Can you be the next Apple?

I recently attended the Embedded World show in Nuremberg. The exhibition always fascinates me. Manufacturers of MCUs, MPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and any other type of processor that I can’t quite remember at the minute, line up to show the capabilities of their latest products. The demonstrations on the stands are normally some of the best I’ve seen at a B2B show, with human-like robots, autonomous model vehicle races, virtual reality and augmented reality exhibits and lots of other innovative displays. It’s becoming a lot like CES in some respects, except that the exhibitors at Embedded World have products that actually exist, whereas CES is becoming more of a vapourware extravaganza every year.

Tens of thousands of engineers from every area of the industry flock to Nuremberg to see the latest technologies that will form the basis for their future designs. Engineers from Siemens will look for the processors and sensors that will drive their next generation of industrial automation and consumer products. Volkswagen and Audi designers will be there to take in the latest vision sensors and neural networking processors that will be at the heart of tomorrow’s autonomous vehicle designs. The cleverest engineers from Germany and the rest of the world were in attendance, so surely if the question was asked about where the next Apple would come from, vaguely pointing at the exhibition hall would provide a decent chance of getting the answer right?

Not according to Steve Carr from Farnell element14, who claimed the designer of the next big thing may not be an engineer at all, or could even be currently sitting in a classroom. The idea ties in with a Google article I read earlier this year, which said the company would be hiring more soft skills. The theory behind the article and Steve’s assertion was when technology is sufficiently advanced and there is enough abstraction to make it simple to use, the people that will be developing future generations of products will be the ones that understand the psychology of humans and our needs.

Engineers will create a common platform that the developer can easily build a solution without in-depth knowledge of how the technology actually operates. The developer may not even know how to program too well either. It may not be necessary to have someone that is trained in psychology or other soft skills, it may just be someone that recognises a basic need that is not being filled and decides to go out and create a solution. These people currently form the backbone of the Maker movement, which is one reason that Farnell element14 and other distributors and manufacturers target that market with boards, such as the popular raspberry Pi single board computer. The SBC and expansion boards could be all the hardware that is required for a product. Software can be programmed through the simple to learn Scratch programming language, or even abstracted further with a graphical interface.

Talking of graphical interfaces, National Instruments is another company that has a similar vision. It looks to what the company calls domain experts to solve problems on standard NI hardware using the graphical LabView software. The company has made a concerted effort to target professions other than engineers with products that allow them to create solutions for complex problems without in-depth hardware or software experience. These domain experts have already designed some outstanding devices. One example that springs to mind is Dr Stephen Hicks, a neuroscience post-doctorate researcher without a formal engineering background, who created LED glasses that help registered blind people to see. Trying to explain a problem that would possibly have required years of medical study to an engineer is just harder than going out and developing the solution yourself. You can read a short case study on Hicks’ work here http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-13847.

It is a very interesting concept. I don’t think the technology is in place yet to let most people go out and develop groundbreaking solutions that will change the world. And there are still other challenges to overcome. How would the developers rights be protected? How would the design move from a standard platform to a bespoke design? How would the device be secured from hacking? How would the device be guaranteed safe for use? How would you scale up manufacturing? Farnell element14 and others are working on these problems at the moment. It will be interesting to see how it all pans out in the end, and more people dabbling with hardware and software can only be good for the whole industry. In the meantime, I might nip out and buy my granddaughter a black polo neck and a Raspberry Pi...just in case!

PSD