Month: April 2020

The Cost of no Architecture

Like many others, I enjoy various reverse engineering and tear-down stories. Personally, I mean things like iFixit tear-downs and Ken Shirriff’s blog, so I started following this tweet thread by foone.

This continues with another tweet sequence about getting software running on the remote control. Having enjoyed these tweets, I started thinking.

The Harmony remotes are quite expensive in my mind. I can’t find any exact numbers for the number of sold devices, but I found this 2018 Q4 earnings report. Looking at the net sales, I guess the remotes are either “Tablets & Other Accessories” or “Smart Home”. They represent sales net sales of ~107 and ~89 MUSD over 12 months. Let’s pick the lower number and just look at magnitudes. The Harmony 900 seems to have retailed for ~350 USD back when it was new. So, if all the Smart Home stuff was harmonies, we’re looking at 250k units over a year. So I’m guessing the magnitude is around 10k – 100k units annually – but the Harmony 900 is from 2013, so I assume that it sold closer to the lower number, if not below. The market was new and so on.

Then we look at the tweets again. What have we got? Let’s put aside security issues, unencrypted communications, and other clear mistakes and just look at how the device is built.

Flash to drive the UI, double web servers on-board, Lua, QNX and what not. A 233 MHz CPU and ~64MB of FLASH – for a remote control. From an engineering perspective, this sounds like a fun system to work on – from an architecture perspective, it looks like a ball of mud.

Back in 2013, QNX might have been a good choice compared to Linux. Today, with Yocto and similar tools for developing embedded Linux systems, it feels like an odd choice to add a license cost to such a device. But no biggie. Back in the day this was not an unreasonable choice (and still isn’t for certain applications).

The Flash stuff. There were alternatives back in 2013, but sure, there were plenty of developers at hand and things like Qt QML was still probably a bit clunky (I can’t recall the state of it back then – it required OpenGL ES, which I guess was a big ask back then).

But the mix of techniques and tools. The on-board web servers. The complexity of a small system and the costs it brings to maintenance and testability. If this is the foundation for Harmony remotes and a platform that has been used for the better past of the past decade, I wonder if the added engineering costs for architecture the platform to be more optimized early on would not have paid off in lower maintenance costs, as well as lower hardware costs.

I know how it is when you’re in a project. The deadline is there in big writing on one of the walls. You can get something working by stringing what you have together with duktape and glue. The question I’m asking myself is more along the lines of how do we run embedded systems engineering projects? Where did we go wrong? Why don’t we prioritize the thinking and refactoring over the just-get-this-thing-out-of-the-door?

The answer is time to market and such, but over a decade of building on a ball of mud, the economical numbers start adding up in favour for the better engineered product. For continuous improvement. For spending time thinking about how to improve the system as a whole.

The Internet Talks

I’ve previously written about the licensing and embedded talks of foss-north 2020. This time around, I’d like to share the recordings of the Internet related talks.

Internet is a very broad topic, so it is hard to classify talks as not being Internet related these days, but the following three talks stand out.

The first speaker is an old time speaker at foss-north, Daniel Stenberg. He has spoken at foss-north several times, but never about his main claim to fame: curl. This time he righted this by delivering a talks about how to Curl better.

Maintaining privacy on the Internet is a big topic. This is a field where it is hard to deliver black or white answers. Elisabet Lobo-Vesga presents DPella, a query language for differential privacy. Using this technology, it is possible to make the tradeoff between how private the user is vs how detailed the data returned is.

The Internet talks end with Patrik Fältström. One of the people who has been around the Swedish Internet scene the longest. He talks about Keeping Time. It is a journey into leap seconds, atomic clocks, the speed of light and other hassles when keeping clocks in sync over a large network.

The talks are already available on conf.tube, and the presentation material can be found by following the links to each speaker. For those of you who prefer YouTube, the talks will be made available shortly on the foss-north channel. Subscribe to get notified when they are.

The Embedded Talks

The foss-north conference strives to have an assortment of various talks. The point is that visitors should see something unexpected and that the conference should attract all types of visitors to ensure that we as a community can meet across various industries and problem spaces.

This time I’ve selected three talks about embedded systems from foss-north 2020. The talks touch on building embedded systems around Linux. If your reader does not show you the embedded videos, make sure to follow the actual page or go to our conf.tube channel to see all the contents.

First out was Ron Munitz talk on understanding and building minimal Linux systems. This talk proved to be a real deep dive into the Linux kernel – including setting up a debugger to the kernel itself.

The next embedded speaker on the program was Chris Simmonds. He discussed if going with Yocto or Debian is best for your embedded Linux project. This an interesting topic – how much is customization worth compared to other aspect such as build-time.

The embedded set of talks ended with Drew Fustini talking about running Linux on the RISC-V. This talk dives deep into the hardware part of embedded systems, but also Linux. By being able to run Linux on RISC-V, which is open hardware, we are very close to an completely open eco-system.

The three talks are already available on conf.tube, and the presentation material can be found by following the links to each speaker. For those of you who prefer YouTube, the talks will be made available shortly on the foss-north channel. Subscribe to get notified when they are.

What a License Track!

The foss-north 2020 videos are rolling out. This year we’re doing a small experiment, so everything is available at once over at conf.tube, while we roll the videos out gradually at YouTube in an attempt to feed the algorithm (like and subscribe!).

This year we had a great set of licensing related talks, and I’d like to discuss them all in this post.

Monday morning started with Frank Karlitschek and his talk Why the GPL is great for business. This a great overview of how you can build an free and open source business – pros and cons and pitfalls to avoid.

Next up is Gabriel Ku Wei Bin from FSFE who talked about REUSE. The REUSE project is about helping creators choose and apply free and open source licenses.

This is followed by Pavel Kopylov and his talk Hacking the legal code of an open source license. This talk is about understanding how licenses works and how to use them.

This is followed by Jason Hammond from Whitesource talking about their compliance tooling and why compliance is important.

The final talk in this track is by Adriaan de Groot talking about the KDE Free Qt Foundation. This is an interesting aspect, as it is about protecting the customers by offering a more liberal license at a given point of time.

Historically we’ve always split talks on a specific topic during the conference to ensure that people move about in the hallways and that most visitors get to see something unexpected. Since we record everything, we can now do both – clustering by topic and a linear playlist.