Monday, September 15, 2008

The Real World: Poznań

I love Eclipse demo camps more than life itself.

My chosen venue for the November '08 camp is Poznań, Poland, which is about a 10-hour flight from my home town. Now that's true love.

The event is hosted by the Eclipse Enthusiasts of Poznań. In addition to being grad students and IBM employees, these busy guys author one of the more entertaining and informative blogs on Eclipse, teach Eclipse summer school and contribute code to the Eclipse platform. In short, I want to be like them when I grow up.

At that event, I plan to demo the latest and greatest in the world of database IDE development. Also, if there is sufficient interest, I may show home movies from my boyhood trip to Michigan :)

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Eclipse Over Spain

Lost in Spain

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 :)