year, search engines moved to the top spot. So people would rather search on-line for an answer than ask a colleague.

“What’s the most important criteria in choosing an operating system”

The top choice is the hardware compatibility. The lowest ranked response—purchase price. Interesting.

And finally, “What’s the most important factor in choosing an embedded processor?”

Availability of software development tools is the top choice, and it even had a sizable increase over last year’s study. “The chip’s performance,” while ranking high, had a decrease. My guess is that designers are starting to take performance for granted, particularly for mainstream designs. Big increases were in “the chip’s power consumption” and “the chip’s cost.”

Let me know if you agree with my assumptions.

This post was published on January 21^st, 2016.