Welcome to London Place Systems. I have been fascinated by embedded systems and control since I started pursuing a Master’s of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.) degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1986. The first robot that I worked with was a Reis V15 Industrial Robot. We created our own “embedded” control system with a three Motorola 68030 processor VME bus cards running the VxWorks real-time operating system. The analog motor current and velocity control were left running on the stock Reis hardware. The path planning, kinematics and position control loops were run on the Motorola 68030 processor VME cards. A graphical user interface was created on a Sun workstation running X-windows. Communication with the user interface was with UDP sockets.
While doing my M.A.Sc. degree in “mechanical” engineering I learned very quickly that I had to expand my class learned skills to include software, electronics and later on, with wide spread availability of programmable logic, firmware. It is the multi-disciplinary systems approach required to build an embedded systems that I find so compelling.
Needless to say, advancements in technology have shrunk size and cost so much that the creation of extremely powerful embedded systems are now accessible to the home hobbyist. It has been my privilege during my career to work in a field which has been so dynamic. It my belief that we are just getting started. The purpose of this blog is to keep track of the small projects that I like to work on in my free time. It is my hope that some who read this blog will find the information interesting or useful. Feedback is always welcome. Questions, insights, comments will help direct my future investigations.