Many parents face ordeals related to their children wandering around the house at night.  A young mother in Tennessee recently experienced a harrowing night when she woke up to find her 4-year-old son missing only to learn that the boy had stolen a beer, gotten drunk, ransacked a neighbor’s Christmas presents (donning one which was a little brown dress), and was brought home by police.  Luckily, most parents don’t have to worry about more than a living room covered in soap after their child’s wanderings, but it’s still a scary issue nonetheless.

Electrical noise from all types of sources can cause severe problems in electronic circuits, so designers spend much time wrestling with ways to reduce or eliminate it. In audio equipment, low-frequency noise can easily couple with sensitive circuits to distort signals. In many measurement systems, ground-loop noise causes problems that sometimes prove almost impossible to overcome.

Earlier in 2009, Micrium introduced its μC/OS-III real-time kernel, a real-time operating system (RTOS) that use the ARM7/9, Cortex-MX, Nios-II, PowerPC, Coldfire, i.MX, Microblaze, H8, SH, M16C, M32C, or Blackfin processors, among others.

The somewhat-obscure journal, "CrossTalk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering," devoted its September/October 2009 issue to resilient software, and engineers or designers involved with embedded systems should read at least the first article, "Considering Software Protection for Embedded Systems." This article covers ways that people can reverse engineer and maliciously attack FPGAs, although the techniques also apply to microcontrollers with internal flash memory. And it suggest ways to protect your intellectual property.

When you develop products that will employ a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection, you might need to dive into the nitty-gritty analysis of bus traffic. Previously, that meant struggling through binary, hexadecimal, or other low-level information to find and then interpret transactions. No software developer or hardware engineer wants to work at that level when tools can distance them from bits and bytes.