An example of an embedded project for a single person

Question

I've been trying to wrap my head around embedded. Since I will be self-taught in this specific niche, I realize it will be harder to get a job in the field, so I'm hoping to add a completed project to my resume to prove to potential employers that I've done it and can do it again for them.

Can someone suggest a project that I can undertake as a single person and actually be able to finish, but at the same time not too simple that it doesn't prove anything? Something reasonable that I can aim for.

If you can substantiate your example with a project you worked on yourself, and mention how many people were involved, and how long it took to finish it, that would also help me gauge the difficulty of projects I see in general and rule out the ones that are probably too big for my capacity. It's very difficult to gauge the amount of work a project needs from my position.

Answer 1

You should take a look at the arduino. To quote their site:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

There is a really handy playground listing a bunch of personal projects on the arduino, any one of which might fulfil your need to do some embedded development. You can also trawl around the internet (e.g. instructables) to find many other interesting arduino applications -- I particularly like the one building a fancy control system for an espresso machine, and, of course, there is the mandatory fart detecting chair that tweets its findings.

Being an arduino experimenter myself, I can attest to the simplicity and power of this device -- and the great fun you will have playing with it. If you want to get started quickly, I can recommend buying the starter kit from the very helpful people at oomlout.

Answer 2

Are you looking specifically at embedded software development, or are you interested in circuit board design as well?

If it's just software, then I would suggest getting hold of an ARM development board (Possibly the Philips LPC range - sparkfun have some nice ones) that you can program via a bootloader over usb and start hacking. Get one with a display and an ethernet port and you can build up to making some sort of network attached sensor (temperature, water level, object counter, etc). Start out little (turn on a LED from a button) and work your way up.

If you're also into the electronics side of things, I'd suggest something like an MP3 (or WAV) player and maybe stick to the AVR or PIC 8bit microcontrollers (AVR is used on the Arduino) as these are a little easier to deal with than ARM. Here you could start with a usb powered device that streams wav files from a PC serial port out to a pair of headphones, and build up to a battery powered board, feeding data to an MP3 decoder IC from an SD card.

Some things you may want to learn & demonstrate:

• Understands the bounds of working with limited resources, including memory management (dynamic and/or static); resource management (locks, semaphores, mutex); multiple tasks (interrupts); and appropriate data structures
• Ability to interface with other devices/ICs over various interconnects (analog & digital IO, serial bus (RS232, I2C, SPI))
• Ability to sanely structure a program and segment the various modules without producing 'spaghetti' code
• Ability to use source and integrate 3rd party libraries where appropriate (think FAT filesystem, or TCP/IP stack)

Misc Tips:

• read and understand the datasheets (yes all of them)
• code and test on the desktop where possible, but understand that there are differences and bugs will still creep through (this is where it helps to be using a tool-chain that is common with the desktop - GCC is good, but the tools are generally CLI)
• use assert a lot - you can flash the line number of a failed assert using a single LED - this is invaluable

Most of all have fun - it still makes me smile when you first get a new component working (display, motor, sensor). Embedded makes the world go round :)