I haven't seen a posting from Gil yet :-)) I think we still haven't reached his standards

Agreed OOAD is pretty much useless for small projects... its a good way to co-ordinate a distributed development effort (with a team of more than 2 at least :-)) ) and it will be a good way to design large, complex systems. Has anyone here worked on such large systems?

Anyway, amongst all the Embedded design tools available, how many formally follow OOAD? Maybe if Software people realize embedded design is basically done in OO, they might not be apprehensive about venturing into the field...hmm, more embedded engineers than we need... not a good idea is it? :-))

If there are no such software tools, I was considering writing software that allows design automation of embedded systems specifically with OO.. If done properly, it might even be easy to extend it for multi-threaded simulation of all objects in the system. The design model can provide the framework (say a C++ interface), and the designer can then implement the functionality of each object as he sees fit.

Maybe some standard objects can come pre-implemented... Can anyone tell me of any Electronic and Microcontroller simulation packages that are open source or expose APIs for others to use? (I know its too much to hope for, but worth a try :-)) ) Simulink does a lot of this stuff, but is it useful for embedded engineers, or only research? Maybe I can come up with an OO-Embedded toolbox for Matlab :-))

Do let me know if its a worthwhile pursuit for what little free-time I may get... It would be my way of staying in touch with the embedded / electronix field in a pure software job. If its all been done before, there's no thrill in doing it.

kundi