Interview with Chris Styles

Featured Engineer

Chris Styles

Chris Styles - Senior Applications Engineer; mbed.org

Image: Me with my 4 year old son, Henry, who is such a budding engineer. I’ve always said that Engineering isn’t a job, it is a way of life, and the way he approaches problems, and solves them so logically makes me think that even without any encouragement, he’d wind up as an engineer.

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

I started fiddling with electronics when I was about 13, just experimenting with simple timers, audio amplifiers and so on, and it really hooked me. The school I went to didn’t offer electronics, so I took physics, and design technolog, opting for all the electronics modules. That was enough to convince me this was the area I wanted to work in, so in 1993 I became an undergraduate at Imperial College, London, Studying Electrical and Electronic engineering. With hindsight I should have taken a slightly different course, as none of the power, magnetics, and heavy current parts of the course turned out to be of any interest to me.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

DVM, Oscilloscope and USB logic analyser. As mbed is all about rapid prototyping, our users don’t often have access to fancy test and measurement gear, so I try to keep it simple too. If I can’t develop, debug and fix problem using simple tools, how can I expect our users to?

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Lots of them, no real favourite, they all do different jobs, all of which are often just as important. I’ve grown to rally like using Eagle for PCB design, but I’m also learning how to use Design Spark PCB, it will be interesting to see how the battle of the catalogue distributors and their adopted PCB tools plays out.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

Many moons ago, as a Junior Engineer, figuring out why the volume control on a hardware MPEG accelerator (a plug in card for PC), the audio was going bonkers, with the volume levels being all over the place. It was an intermittent fault, hard to reliably reproduce.

It turned out to be an SPI connection between a controller chip and a volume control IC. The SPI connection was bit banged, and the code had lots (and lots) of branches inside the rudimentary state machine. In one of these branches, data was being written in the same cycle that the rising clock edge was written – a setup time violation causing metastablity and the incorrect value for that bit being presented. With the tools available at the time, it was hard to track down.

It was a one line of code to fix, but so deeply obscure, I was pleased to have tracked it down

What is on your bookshelf?

The Art of Electronics, obviously! Apart from that, a few “SAMs teach yourself in 24 hours” – I like those books as they are a great leg up into the new languages we all have to learn, and remain a useful reference. Oh, and of course, lots of O’Reilly reference book.

Apart from the books, the rest of the bookshelf space is taken up which components, modules, PCBs and the like. I tend to use google and the distributor websites as my main source of information so, for me, books are less important than they once were.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Not really. Like most engineers I am surrounded by a lot of talent, so being sociable, networking and not be afraid to ask helps unlocks the single biggest resource available.

What has been your favorite project?

So far, mbed has been the best thing I have worked on. It started out as an experimental project I worked in with Simon Ford from ARM’s R&D team. We were both running projects with education and finding it frustrating that the tools we had were not appropriate. After some research, and lots of talking to people, it became clear that this problem wasn’t about education in the traditional sense (taught education) it was about people learning in whatever context they find themselves in. Our job was to provide the tools they need to get their job done, which is what http://mbed.org is all about, Rapid Prototyping with 32 bit MCU’s.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

Not really. The sort of engineering I’m involved with often isn’t that dramatic. Sure I’ve fried my fair share of boards, done some good stuff, and some dumb stuff, but no more than most engineers have.

What are you currently working on?

I am still working on the mbed project, and hope to do so for quite a while yet. Although the platform is coming up to 2 years old we’re still learning what our users need, and responding to that. Of course, if you’re building the tools others build their designs on top of, they have to be rock solid and well thought out – Its very time consuming!

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

I can see the strong growth in the 32 bit MCU market continuing . The big OEMs are taking up this technology, and have the resources to do so as they are ahead of the curve, but others are only really beginning to explore what really powerful MCUs can do. The opportunities for these MCUs is immense, very easy to underestimate, and there will be a long period of growth in this area.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Energy consumption will continue to be a major factor as so much more electronics is becoming portable, higher performance and wireless, or a combination of the three – all at the same time.

Software in the embedded space is becoming ever more important too, especially for a hardware guy like myself. Until now, I have always been able to get by with the software skills that I have, afterall, MCUs have always been just a load of registers to poke. Now, that these MCUs have things like Ethernet, CAN, USB, it will be more important for me to raise my software game, and really get to grips with middleware. I won’t necessarily write middleware, or even have to port it myself, but understanding the bigger picture will be essential,

Oh, and a massive skills shortage…

What additional things do you fill your time with?

As well as my work, I tend to do as much as I can promoting engineering in schools and colleges. Not so much in universities, as once a student is at Uni, they’ve already chosen the Engineering path (wether they graduate to an engineering job is another question!)

I am a registered STEM ambassador, and help organisations like STEMNet, Young Engineers and so on run events. STEMNet even produced a 15 minute film about some of the work I do as an ambassador, which was shown on TeachersTV (now defunct), but it is available online.

I think it is really important for engineers to help encourage the next generation of engineers and scientists. We’re facing a pretty big skills shortage over the next 5-10 years, as the intake to university Engineering courses is dropping off at al alarming rate. If we’d met in person I’d have gone off on a whole rant about this, and probably shown you a slide set or two!

Bascially, I think that education systems are teaching technology wrong. While the bottom up approach is essential for sciences and maths (you have to learn to count before you can do calculus!) it doesn’t work engineering any more. When a class of 15 year olds are told what a resistor is, why on earth would they care? Those who are interested will already know, and those who aren’t (99.5%) are not going to be inspired – the uninitiated will not be able to extrapolate from a transistor to a Cell Phone.

In my opinion, High school should all be about deconstruction, finding out about and understanding the technology that is around us, its limitations and implications, and maybe understanding how to repurpose it. Gaining insight and intuition is far more important that find out about passive components and transistors – that’s detail, Which is what college is for!