Author: Joe

The FreeRTOS Tick – Unravel the Mystery to Master the Tick

Over the last few years, I have become a fan of FreeRTOS for a few different reasons: It’s free (though a paid versions allow for some protection) Portable as it abstracts well from the hardware it runs on Provides an easy way to separate sections of code Allows for control of when, and how often, tasks are run It’s the last point that this post will delve into. How does each thread (tasks in FreeRTOS speak) control when they run? It all comes down to the ‘tick,’ the magical trigger that FreeRTOS uses to know when to switch which task is running or give up waiting for a semaphore that will never be given. What Drives the FreeRTOS Tick It all comes from the FreeRTOS Tick – the function that is called at a periodic interval. As we will see below, this tick drives the context switch between tasks. But first, what drives this tick? At the simplest level, the tick is just a timer that has a period set to match the desired tick rate. …

Full-Scale Production – New Product Introduction in Seven Steps

This is the final step in our series on New Product Introduction: Full-Scale Production. If you missed the rest of the series, get caught up in the intro post. So here we are, after months of hard work, trips to the manufacturer, and probably long nights, we are finally at the last stage of New Product Introduction: Full-Scale Production. While it could be argued that at this stage you are no longer in NPI mode, I view the start of scale production as the transition zone. Full-Scale Production It is now time to turn the crank and print the money. This is where the manufacturer is building hundreds or thousands a day to be shipped out to customers. The processes have been worked out, the hardware and firmware bugs have been solved or accepted, and now it’s just copy and paste. Go ahead and pop the champagne and celebrate, this is an exciting milestone, one that many products never achieve. But Now What? But, the work isn’t over here – though many an engineer wished it …

NPI Product Verification Build

Product Verification Build – NPI in Seven Steps

Product Verification is part six of our New Product Introduction series. If you missed the previous posts and want to get caught up, start with the introduction post. At this stage of the New Product Introduction process, your manufacturer has built small, hands-on runs of your product. They have put their best team on the lines, and probably had a high level of oversight at every step. This has made for very expensive units, probably twice as much as you were expecting. But as described in the Design Verification stage, it was all investment in making sure that everything would run smoothly once the crank started turning. Product Verification Build And that cranks is beginning to wind up. The Product Verification build (or just PV) is much like a mini-production run. In fact, the PV is a practice run before releasing the production flood. This means that what you receive from this build is a product that could, in theory, be placed on a store shelf. As we dive in, we will find that while you …

Understand Customer Service

Customer Service for Engineers

Customer service often gets a bad rep in the press. Unfortunately, it’s often due to insanely poor service from corporations, companies that win Consumerist’s Golden Poo Award. It could be in part because these large businesses outsource the role to call centers that get paid by volume of handled cases rather than the value provided to the customer. But that isn’t the service I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to help engineers understand what the importance of good customer service and how people in the role promote your company’s brand. On the Front Line A dedicated team may hold the role of customer service or shared by other roles within the business. Customer requests may come in through emails, support tickets from a web form, calls, or even passionate customers showing up at the front desk. Whoever is filling the role, they are the front line of your company with its customers. Consumers have become to expect a high level of product quality and when something doesn’t work right out of the box, …

NPI in Seven Steps – Design Verification Run

Design Verification is part five of our New Product Introduction series. If you missed the previous posts and want to get caught up, start with the introduction post. Your team has now received the Engineering Verification units and your manufacturer has completed their test plan to ensure they are building the product correctly. You’re now ready to build millions, right? Now quite. You have a nice prototype that may even look like a product, but you and your manufacturer need to go through a few more steps before reaching full production, well at least if you want to get it right. At this stage of the New Product Introduction, we are going to build what is called the Design Verification build, or just DV. After completing the EV run, your team and your manufacturer probably had a few design changes needed to get the product working right and able to test efficiently. If those changes were significant, you might have had to redo the EV build, but otherwise, the changes get implemented and the DV build …

