During my recent Lost in Spain™ vacation, I visited Mallorca, Spain's largest Balearic island. Mallorca is home to tennis royalty (Rafael Nadal), Hollywood royalty (Michael Douglas and his young wife) and the summer home to Spain's royal family.
Mallorca is also the home to an old friend Emil, a mechatronic engineer living in the beautiful city of Palma. When I walked into his office, I expected to see a desk covered with electronic equipment, but I was certainly surprised to see an Eclipse application running on his monitor.
Eclipse and Mechatronics
So how is Eclipse used in Mechatronics on a Spanish island? Let's break it down.
Emil is developing a rich client application that communicates via CAN-bus with a range of electronic sensor/actuator control devices using a USB-CAN adapter.
With this application, he can monitor the states/errors, remote-control actuators and change the setting of each installed device. He can also send, read and verify the firmwares of all devices. The number of the control devices can reach 8000 in one installation.
Living La Vida Loca
It was very cool to see Eclipse being used on a daily basis in mechatronics. However, as soon as I realized that I was discussing Eclipse on my vacation, I stormed out of his office and enjoyed a street dance :)
5 comments:
They should start an Eclipse User Group on the island.
Sign me up :)
Your friend could be interested in the Eclipse Day that will be held next december in Valencia: http://www.moskitt.org/eng/eclipseday/
"start an Eclipse User Group on the island."
It is a good idea. I will thing about it.
Wassim, tell Emil to take a look at the DeviceKit from Eclipse.
http://download.eclipse.org/technology/ohf/soda/dk/update-site/weekly/
I hear that there is not CAN support in the current build, but that it either could be added (it exists) or could be implemented.
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