Designing your boards (but not your LEDs)
Designing Embedded Hardware, by John Catsoulis
At the recent Embedded Systems Conference I became familiar with the new wireless devices and some low-power processors. All nifty chip sets, some with evaluation boards and and development kits. Having lots of application projects in mind for these, I grabbed the URLs and CDs. The many variables leads to a trade space that's practically too large. I found this book also at the conference, and liked it because it narrowed that trade space in an effective manner. After reviewing the fundamentals of decoupling and rectifying (it's necessarily basic, so get more detail from Horowitz or elsewhere), he delves into various I/O options and suggests specific chip combinations that perform the basic tasks. That helps a lot. One could then re-enlarge the trade space, more informed this time, after studying and implementing these designs. I thought the SPI, CAN, and USB sections were especially useful. I don't know why there's a section on digital filters, but the digital signal processing section is okay. I got what I wanted out of the book, already knowing differential equations and some electronics and device programming: it helped narrow the space. Others wanting to learn device programming, or electronics, or electrical engineering, or digital filters, should look for books deeper in those topics.
Designing Embedded Hardware
Monday, September 26, 2005
