I was at some trade show wandering around with a cynic who was pointing out that every booth advertised productivity improvements. How many improvements we’ve made to productivity, and this has gone on for years” he said,“By now, we must be able to make incredible things with no effort.” In the embedded world, productivity is, of course, not incredible – or at least not incredibly good – but this can change. Using Linux or BSD as platforms in embedded development is a huge step although the Legacy RTOS (LRTOS) vendors and the 16bitters are fighting all the way. Our customers who come from the LRTOS world are often amazed to discover that many complex problems (like: display a graphical window on a remote machine) are trivial on a modern POSIX operating system. And the productivity gains of hardware platform independence are also big: You mean I can start software development now on a PC or reference board and just run the same software on our hardware when (or if) our hardware is ready? You mean we don’t have to start six months late?
A standard data acquisition program on RTLinuxPro is so easy it’s hard to believe.
See the post on control loops