If there is a lecturer in TCD’s CS department that doesn’t know of the problems and issues Joel just raised in his Capstone Projects post, they’re a rare bird indeed. But what Joel hasn’t mentioned — and what those lecturers can tell you because they’ve been debating it for decades, writing papers on it, holding conferences and have published peer-reviewed journals on the topic, as opposed to Joel’s one blog post — are that there are very specific and very good reasons why CS and CEng undergraduate courses don’t get to cover all the industry tools Joel uses.

To give a brief and inexhaustive list:

• Undergraduate courses in CS and CEng are not there to teach industrial tools, but basic principles, ususally ab initio to students just out of secondary school (high school for the US equivalent courses). This has implications:
  • Everyone must work solo. You can learn to work in teams later (and certainly there are team projects all through the four years of the CS and CEng courses in TCD) but until you have a grasp of the fundamentals, team projects are worse than useless as they mask the student’s problems with the basics.
  • No student is expected to graduate and be able the next day to walk into an industrial role without supervision or training, and no student has ever been expected to do that in Engineering since the first undergraduate course started in TCD in 1841. That’s why we have mentoring, why we have CPD processes, why we have Chartered Engineer (or Professional Engineer) titles granted by postgraduate programmes, it’s why there’s an entire structure there that’s been built up over hundreds of years of experience. Experience that we have paid for with lives in many cases.
  • Everyone needs to work on the “interesting 10%”
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So for CS7004′s labs, I wanted to have one large-ish, deep-ish, multi-step, interesting project. And I’ve thought of one and I’ll write it up as we go through it (no fair readers here learning before the students!).

But here’s a sneak peek at the hardware they’ll be using

(Assuming, of course, that I can get the sodding thing to do what it needs to do!)

Well that didn’t go too badly. General course overview and a probably over-long “what is an embedded system” lecture. No-one overtly fell asleep at any rate. And everyone enjoyed the videos of the explosions.

So what the heck, enjoy – Ariane 5 Flight 501. An example of what can happen with unsafe datatype casting

Next talks are on the hardware used in embedded systems, starting with the microprocessors and microcontrollers.

Okay, I’ll grant you, it doesn’t look that impressive. That’s just the basic ‘Blinky’ first-step demo for the Keil MPC2400 board. Basic light chaser using the pot to set the speed of the blinking.

However, it’s a bit more fun when I note that the Keil environment was run from within Virtualbox on my Debian laptop and it still used the USB JTAG connection to connect to the board and it all worked without a hitch on the first try.

Apart from the obvious convienence this means to me (I don’t have to dual-boot to programme the board, I can run the exercises from within Linux, which I prefer), it’s just downright impressive that Virtualbox is that far along.

Well, maybe not to you young kids, but to someone who was in college when the web came along, this is impressive

So it seems that getting shot in the face by a robot can actually pay long-term dividends.

By which I mean that after all the time I spent building and debugging hardware in the now-defunct Computer Vision and Robotics Research Group, I’m now one of the decreasing handful of people in the CS department who knows hardware. Which sounds odd from the outside I suppose – most non-computer people I know seem to think that anyone with a degree in computer science or computer engineering knows how to do anything and everything to do with computers. It doesn’t actually work that way, the same way that a neurosurgeon wouldn’t be able to deal with a pandemic; the field is specialised in both cases to the point where specialists aren’t interchangeable anymore, at least at the deeper levels of specialisation.

That’s not to say that there’s no knowledge of hardware outside of the few people who’re working on hardware-level research; it’s more that those working in (for example) formal methods would be misspending their time if they spent time building hardware. It’s got nothing to do with what they’re working on.

At any rate, because of this, I’ve been assigned to teach the CS7004 course, which is the introduction to embedded systems on the Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing MSc course. I’ve done a lecture or two before, along with six years demonstrating to various courses and three years TAing for two other courses and teaching commercial courses outside of college but this is my first actual post as a college lecturer. I’m rather looking forward to it.

And we’ve got some nifty hardware to use as a platform; we’re moving away from the chips we used to use (68000′s, 8051′s, PIC chips, BASIC stamps, SunSpots and so forth) and several … Read the rest