Mars Ate My Spacecraft, 30% off and several more reasons to attend DESIGN East

7/3/2012 11:25 AM EDT

DESIGN East is coming up rapidly, it’s markedly different than last year’s ESC, and it’s time to take a quick look at what’s up at the conference. Held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, September 17-20, there is a rich agenda for DESIGN East ESC itself with 95 sessions to choose from.  There are also great opportunities to attend such offerings as the Sensor Summit, LED Summit, and Android Summit and Certificate Programs. All of these extra programs add another 25 sessions to the dance card. 

Until July 14, you can take advantage of a promo specifically for you, the readers of the Industrial Control Newsletter. Go to Register for DESIGN East and put in coupon code IND0627. That will get you 30% off the conference. Here are a few more reasons to attend:

The Sensors in Design Summit topics and their respective presenters include:

• Future of MEMS Market: New and Innovative Applications—Dave Rothenberg, Movea
• Sense-able Robotics: Using Accelerometers, Gyroscopes, and Magnetometers to Build Smarter Robots—Stephen Olsen, Embedded Artisan
• Command and Control with Handheld Advanced Technology Systems—Douglas Naimo, Triggerfinger Software
• Adding Custom Sensors to Android Powered Devices to Enable New Forms of Data Collectioin—William Gatliff, Embedded Systems Freelance Developer
• MEMs in Sports—Per Slycke, Xsens, Jack McCauley, R0R3 DEVICES

Having attended the Sensors Summit at DESIGN West this spring, I can tell you that these sessions are truly valuable. Not only are there strong presenters, there is active and informative discussion in these sessions—a chance to ask the experts questions in real time.

So, what’s with Mars Ate My Spacecraft? It’s an ESC course presented by Jack Ganssle on September 18 at 8 am to 9:15 (Course ESC-2002).  Here’s Jack’s description:

Civil engineers have learned how to avoid failure from their rich history of bridge collapses, tunnel floodings, and building disintegrations. The firmware world is quite different; it seems we all make the same mistakes, repeatedly. Yet most problems have similar root causes. In this class we’ll examine a number of embedded disasters, large and small, and extract lessons we must learn to improve our code.

ESC has always been a stellar conference. In my opinion, it’s much stronger now with such a broad session offering under the DESIGN East umbrella, allowing engineers to have the opportunity to attend targeted sessions that will have a direct and immediate impact on their day-to-day work.

The downside? It’s often tough to decide which sessions to attend given the number of high-quality choices available. Maybe I’ll suggest a cloning session to start.