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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Programs, processes and threads – Part 2

This post is Part 2 of the series. Part1, which explains Programs and Processes, can be found here. Thread A thread is a single path of execution and schedulable by the CPU. It has its own stack, program counter and set of registers. A process (living program and container of all resources — see Part1) has one […]

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Programs, processes and threads – Part 1

Introduction Especially process and thread are terms which have many different definitions and implementations. And therefor, it is easy to get confused, and hard to get the concepts crystallized in your mind. Just do some googling and you will find plenty of sources which more or less contradict each other. We will add another source […]

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The energy harvester is ready for iteration 3

Iteration 2 overview Wind power to dump load switching has been the main topic of iteration 2. In our system design we also call this Power Management Decision 1 (PMD1). PMD1 should realize several system requirements and, because we have an energy harvester model in Enterprise Architect, this list of requirements can easily be generated […]

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Development facilitators

This might be a good time to talk about developer (or technical development procedure) facilitators. Although these are not even regarded as intermediate requirements – and certainly are not considered to be as important as user requirements – some development facilitators could be considered as development procedure requirements that have big impact on the process […]

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Early Prototyping: ‘blink those leds’

A bottom-up or a top-down approach? In order to be able to try something out, to proof something is technically viable, it is absolutely necessary to do early prototyping and provide ‘POTs’. A Proof Of Technology is just substantiating that there is a potential solution to a technical problem: We must emphasize that it is […]

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Development: a mixed top-down, bottom-up approach

Introduction In a previous post we proposed our RTOS engineering process: a lean and iterative process, which cycles between project management and development (see Figure). In this post we describe our development approach that can mitigate the risks and uncertainties of developing a new product in a new domain. But before we come to that, we introduce the two […]

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The engineering process

Introduction Let us begin with a recap. The goal of this blog is to describe how we develop: a new product in a new domain, with a short time-to-market, and given a minimal budget. Although our product – the “energy harvester” – is only used for illustration purposes, it is well chosen because building it, […]

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