Serious Integrated: Captain's Log

Last podcast of 2018! The question to really think about is do you want 2019 to be different that 2018?  Did you release enough products, new features, or did you get bogged down in sustaining engineering?  

The three pillars of innovation that drove the consumer electronics revolution - Communications, Control, and Human Machine Interface (HMI) - are going to drive the next revolution in industrial, medical, and commercial "embedded" devices.  What's your plan?

After the interview with Pär Håkansson of Nordic Semiconductor on mesh networking, Terry bounces the usage models off a lot of customers.. and wow.. is mesh networking the new killer embedded app?

All about Bluetooth 5 and Thread for the embedded engineer! Terry interviews Pär Håkansson, Product Marketing Manager at Nordic Semiconductor to find out all about this new technology Serious is incorporating in the upcoming SCM318 Comms/Control Module.

Channeling our inner Samuel L Jackson -- but really, do you know what is in your code? Automatic code generators, downloaders, and builders are making the world a whole lot more complicated.

It seems pretty audacious: the company wants to sell you their technology/product, and then they ask for an up-front contract as well to "help" you get started. Shouldn't that be free? Is there documentation so non-existent I can't do it myself? Or maybe there's something different going on and it's not so audacious an idea after all, but eminently rational. Read Podcast Transcript

A Ted Talk about an engineer who revolutionized the way we look at subway maps hits us between the eyes as we nearly forget an obvious feature on a new product.

Terry reviews a white paper from Mentor demonstrating why Linux may be the most expensive free OS there is.

Industry constraints are continuing to get worse -- now what?

Is a supply chain still a "chain" if it only has a few links left? There are highly disruptive forces in the world that are rapidly and radically changing the way companies build and sell products.

Is your product facing its "Steve Austin" moment where it's time to rebuild it.. stronger... faster..? How do you approach this key moment? Maybe it's time to change the trajectory of your engineering team and approach to your product line, as the next 5 years are going to be a lot different than the last 30.

Terry answers a question on technology entrepreneurship – understanding and embracing the difference between Raspberry Pi + AWS/Azure prototypes to commercialized products is critical to your success.

We're entering a period of incredible competitiveness and new entrants to markets that can be highly disruptive. Embracing "product cannibalism" and being paranoid about competitors are vital to your company's future.

Terry digs deeper on the normal ingredients in an RTOS. What more do you need?

Terry explores the state of embedded engineering, 8 to 32-bits, and the cost of not using an RTOS.

Terry meets with one of the smartest bankers ever ... and learns something about 2018 and investing in growth, products, and engineering.

A customer tells me "we have to re-engineer engineering", and how that will radically change his company's trajectory and competitiveness in 2018.   Learn more at: www.seriousintegrated.com

Bluetooth is very successful in the mobile phone market, and has also helped "cut cords" on PC mice and keyboards. However in the embedded industrial and commercial machine and product space, it has, up til now, been narrow in application. Is this about to change?

Fresh off CES and the AHR air conditioning tradeshows, Terry finds that there are some striking gaps between the state of technology and the state of room/environmental control systems today.

Our CEO, Terry West, talks about another big take-away from CES 2018: how traditionally horizontal enabling technology companies are going more and more vertical into key target applications, and what that means for companies that are the device manufacturers in those applications.

Terry visits CES 2018 ... connectivity is everywhere, security is nowhere. 

Security for IoT devices is a very hot topic. This year we need to think about our technology foundation, roadmaps, and partnerships very seriously and deliberately in order to capitalize on the IoT upside without losing all our gains to the downside of an "security incident" on our products.

2018 looks like a big innovation year but if you're an established market player, how do you not get left behind?

We've entered into another innovation cycle after nearly 18 years of stagnation. How did we get here and how 2018 looks to be very different from the past 17 years.

The electronics industry has now been plunged into a highly constrained environment -- how do we navigate the next few years as manufacturers and customers?

Going to a graphic/touch Human Machine Interface (HMI) is a big evolutionary leap for your industrial/medical/commercial device as a systems engineer. How high should you aspire for your new User Experience (UX) to be? What does that mean for my technology, partners, and roadmap?

Evolving your commercial/industrial/medical product to support IoT is a lot like driving in a blizzard – it’s really hard to see what’s next for your technology until you get down the road.  Thinking long term and picking the right partners is key.

With the evolution of industrial/medical/commercial devices becoming IoT connected, the challenge is to think in terms of customer outcomes and map that back to your roadmap and the technologies and partners needed to get there.

IoT and HMI are incredibly disruptive evolutionary leaps in the architecture, hardware, and software of an industrial/medical/commercial device. Engineers and engineering managers should consider a new approach – a leveraged embedded approach – to getting their products done.

Dell is spending $1B in edge technologies over the next 3 years. The battle over who own’s your product’s IoT data is a battle you and your company cannot ignore.