While the first day of a trade show usually begins slowly, this year seemed to be different: The amount of visitors was quite high from Tuesday morning on. The 16th annual Embedded World conference has maintained its reputation as the leading exhibtion for the international embedded community.
Hardware is the basis for electronics, as Mouser’s partners Analog Devices, Basler and Pycom demonstrated, but software is the key to unlock possibilities. Analog Devices’ Software-Defined Radio demo, Pycom’s IoT boards and, of course, Basler’s facial recognition system showed the neccesity of hardware and software engineers cooperating. Actually, it’s troubling that this fact still needs to be mentioned; the merits of collaborative design and hardware/software co-design have been well known for decades.
Still, there’s a long way to go. System development is more complex than ever, and modeling platforms complementing traditional programming languages are gradually beginning to dominate design. While requirements engineering has proven itself to be a solid set of methods, it turned out to make the process even more difficult due to long analysis stages in the beginning. Regardless, it’s the best we have at the moment, even though its promise to shorten testing time at the end rarely is fulfilled.
Back at the convention, there were no huge technological breakthroughs to see, but there was a steady consolidation of established technologies, combined in new ways. One of the triggers of this is the establishing of Internet of Things approaches, which hardly require huge computation power. This development also allows breathing time for small- and medium-sized exhibitors that used to be under pressure by large global companies with one-size-fits-all solutions. Many IoT applications, be it in the consumer space or for industrial uses, require tailor-made hardware and software solutions that are way too intricate and detailed for large solution providers. This explains why there were 1021 companies exhibiting in Nuremberg.
A clear indication of the way the industry is taking gave the conference part with the main topic “Embedded goes Autonomous.” And, indeed, the exhibition floor was full of semi-autonomous system approaches, from automotive and robotics to healthcare and security designs. Various conference speakers made it clear that fully autonomous systems will be around in many of those areas in a short period of time.
The theoretical knowledge communicated during the conferences was not only presented to the conference participants, but also to the 32,217 visitors; special areas devoted to M2M, electronic displays, and safety and security made information available to all.
Mouser supplier Antenova has received a special keepsake: One of the renowned embedded awards has been dedicated to their Robusta Antenna SR4G031. And one of the uncontested highlights of the show turned out to be Mouser’s game “Pick Pack Ship.” The visitors didn’t just play to win a prize but for the fun of it!
As Technical Content Specialist, Marcel is the internal contact person for technical questions in Mouser’s EMEA marketing team. Originally a physicist, he used to work as editor for special-interest magazines in electronics. In real life, he’s juggling two kids with too many chromosomes, a penchant for electronic gadgets and a fondness of books and beer. Until now, none has dropped.