Live Chat Lineup: January 2013

Each week (well, mostly), we have a chance to get together as a community and interact live via the Microcontroller Central chat feature. It is a text-based chat, but the posts refresh every few seconds, so we can have an interactive conversation. Each month, I pick a series of topics to serve as conversation starters, but we can always deviate and chat about whatever comes up. It's a great way of relating to others in the MCC community.

This month's chats will all be held on Thursdays at 11:00 a.m. Eastern (US) Time. That's 1600 GMT for those of you needing to do some time zone conversions. We typically chat for about an hour.

Chats are set up ahead of time, so it is possible for you to post a comment to the chat before it actually goes live. Also, the chats are archived, so if you can't make it live, you can at least see what folks said. But participating live is the best way to handle these chats.

Here are the topics. The links will bring you to the chat's page.

• Thursday, Jan. 3, 11:00 a.m., What do you want to see on MCC? January is a good time to plan for the year. Come help plan the year's activities on Microcontroller Central. We will be talking about what we did here this last year and what we would like to see in the coming year.
• Thursday, Jan. 10, 11:00 a.m., Online education. Continuing education is a must for working engineers, and it's often a passion, as well. Come talk about your experiences and interests in online technical training.
• Thursday, Jan. 17, 11:00 a.m., Will ARM dominate MCUs? We tried this topic before, but a server failure cut our chat short, so we'll try again. The ARM architecture is increasingly being adopted by vendors as support for proprietary MCU architectures becomes increasingly difficult. How far will ARM be able to go in the market?
• Thursday, Jan. 24, 11:00 a.m., Specialty MCUs: The days of trying to differentiate an MCU from its competitors by being faster, smaller, or more power efficient appear to be waning. Instead, MCU vendors seem to be turning their creativity toward making products that target specific application spaces. Do you agree, and what do you think about this trend?
• Thursday, Jan. 31, 11:00 a.m., Would you become an engineer again? For many of us, the challenge of making things work and the thrill of seeing a design come to life is what drew us into design. But the reality of design is filled with frustration as markets and management impose limits and conditions on what we are able to do and how. Knowing what you know now, would you enter the profession again (or recommend it to your children)? Tell us why or why not.

Hope to see you live online.