It's official, as of this afternoon. For a client, so details not to be revealed until it hits the market, as usual. It's in the field of industrial process control.
Full hardware (and firmware) development of a new product, not making patches to an old one. Application software (under Linux) is Somebody Else's Problem.
It's filled with little challenges, but no great glaring unknowns.
And I just noticed something amusing, and potentially useful. For one aspect of the project (which developed unexpectedly at the kickoff meeting this afternoon), I'll need to interface a bunch of [peripheral] to an MCU. Obvious approach is to use a [peripheral] with an I2C or SPI interface. But... the MCU for that particular context ends up having a lot of I/O pins, so... it may turn out (depending on part pricing and board layout considerations) to make sense to use [peripheral] chips that are meant to connect to an 8-bit system bus, and just emulate the freaking data/address/control bus using I/O pins and a few instructions per bus cycle... given that the processor will be buzzing along at roughly 100 times the speed of the microprocessors of the age when the [peripheral] chips were standardized. Or I could, I suppose, pick an MCU with an external bus interface. That works too.
Anyway, time to get busy.
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