I've had a few bright ideas for cool products in the past. Some of these ideas turned to dust when I found that several other people had the same idea some time before me and have fully implemented the resulting product. Others turned out to be infeasible for a variety of reasons. A few have been shelved only to find that someone else later implemented said product ... much to my annoyance.

A few weeks ago, I had a bright idea for a new product. I've searched online and can't find anything quite like what I am considering building. So I've decided to build a prototype of this product to see what it'd take to make it all work.

The specific details of what this product will be are not important right now - I'll (hopefully) be able to share the details on this product sometime later. For now, we'll code-name this product Sentinel!

The thing that I want to build requires an embedded system to control several devices.

Now, I've been a computer and gadget geek for years. When I was 12, I got a Dragon 32 for Xmas ... and the love affair with computers began. A year later I was lucky enough to upgrade to a BBC Micro ... that's when the fun really started. The Beeb was an amazing machine - it had built-in A/D converters (one of the only home computers to do so at the time) and a variety of serial and parallel interfaces. It was a home hobbyist's dream. My Beeb rarely had its cover on and was regularly seen to be spewing wires and probes as I interfaced it to all manner of things.

When I went to university, I took Computer Science and Microelectronics. I was fascinated by how computer hardware and software interacted and how these amazing machines *really* worked. After college, I worked at a company that was split 50-50 between hardware and software engineers. The hardware crew designed incredibly powerful Transputer-based signal/image processing cards and hardware; the software teams designed sophisticated apps and systems (usually in Occam and/or C) to make the hardware sing. It was very cool stuff back then.

It's been a few years since I build anything electronic ... and times have changed. So have available hardware. Whilst many existing and new products are built around 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors, the cost, size and power consumption of modern 32-bit CPU's has dropped to the point where it's often more cost-effective to build products based around these more powerful chips which in turn let products do more than ever before.

So, in order to build a prototype of this system, I'm going to have to do some work and un-learn and re-learn many things to get it all working! I'm going to need to decide *how* to build it. Do I build it in an emulator? Do I build a real device? Do I write my own OS or use a pre-existing OS? How do I build, debug, test and deploy said system? What are the challenges of building an embedded system using today's technologies vs. those of yesteryear?

I'll be regularly blogging my progress in building this prototype here, covering many of my strategy, design and implementation choices, problems, successes and failures.

Stay tuned :)