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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Archives for February 2013

Real-time scheduling: no locks, please.

In a previous post, the assignment of priorities was discussed. There are a couple of axioms involved. One must mention at least these two: No resource sharing, locks or busy-waits. Static priorities (i.e. the task with the highest static priority that is runnable immediately preempts all other tasks, and the task priority does not change […]

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ADC

In order to (attempt to) control things, we need to find out what is going on, we need to measure and quantize: Sensors are the senses of electronics. Without senses, we are deaf and blind. Most micro-controllers we find today, incorporate an Analog-to-Digital-Converter (ADC) peripheral. This ADC enables us to link electronic sensors, which output […]

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AC generation experiments

Power with green inspiration. A couple of weeks ago, an electricity blackout in our neighborhood was announced by the power company. We thought this was the ideal time for some experimentation with ‘green’ off-the-shelve products and also explain a bit about the inspiration for the energy harvester project. The various “domain knowledge gathering” experiments (e.g. […]

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4 really good things about Scrum

Here are my 4 favorite scrum-activities: Sprint Planning meetings Daily scrums Retrospectives The backlog Sprint Planning meetings Planning meetings are at the beginning of each sprint.  During these meetings the team looks at the most urgent user stories, then breaks them down in tasks, and then estimates the time it will take to implement each […]

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Real-time scheduling: assigning priorities

Real-time scheduling in practice In one of our previous items we talked about Real-time scheduling. Now, we want to show how priorities could be assigned in practice and how deterministic system response can be designed. Deterministic response needs to take into account the worst case scenario: everything is happening at once, at the worst possible […]

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