Sensors Converge 2021

This half-day pre-conference symposium on embedded technologies is targeted specifically at engineers who develop embedded systems and work with both hardware and software. The focus is on operating systems, coding, debugging, and testing systems as well as on full stack engineering for connected devices. Attendees will learn techniques and strategies to design better, more reliable and secure embedded systems and discover new concepts, techniques and tools to shave development time and increase performance of their products. They will also hear from engineers who have hard-won knowledge about the trade-offs and challenges associated with any embedded development effort. And what better way to learn, than from other’s mistakes?

9:00AM - 9:05AM PDT
Opening Remarks

9:05AM - 9:45AM PDT
Speakers:
Dave Bim-Merle, Partner & Co-Founder, 219 Design
David Gutierrez, Lead Embedded Systems Engineer, 219 Design
Title: Architecting Firmware Applications with Multiple Sensors, Bare Metal up to RTOS
Description: There are various methods for architecting a system that needs to read multiple sensors on a periodic basis. We will go over what some of these architectures look like, the pros and cons of each, and the latest learning from employing FreeRTOS in a recent project for this purpose. Follow along with our demo project (available on GitHub) that makes it easy to handle low data rate, high data rate, and interrupt-driven sensors all at once.

9:50AM - 10:30AM PDT
Speaker: Alex Lim, Lead Field Application Engineer, LDRA
Title: How to Build Secure Embedded Software
Description: Embedded devices are everywhere these days. They are integrated in the national grid, water supplies, and more. Security has been neglected in this expanding space. The best way to develop secure software for the embedded device is to focus on security throughout the whole development life cycle. Building in security through multiple layers is the best way for a secure software. A great layer is choosing a secure language subset like MISRA, Cert C and C++ . Also, following a security-focused process standard provides the overarching backbone for the software. A full traceability between, requirements, code, and tests can verify that the developed code does what it supposed to do. An important piece to make this all manageable is to automate as much as possible. Static analysis engines can check that the code is compliant to security and safety coding standards. Structural code coverage tools can verify that the code has been fully tested. Functional unit testing can not only verify that the function behaves correctly, but also do additional tests like invalid, unexpected, or random data as inputs. These secure coding practices and the automation of validation and verification of tests all ensures that secure code can be developed in an effective way.

10:35AM - 11:15AM PDT
Speaker: Eli Hughes, CTO, TZero
Title: Connecting the Unconnected: Full Stack Engineering for Cellular Connected Sensing
Description: Advances in cellular connectivity solutions are enabling new solutions for remote monitoring and control of industrial machines and processes. To take advantage of new connectivity solutions, engineers whose primary responsibility was hardware must now also be familiar with the details of cloud technologies. Through an application in the food/beverage industry, this session will provide a holistic view to engineering an Industrial IOT solution using modern cellular communications standards, embedded microcontrollers, and cloud data processing.