Automotive embedded software | Development engineering for software (personal views)

As we have entered an era where everyone are chatting with LLMs to share their emotions, troubles and joys leading to unprecedented levels of breach of personal data privacy. This is similar to the initial days of social media where everyone thought what is the big deal about sharing some pics, travels and events. Now those of us who have shared data to social media are to a large extent addicted to it and can’t get away from it. We are at the cusp of a similar situation with LLMs where we may share our inner most feelings, fears. A day may come when we can’t live without these LLMs and our human to human interactions keep coming down. This reliance on LLMs leads to more isolation and even more usage of LLMs in an endless loop.

To be able to improve human to human communications it maybe a good idea to go back to basics and understand human psychology. An excellent course on this topic by Yale from Prof Paul Bloom is available on Coursera for a the price of couple of Starbucks coffee https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-psychology

The course very well explains in an easy to understand fashion evolution of the science behind the human mind, the quirks and a few fascinating aspects of the human minds. The course ends with a module on latest development in this field of science.

Happy learning ! do let me know what you think about this in comments.

Now there is such an hype about Agentic , LLM, SLM, motlbook, AGI etc. it is easy to think and start to believe that there is no need of software developers at all and somehow we will 100x or even 1000x productivity from developers and test engineers.

I have been working in automotive embedded can say for sure that this skill is not going to AI’fied meaning AI taking over. The reasons are as follows:

1, Automotive embedded products need to be safety certified to varying degrees depending on the criticality or the SIL levels.

2, Automotive products which go on the road can harm others and can cause malfunction so there are regulations before a new vehicle can be launched into any market

3, The LLMs are mostly trained on web and application code as embedded code is not available on internet, they are all in repos of Tier-1 and OEMs and never in public domain.

4, OEMs can’t risk their brand reputation to an LLM generated code so they will likely put checks and balances. I know a few OEMs who are giving licenses to LLM agents, but them they have so many component tests in the path , it is lot easier to write human code and get it main-lined than using LLM code and keep getting into debug-loops of failed main line test cases.

The best use of LLMs is as a search engine to validate what you already know, if the user of LLM can’t know if the LLM output is correct or not, then better to learn the hardway and only use LLM as an aid rather than as a main source of knowledge.

What do you think, comment below.

We all have read a lot about the Air Quality Index and its effect on respiratory health in specific. Have we even wondered how much RF radiation we are exposed to and what impact it has one our cells. Those from cellular biology know that strong RF radiation ionises the contents of the cell contents.

Add to this the GHz we are subjected to due to 5G and upcoming 6G. Each country has set limitations on the RF exposure within their boundaries and every device needs to comply with EMC regulations before it can be given CE or FCC certifications. That said there is not much we can do protect ourselves, expect for one thing.

The one thing is wearables, they emit massive amount of radiations and us wearing them 24×7 exposes us to these high levels of radiations directly into our body. So my suggestion if I may is to minimise the usage of wearables for the purpose it was bought for. For e.g. there is no need to carry phone (also another Radio transmitter) and a watch together.

Happy responsible usage of RF devices in and around you and your family.

As today’s Human Machine interfaces are getting more complex and intuitive, it is super important to have a mechanism to do regression testing in an automated fashion to minimise human error and reduce fatigue.

Squish from Qt is one such tool which can do the job. It supports embedded device testing or even desktop application testing.

Squish allows:

1, Record and playback a test script

2, Write a Python script to do the automation using Squish framework

3, Uses Eclipse IDE which most software folks are familiar with.

4, It allows a development kind of interface to developing automated scripts for HMI validation

Happy squishing !

Link at https://www.qt.io/quality-assurance/squish

We all have encountered one time or the other folks going through slides one by one, reading every line and we as audience doom scrolling on our phones or nodding to show to great interest based on who is presenting.

In the very old days, there used to be projectors and slide sheets in which we used to draw using markers and project it, those were the days when there was more intellectual freedom for the presenter and also for the audience to see the human written alphabets, those days are never going to come back, unless AGI takes back to those due to some Armageddon event.

Now that power points stays here are situations NOT to use power point

1, Responses to RFQs

2, Scientific reports

3, Engineering reports

4, Under-graduate level project reports

The reason is using power points leads to:

1, Collection of bullet points which are fragment of thoughts and not complete ideas

2, The nesting of bullets makes it even more convoluted with additional meta messaging which might be missed by the audience.

3, Reading slides offline by others lead to lot of assumptions about the presenter with no chance to clarify

The only times IMHO power point can be used is for non serious communications, like town-halls, fun events, marketing events and the kind.

Happy word processing and good bye to ppts.