On Tuesday I attended the miniconf, which was pretty fun. Mark Philips provided a great inspiration talk about why working in the embedded is the cool place to be. Most of the talk focussed on robotics, and had great examples of current robotics stuff.
Paul Campbell from Digeo presented on set-top boxes using Linux. The main interesting thing from this talk was the use of a secure boot loader to get into Linux so people can't ripoff any content stored on the set-top box.
Ian Walters from Trolltech gave an update on Qtopia. This stuff looked kind of interesting, they have basically come up with their own programming environment which totally abstracts away POSIX which is underneath. This would be an interesting system to run directly on top of Iguana.
Yutaka Niibe gave a really cool talk on using a USB hub to control AC devices. In Japan they have a much higher respect than we do here, (they signed the Kyoto protocol after all), and care about things like turning off peripheral devices when they are not in use, so they have USB controlled power cables.
There was a bunch of cool hardware shown off, but probably the most interesting one is the gumstix hardware. It would definately nice to get some of these with L4 running on it.
This year the embedded miniconf was more a microconf and only ran for the one morning. So in the afternoon I went along to the GNOME miniconf, it was really cool to see CryoPID which does process checkpointing in Linux.
Dinner was at the Terrace where they serve beer in 3 litre glass tubes, which have there own taps. Pretty damn cool! The meat is served raw on hot rocks which is a pretty cool idea, but I'm not too sure if serving people 3 litres of beer and then giving them boiling rocks is the best idea!