Every year since 2003, Alexis Polti and myself run a course named “ROSE” (Robotique et Systèmes Embarqués, Robotics and Embedded Systems) for future engineers at Télécom ParisTech. During this 120 hour curriculum, students have to design and buid embedded systems, including designing their own electronic boards and programming them. Classical courses are limited to the minimum (real-time operating systems, signal integrity), and students must learn by themselves all the other topics while the two teachers offer lots of assistance (we are physically with the students most of the time to answer their questions).

As every year, the 2011 occurrence introduced some changes (hopefully for the better), that I now want to analyze.

Afterthoughts

Git vs. Hg

Until last year, we were using Mercurial as our revision control system because we thought it was simpler to use than Git for the students although the teachers both used it. We decided to try Git with the Gitolite backend tool that we already used for research projects. The outcome was unexpectedly successful: every project used lots of branches for their development, merging and rebasing at will.

The presence of Clément Moussu, a student who had previously done an internship at Gostai where Git is used intensively (they even use “git notes” that almost noone knows about), has been a tremendous help, and has been acknowledged during the debriefing session by other students. He and three other students explained Git to the others, and spoke about the best practices right from the beginning. So we plan to keep using Git as our preferred revision control system.

Linux-based boards

For the first time, we accepted that some projects use Linux-based boards in addition to the micro-controllers boards they had to design. The mix of those Linux-based boards (one Armadeus APF27, one BeagleBoard xM and one Gumstix Overo FE COM) allowed them to use high-level languages (Python), libraries (OpenCV, 0MQ) and cloud-based processing capabilities (Google Appengine) very easily. We plan to keep this possibility as well, but we need to ensure that every project needs to build additional micro-controller based boards as we want our students to really know how to design a board from scratch.

Best programming practices

This is something we did not do: ensure that our students know the best programming practices. Next year, we plan to do a live-coding session where we will collectively try to write the best possible code. The teacher will write, compile and run the code as suggested by the students, and explain how the code may be improved and what needs to be done to guarantee reliability and ease of maintenance. Tricky exercises will be proposed, to ensure that students need to know when volatile needs to be used, and when it is not needed. Also, lockless algorithms, depending on the underlying hardware, will be used whenever possible. The effect of inlining some functions (and when not to inline and let the compiler work it out) will be studied intensively, and methods to avoid any code duplication will be taught.

Some students naturally know how to write good code, but some don’t and just write code that works but is unmaintainable. Instead of having them fix the code afterward, we will make sure that they write proper code from day one. So next year, the students will learn this skill at the beginning of the class rather than along its course.

The projects

If you are curious to see what has been done, here are links to the various projects done by the students in 2011 during this 2.5 month course:

• Casper: a talking and listening robot shaped like an elephant trunk
• Copterix: a helicopter with eight engines
• IRL: a nightclub laser that displays your tweets and let you control via Twitter the color of the club as well as other equipment such as the smoke machine
• MB Led: a very nice set of blocks letting you play games by moving them around
• Rosewheel: a Segway clone, remotely controlled using an Android phone
• TSV Safe Express: control a model railroad layout using cheap components (unfortunately, the web site is almost empty)

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