Fail Fast, Succeed Fast

The micro-world that is Silicon Valley has a perception of a breeding ground for new ideas. With a few horrendously bad (like ‘disruption‘), and others being quite good – when put into context. Fail fast! Fail often! This is an idea that has been bandied recently, and out of context, some companies have used it to fail right out of business. The core idea of this concept is to make small, but brave changes to your project and see how the customer responds. Only a small amount of time is invested and if the result is an awful failure there has been little lost. On the other hand, if the results look promising, you could iterate the idea into a successful product. Fail fast – but not for the sake of failing. Fail fast or succeed fast, either way, the idea is to take an idea and act on it. Fail Fast in Your Career For you, the idea of fail fast is just as applicable to your career. However, for performance review reasons, we …

NPI in Seven Steps – Production Test, FCT and ICT

Production Test Verification is part four of our look at New Product Introduction, if you missed the previous articles, get caught up here. In this post we use the prototypes from the Engineering Verification build to start the production test procedures and fixtures. At this point in our process through the New Product Introduction, we just received our first manufactured boards from the Engineering Verification run and are giddy with excitement I’m sure (or frustrated with hardware bugs!). Your manufacturer is also excited about the boards as well so they can start the next step in the NPI process: designing and producing the Production Verification Test. What is Production Test Verification As we previously hinted at in the Design for Manufacturing and Test phase, the manufacturer has an incentive to make sure every product that goes out their door works to the best of your design. This is where the Production Test Verification comes in. While the EV build isn’t the final product, it still gives the manufacturer something to work with to figure out how …

The FAE, Sales Rep, Distributor and You

As the New Product Introduction process starts, a confusing relationship starts to unravel between your company, your manufacturer and the maker of the parts you are attempting to buy. Somewhere in that mix, a distributor steps in to provide the needed parts to your manufacturer, sales representatives from all sorts of companies start calling on you, and your technical questions are redirected to mysterious FAEs. But who are all these companies and how do they interrelate? And before you shrug it off and don’t think any of them matter to you (they’re ‘business people stuff’) I can tell you from experience that FAEs can be the difference between getting a part to work and hitting my head against a wall for weeks. And a good sales rep and distributor will not only help you find the right parts to meet your needs, they also drive pricing. Meaning they can bring your product from out of reach due to cost to exceeding margin expectations. The Four Main players When manufacturing a product, there are four main players that …

Engineering Verification

NPI in Seven Steps – Engineering Verification

This is part three of our dive into New Product Introduction, this time with a look at the Engineering Verification stage. If you missed the previous articles, get caught up here. To this point in the New Product Introduction process, you don’t really have much to show for all the hard work. A couple of reports, pretty renderings of the mechanicals, and lots of hand-waving around the prototype. Get ready to change all of that. In fact, get ready to become the most popular team in the company, everybody will soon ‘be in the area.’ Why? Because you are about to get the first prototypes from the manufacturer that almost look like a product. Engineering Verification Run So now that your manufacturer has reviewed the design, helped you make some changes, and gave their best estimate of the final cost, now it’s time to build something to show for all the hard work. The very first build at the manufacturer is the Engineering Verification build or EV. Depending on how much money your company wants to …

Making Mistakes

Making Mistakes and Learning From Them

This blog almost didn’t happen. I was afraid I’d make mistakes in what I write or what I say. In fact, many other projects that I have started have completely sputtered out due to this fear of failure. Have I already made some mistakes? Yup, and I will continue to do so as I go. What I have not done is to allow these mistakes to cripple me. Instead, I allowed myself to use them to improve, and so can you. Making Mistakes, and Learning From Them Success is like getting high, but failing is like going to the gym. When things go right everybody feels good, everybody is happy, and nobody cares why. When you tied your shoe this morning did you reflect on how it could have been improved? Or on today’s commute, did you think about how to add additional safety processes to the transportation system? Probably not, because they worked just as expected. Things that work rarely get attention, and therefore rarely get improved. Now think of something that didn’t go so well this …