For quite some time I had been thinking about the Memory Architecture of WinCE 5.0 and older kernels. Most striking about it is the per process virtual address space of 32MB. This is quite unique in that it offers protection between processes but allows for all virtual addresses to be unique. This is what allows fast context switch between processes during system call and re-schedule. As all Virtual Addresses are unique one doesn't have to flush L1 cache and TLB during a context switch.

The dates have been announced. It will be launched on 1st November 2006. If you want to get it all from horse's mouth, the virtual launch will be available at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/ce6launch/agenda.mspx#session_1 Do expect that all microsoft marketing and other channels will be full or this and other Windows CE related buzz.

Those with interest in robotics can look at robotics platform MINDSTORMS from LEGO. It's brain has 32-bit Microprocessor, USB and Bluetooth capabilities and Ultrasonic Visual Sensor, Touch sensor, 3 interactive servo motors and more. Right now they don't ship to India directly. But if you have a friend  in US, this may be perfect  thing to ask for.

I recently got my Phidgets kit - thanks to Microsoft. It's really cool with every possible sensor that one can think of - RFID tags, LEDs, motor, LCD etc. etc. On top of all this folks at Phidgets have added support for Phidgets with eBox (from ICop-Tech). With this I think building projects with eBox has become much easier. To say that I am impressed with the job Phidgets team has done to enable access to their peripherals would be an understement.

INAST-4C launch aboard India's GSLV-F02, failed. It's a bad feeling for Indians in general and professionals like us in particular. In last 10 years ISRO had a clean slate with all successful launches to it's credit. However, this is "rocket science" after all and things can and do go wrong. I feel bad for those engineers and scientists whose years of efforts have gone down in a failed mission like this. I hope that India's press does a bit more than just reporting "307 crores went down the drain".

Pascal Stang's contribution to programming with AVR microcontrollers is well known. For those of you looking to start in this area, please refer to his homepage at: http://hubbard.engr.scu.edu/embedded/

I came across a nice website which sells easy to interface hardware kits for hobbyists. USB is used to interface the kits with PC and API is provided for ease of programming. Can be a nice starting point for anyone dabbling with embedded systems. Best of all - the prices are reasonable. http://www.phidgets.com/index.php

I recently had an opportunity to interact with a graduate student who had worked at GMRT at Pune, India on Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope on a project involving Polarimeter - a complex device that is used to measure extremely weak signals from distant dead stars know as pulsars. This system gathers inputs from 26 giant antennas. The amount of information to be processed is phenomenal.

With the advent of virtualization in desktop and server computing for variety of reasons it's imperative that embedded systems too see a growth of this approach in coming years. WinCE emulator is a virtual machine already. Only problem with it is that it's limited in it's functionality. We need to see more functional virtual machines for exploit full power of WinCE and development conveniences, testability and debugability that it brings along. Over the years VMWare has proven that virtual machine provides great benefits for build -> test -> debug development cycles.

This one is really nice XScale 520MHz PXA270 SBC with WinCE 5.0 BSP. Has one USB Host and one function, builtin LCD controller. Manufactured by Applied Data Systems: http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS5947193247.html