Embedded Muse 55 Copyright 2000 TGG November 8, 2000

EDITOR: Jack Ganssle, jack@ganssle.com

CONTENTS:
- Tires That Are Too Smart
- More On Measuring Latency
- Upcoming Embedded Seminar
- Thought for the Week
- About The Embedded Muse

Tires That Are Too Smart

Reuters reports that in Finland work is afoot to embed chips inside of your car’s tires. When the pressure falls too low they’ll call you on your cell phone.

Technology run amok? Can I block calls from my tires? I’ll have to get call waiting in case the tires want to break in on another conversation!

More on Measuring Latency

And Alf Katz commented:
Of course, you're right, but of much more interest to most embedded programmers is the longest system latency. This can easily be found by keeping the highest overrun reached in another variable, and updating only when a higher one is found. Of course you could go overboard & collect means & standard deviations of the latency time, but you wouldn't want to do it in an interrupt - and the longest latency is *usually* the most important metric.

Finally, from Dean TerHaar:
I use a similar approach to time the duration of an ISR. I define a struct of two variables: TimerIn and TimerOut, and then declare a global array of this struct. On entry to the ISR I read the system timer and store it in Array[i].TimerIn and on exit from the ISR I read the system timer again and store it in Array[i].TimerOut. I also have a control variable that I can set dynamically to enable/disable this ISR duration monitor. After I execute a sample run of the program (in real time), I'm use these timer values to calculate the min, max, and average durations of the ISR and display a report. (without the aid of a debugger or oscilloscope!)

This test, as it is written in C, however, does not account for the overhead of the ISR under test (working register pushes and pops), but this fixed time could be calculated manually and included into the final result returned by the routine that calculates the ISR execution time.

Embedded Seminar in Chicago

The focus is uniquely on embedded systems. I'll talk about ways to link the hardware and software, to identify and stamp out bugs, to manage risk, and to meet impossible deadlines. If you’re interested reserve early as these seminars fill completely.

A lot of folks have asked me to bring this seminar to their company. Email me at mailto:jack@ganssle.com if you’re interested.

Thought for the Week

The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side
of the shop and took out a monkey. He fit a collar and
leash, handed it to the customer, saying, "That'll be
$5000." The customer paid and walked out with his
monkey.

Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and
said, "That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them
are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so
much?"

The shopkeeper answered, "Ah, that monkey can program
in C - very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the
money."

The tourist looked at the monkey in another cage.
"That one's even more expensive - $10,000! What does
it do?"

"Oh, that one's a C++ monkey; it can manage
object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some
Java. All the really useful stuff," said the
shopkeeper.

The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw
a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag
around its neck read $50,000. He gasped to the
shopkeeper, "That one costs more than all the others
put together! What on earth does it do?"

The shopkeeper replied, "Well, I haven't actually seen
it do anything, but it says it's a consultant."