Raspberry Pi für die professionelle Produktentwicklung - Eine gute Idee?

International Women's Day - Why I wear Yocto Shirts on the Embedded World Exhibition

• Anna-Lena Marx
• March 8, 2024
• Personal , Embedded

Today, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, I’d like to give you an insight on working in Embedded as a woman: Why I’m searching for my best Yocto shirt and the nerdiest hoodie when I’m visiting the Embedded World exhibition.

Let’s go back some years to one of my first Embedded World visits. I was still a student doing my master’s degree in Embedded Systems. EW traditionally invites embedded students from all over Germany and adjacent countries on the third day, the student’s day. Together with some of my fellow students, I joined the trip and was looking forward to seeing new trends, talking to people, but also getting an idea where to apply for a job after finishing. At the exhibition, I started exploring together with some peers. Of course, all male. When going through the exhibition and talking to the people at the booths, I quickly recognized a pattern. The staff talked rather to the boys than to me. Mostly not quite obvious and probably not even on purpose. I think it’s about internalized stereotypes. They probably do not think that much about it, but obviously I was not a technically competent conversational partner to them at first sight, even if I asked the questions. I was an addition, an accompanying person from university or marketing. Mostly it was rather subtle, and I did not recognize it that much as the problem it was in the actual moment. But at some point we reached the Intel booth. I asked a question on something I was really curious about, and the male staff member started explaining to me and the accompanying students. During his talk, he started turning more to the boys until he showed me his back. I got a bit angry and told him directly that I would really like to hear the answer to the question I asked. Ok, bad, but human. So why am I telling this, and why do I mention Intel? Because I believe particularly such large companies should sensitize their employees working on a booth.

LoRaWAN in theory and practice: A trip through Munich

• Anna-Lena Marx
• February 24, 2024
• Embedded , Conferences

LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is becoming increasingly popular, thanks in part to public networks such as The Things Network, which allow users to dispense with their own gateways. LoRaWAN also promises potential in terms of range and energy efficiency. But how does the standard perform in practice?

The aim of the presentation is to shed light on the technical background and demonstrate how practicable LoRa is in the field using real tests. It will be shown how the standard behaves in urban and rural areas, how differences in height of the gateway and different antennas influence the transmission quality.

Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

• Anna-Lena Marx
• June 30, 2023
• Embedded , Conferences

In our community, building embedded systems based on Linux, e.g. with Yocto or buildroot, is standard and well known. Considering Android, respectively the AOSP as a base system feels strange at the beginning as it is a huge ecosystem that implies high system requirements. Of course, embedded Android is not a solution for each issue. Nevertheless, the AOSP provides a sophisticated base platform which is packed with a

• modern UI stack
• robust media and camera implementation
• modern AI runtime
• well known abstraction between system and app development
• energy optimization

and lots of other helpful infrastructure.
This makes AOSP an interesting approach for building more complex embedded systems.