On Sep 18, 2009, at 11:50 AM, Alan Schnittman wrote:

> For those who have attended in the past, did you find the sessions  
> to be worthwhile?

I almost always attend a day of the (free) exhibit hall when ESC is  
local, but I've never paid or attended the formal sessions.  (Not so  
much that they didn't look interesting, but that they're not close  
enough to my paying job that I felt the cost was justified.)

Olin's observation about PC-class "embedded" systems and magic tools  
is pretty close to the mark, but that's because PC-class systems are  
approaching the same price as smaller processor systems (for better or  
worse.)  It's interesting to observe, in some philosophical sense.  (I  
attended an exhibit-hall session by Microsoft on "embedded solutions",  
by which they meant building a version of windows with fewer-than- 
normal extensions for kiosks and such.  Scary.)  But there are enough  
other vendors showing interesting stuff that it's worth a few hours  
wandering about.  Recently microchip has been doing pretty significant  
tutorials (sign up in advance on the show floor), and TI, SiLabs,  
Zilog, Atmel, and others have a pretty good presence.

Swag is pretty good and sometimes useful (picked up an Atmel Butterfly  
one year, for example); discounted development boards are common, and  
the odds of winning drawings are better than you'll get most places.   
(although I'm developing a particular respect for companies with  
enough ego to raffle off one of their own products instead of an iPod.)

BillW

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