All those who are following the rise of embedded Linux should take note of Snapshot of the Embedded Linux market; a survey by the folks over at LinuxDevices.com.

Probably tends to be a little biased towards Linux users since it on a site devoted to embedded Linux, but they still got an interesting number of responses from people using other systems.

My favourite embedded Linux distribution, from the folks at SnapGear.org was not listed.

Was watching a TV program the other day about a 2 wheel balancing robot which I thought was kind of cool. Not something put together by a large corporation, but by a couple of guys down in the San Jose area (one hardware engineer, one software).

Check it out, especially the video clips of this thing actually working – it is quite impressive and all done with relatively cheap components. The processor that runs it all is an 8 bit PIC microcontroller!

I thought that it was about time I started work on the second of my two VxWorks-related books: Migrating from VxWorks to Linux, so this week I outlined the chapter titles and today I have started work on the preface and more detailed outlines for the first few chapters.

I also picked up a book I had order earlier in the week, Building Embedded Linux Systems by Karim Yaghmour. I’ve only read a little of it so far, but it seems to be a reasonably good overview of the issues that somebody starting with Linux for an embedded project would face. Not a lot of cross-over with my book, hence I have no problems recommending it in the preface of my book as something that people should buy.

Yesterday evening I finally published the changes to add support for remote debugging to the NetBSD latest source base for PowerPC devices. This includes support for the scheduler activations based threading via the remote debugger connection as well.

More information can be found here. The change was also filed as change-request problem report with the NetBSD project.

Here I am at an ARM-sponsored internet terminal in the mezzanine level of the Moscone Center. Thought I post a short note now, add more detail perhaps later.

Spent the morning at a breakfast session about the Eclipse IDE hosted by QNX and Rational. Very interesting, and it looks as though it might well become the IDE of the future. I don’t think the others out there, especially the proprietary ones from other embedded players, stand much chance against this. IBM’s backing is obvious, Rational and QNX seem very committed not only to using it, but also feeding back work in the open source community.

As a side note, I am wondering when IBM will buy QNX… I think that would have a big impact on the embedded industry in general, and would certainly push QNX into the spotlight a little more than they have been.

The VxWorks Cookbook is progressing, though perhaps not as fast as I imagined. I have completed the Preface, done a fair portion of the Working with VxWorks section. A few other chapters have a little information, pasted from a recent posting in comp.os.vxworks when I write that response.

I really need to go through the rest of my responses to common questions in comp.os.vxworks and get some information into the rest of the book, then I can announce it to the comp.os.vxworks usenet forum and see if anybody else out there wishes to contribute.