So it has been ages since I last wrote on this blog... ages as in time, distance and multiple other parameters. I even changed my location from sunny California to freezing Netherlands... but well you do what you have to do. I will not comment about those kind of changes. So now I am living in Eindhoven, a little (200K people) town in the south of Holland (yep, back in old Europe!!). If you know a little bit about Eindhoven you will know the following facts
- It is the smartest region in the world in 2011. Hopefully it will remain this way after my arrival :-).
- More than 50% of the patents in the Netherlands come from this city
- Most of the people are engineers
- Most of the engineers work for either Philips or ASML. I do not work for neither of them, at least directly.
- It is 2h by plane from my hometown (instead of the 18 hours of California).
Other than the distance, the time zone, and the weather, I also changed jobs and started working with Microcontrollers!!! Well working as in working full time on a paid job as a firmware engineer.
For the first time I got in contact with the famous and popular MSP430 (90% of my daily job for the last 6 months is coding for MSP430s) and its tool chain through IAR. So far I cannot complain much (compared to PICs and ATMELs through arduino).
So far, as I was saying I have not been fully satisfied with the toolchain for the MSP430 as it is somewhat clunky and it crashes often. I have to admit I am not careful enough to stop debugging before unplugging the JTAG, and that kind of stuff.... but anyway... it is always good to get in touch with different hardware.
Although I would not like to talk much about my professional
life, let's say I work on firmware for medical devices in the wireless
sensing arena.
On another side note I just noticed it has been more than a year since I wrote in this blog about the Arduino DUE and its ARM core. Well still waiting, and apparently it is not even close. Of course the new era of Raspberry Pi's is already here (still did not quite get one for testing). Anyway several interesting things happening on the embedded world and it is almost impossible to keep track of them.
Other than that, the IndieGoGo campaign did not work, my son is growing like crazy (starting to speak in dutch alredy), it is the year I had more vacations in my after-school life (Hawaii and a lot of Spain) and I hate bureaucracy more and more every day!! Unfortunately, also, I had to add some ads to the blog to help me support my side business... because now that I moved out of the US, it sort of needs a revival campaign.
Write to you real soon!!
