Msthesis

In discussing tooling for hardware control systems, it’s interesting to talk about what tools have existed in the past. Indeed, the history of control systems is much longer than would be naively assumed. The development of control systems has been strongly linked with the development of tools for making them, from realizing controls with linkages connecting arcane sensors to outputs, to the advent of electrical mains enabling an easy-to-handle control medium, and the development of classical control theory and computers making development very accessible. Read more...

Layered abstraction models are an incredibly useful tool to reason about the myriad functions that even simple engineering systems must employ, especially when computers are involved. They take highly unique engineering components, identify commanality among them, and what interfaces they provide, and then in chaining several of these abstractions together, an engineering practitioner is provided with a relatively simple model to describe complex behaviour. Given how useful they are, how would one make a layered abstraction model? The Open Systems Interface, or OSI, model for network communication has an answer in ISO/IEC 7498-1. Read more...