As soon as any benefit can be drawn out of such an activity, deployed electronic systems are subject to hacking in the same manner as regular PCs are. This article will briefly describe the methods employed by microcontroller hardware hackers and will also shed some light on the method employed by the micro manufacturers to prevent this kind on activities.

Along other popular microcontroller manufacturers, Freescale also offers a complete line of one chip USB solutions for various development needs.

Linear voltage regulators are regarded as much simpler circuits than switching power supplies. And it is true. They hide, however, some traps which should be avoided when doing professional electronic design.

A few days ago it was again that day of the month when, at start-up, the laptop provided by the company I work for generated that hated message: “Your password will expire in 14 days. Do you want to change it now?”

Airbag systems are critical safety systems and they save lives. They are also a mandatory feature on all vehicles sold in the developed countries making them a prime target for all automotive developers to have in their portfolio.

Competition in the semiconductor market is quite high, and one of its most diverse branches is the microcontroller market.

The huge increase of portable devices during the last 10-15 years has lead to numerous companies seeking (and succeeding) to make significant profits in this market.

The MEMS technology seems to byte bigger and bigger chunks from the conventional semiconductor market. And although the accelerometer is the first thing that pops into mind when you think of an example, the most widespread MEMS representative is most probably the microphone.

For more than 100 years now, electric motors have been available and once fully developed they made their way into our lives from the most modern computers to the most common appliances.

The most probable development that would put an end to our battery addiction is energy harvesting. Sometimes called also energy scavenging, it means using energy which is “freely” available in the environment to power up the devices that would traditionally rely on batteries to function.

Many of the embedded systems developed today need some sort of wireless communication.

CodeWarrior Development Studio is a complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides a highly visual and automated framework to accelerate the development of complex embedded applications using Freescale processors.

A traditional way of transmitting video signals in the automotive environment is using analogue NTSC compatible signals.

LIN or CAN communications have represented standards in automotive communication systems for quite a while now.

ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) is one of the main enemies of electronic devices.

Voice control of electronic systems is not a new invention; however its development has been hindered until 10 years ago by the lack of powerful enough (and dedicated) digital signal controllers).

There is a multitude of process parameters nowadays that need to be measured in the industrial environment (temperature, pressure, humidity, force etc.).

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how you can perform serial port communication in the VBA (Visual Basic Applications - script editor included in any typical Microsoft Excel distribution) but without using the MSComm control or any other third party add-on or ActiveX.

Although looked down upon, and looking very technologically backward, the tires are actually one of the most critical elements in a car (old cars did have tires, but did not have airbags, for instance).

Taking into account the amount of time electronic products have been around us, one would think that choosing the correct power supply would be only a trivial task, just an easy off-the-shelf exercise. However, given that a poorly constructed power supply can easily lead to the demise of the entire product (or just parts of it) it is still one of the most important parts on the schematic.

Although now-a-days cars are mainly built around a sturdy CAN network, and FlexRay is gradually making its way on the market, the LIN is still in place and it is present in many simple automotive electronic control units.

Back in the days when my father used to profess as an electronics engineer (1980s) the standard light sensitive element was the good old photoresistor.

Although infrared communication might look like the technology of the 1990s, it is still present in a multitude of applications around us. Every time you press the button of a remote control, it is most likely it is using the IR (infrared) technology for transmitting data. The TV remote is the most common example. Air conditioning remote controls are another good one. The good old ball based PS2 computer mice (which are now dying out, unfortunately). And the best thing about it is that it is so…simple!

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are basically computational models which are inspired from the architecture of real biological neural networks; at least this is a common claim among some theoreticians of this science. However there is still so little known (even at the lowest cell level) about biological systems, that the models we are using for our artificial neural systems seem to introduce an oversimplification of the 'biological' models.

In the world we live today, the cost is considered one of the most important characteristics of a product. No wonder then, keeping production costs down is an important part of the manufacturing of a product. This concept has also been extended over the development costs. In many cases, especially for projects which pioneer a specific filed of electronics, the development costs represent a significant part of the final price of a product. Keeping them down would obviously make the managers happy and win a pat on the back for the engineers (stop hoping for a pay raise!)