Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas ... The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929)

So too is each new embedded design the fruit of hundreds if not thousands of other designs.  

I read Thomas Wolfe’s remarkable first novel Look Homeward, Angel at least once a year. When I was reading the first page a few weeks ago, I began thinking about the technologies and projects covered in Circuit Cellar. In the beginning paragraphs of the book, Wolfe poetically describes the causal relationships between past and present occurrences, ideas, and situations. For instance, he suggests that a chain of events that started in Crete 4,000 years ago ended yesterday in Texas. How does this idea relate to the projects described in Circuit Cellar every month? Well, each design has a particular past, present, and future that’s part of a much longer story of technological progress. For instance, Alexander Enzmann’s  USB flash PIC programmer (p. 12) didn’t suddenly appear out of thin air. Literally thousands of other designs had to be tested and tweaked before Alexander could build his programmer. Thus, his design is the result of years of technological development and idea swapping between engineers.

This is an interesting perspective from which to view projects described in this magazine. Rather than looking at a project as simply both a start and an end point, you should take a step back and look at the technological developments that led up to the particular design. After doing so, you can then consider how the design and the principles behind it might contribute to your future projects or the designs of others. By doing so, you’ll see that every design we feature, regardless of its complexity, plays an important role in the progress of embedded development in the early 21st century.

What does this mean for you? Well, you may not need a gas leak detector, but by reading Brian Millier’s article (p. 44) and studying his schematics and code, a seed will be sown in your mind that will surely reap a reward somewhere down the line, whether you end up incorporating an aspect of the design in a ground-breaking technology or simply referring the project to a fellow engineer in need of a little assistance. The idea is to recognize that each design is a small contribution to the ever-evolving process of technological development. 

As you continue reading Circuit Cellar and working on your own designs, consider making a contribution of your own. If you send me an article proposal (cj@circuitcellar.com), we will review it and respond in fairly short order. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

Recently, we’ve seen many interesting proposals by designers who are dedicated to developing the new technologies that will change the way we live and interact with each other and our environment in this new century. This type of proactive approach to tackling the major problems of our day is what we like to see. Projects that address solutions to problems associated with topics such as energy consumption and emissions/EMI monitoring have everyone excited. I encourage you to get serious about an important issue and then start designing a solution. You can then use Cellar Cellar to bring your ideas to the masses.

cj@circuitcellar.com