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Signals and Embedded Systems

We live in a physical world, and while we increasingly spend more time with our mobile devices and our computers, we still interact with that physical environment. This is an intuitive interaction, based on subconscious reflexes. We see, touch, hear, smell whatever is happening around us, and we show, grab, push, talk, to control our environment.

As computers become more powerful, we want them to sense, and control, the world in the same way as we do. Computers however live in a virtual world, in which everything is more or less deterministic and where the control is often arranged in a one-dimensional way. The signals that are produced by the physical world have no direct meaning when left untouched.

So how do we get signals from the physical world into the digital world of the computer? How can we process these signals in such a way that we can make sense of them in an application? This is the focus of the Minor Signals and Embedded Systems. Almost any type of applications can serve as a driver to sense signals from the physical world, and to create signals that control it. These are used as a precursor to dive into the nature of signals and how to process them for use in the application.

Field

The applicability of this minor is very wide. Any application that interacts with the world, sooner or later is going to exchange sound, movement, light, and so on.

We've identified three areas of interest when working with signals from the 'real' world. These are:

Characteristics of signals, where we dive into the nature of signals, and what is distinguishes them from another, and what is the same.
Processing signals, where we take a look on how any type of signal can be converted to electronic signals, and how we can process these electronic signals to make them useful for our application.
Embedded control, where we dive into the specifics of embedded computing, the general architecture, some logic, and the resource constraints that create limits on what we can achieve.

More info

Admission and application
The minor is meant for all students from Fontys School of ICT that successfully finished the core phase of their study. The only real requirement is that the programming skills of the student are on level 2.
The minor is a single semester, fulltime program, i.e. there is no time for other courses not belonging to the minor.

For our advanced program it is assumed that the student has already mastered essential embedded systems knowledge and programming skills, including programming in C/C++. Dutch students that do not have sufficient C/C++ and embedded systems background can follow a special program that makes them acquainted with the essentials.

For more information contact the minor coordinator:
Jan Dobbelsteen | j.dobbelsteen@fontys.nl