April 20, 2020

An Interview with Jack Ganssle (2nd)

1 hour 8 minutes

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits. If you need a hand with your rework or getting your design spun up to full production, they can help.

Welcome back, Jack Ganssle! Jack was one of our first guests on The Amp Hour on episode 54.

There have been 435 episodes of The Amp Hour and 185 editions of The Embedded Muse since our last episode. Jack has been publishing TEM since the late 90s! Consistency matters.

Jack gets great feedback from readers, and you should be one of them! Subscribe to TEM to get a newsletter every other week!

He is currently doing a Salary Survey, if you'd like to participate.

One of Jack's early scopes was a Tek 545

Jack also started making videos since we last talked, including equipment reviews.

The "cry of despair" is that the code is crap

Renesas Synergy gives a code guarantee

What is still the challenge with all of these things?

So many communication standards!

Paying someone allows you to give someone to yell at

RTOS roundup

VXworks has had reports of problems and popularity seems to be dropping off. Instead, Wind River is doing more embedded Linux.

Jack likes Micrium as an RTOS

Amazon bought FreeRTOS

Microsoft bought ExpressLogic

How have things spread and changed in the world of micros since the last show? Like we discussed then, 8 bit isn't dead (and still isn't).

SiLabs won't characterize their parts

RISC V

196 from Intel was not well supported.

Cross platform stuff

He got his first taste of Linux/Unix stuff starting Maryland's first ISPs in '91.

Training business during COVID has completely cut off (obviously)

Jack does training all over the world, including Australia! He even joined Dave for a video while he was there. His course is called "Better firmware, faster"

The focus is on quality. The average team spends 50% of work on debug.

Jack prefers designed firmware systems. "Know where we're going before we start building". The best engineer he ever had would stare at the ceiling for weeks, designing the system in his head.

Books about Agile methods

"Agile! by Bertrand Meyer

"Extreme Programming Explained", by Kent Beck

"Balancing Agility and Discipline" - Barry Boehm

War stories

Chris's bosss used to say "little R, big D" for engineering organization.

Jack gave a great bodge wire example: you wouldn't leave bodge wires all over the board for production, you would fix it in the next rev! Same goes for software.

It only works when all the engineers have bought into the process.

Space shuttle was 1 bug per 400K LOC

How to get better results:

Code review

Michael Fagan review process

Working to a firmware standard, like MISRA

Use metrics to track the team.

How do solos get better (in addition to above)? Put it on the shelf before testing it

Card decks for programming in the 70s

Segger code coverage tool

Tools won't tell you edge conditions

Audit (QA) joke

Fuzz testing

The tragedy of the crashes of 737 Max airplanes and what we can learn from it. "They believed the sensor data"

Angle of attack sensor

Wonky temperature displays

Pay attention to your "goesintas and goesoutas"

Ada has a concept of "Design by contract"

Canticle for Liebowitz

Reach out to Jack at [email protected]

Photo taken from EEVblog #818

...more

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

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