A team of electrical and computer engineering students at Calvin College is designing a digital electronic stethoscope running uClinux (pronounced “you-see-linux”) as its operating system. The team has chosen the Coldfire MCF5275 Microprocessor from Freescale. This is a 32-bit microprocessor with built-in USB Device, Ethernet, harware encryption, and eMAC. The eMAC (Enhanced Multiply Accumulate Unit) allows the processor to perform the intensive calculations required to do digital filtering and audio compression.The team has decided to use µClinux as the project operating system. µClinux is a very small (1 MB) open-source Linux operating system that will run from flash memory. The team has successfully compiled the µClinux kernel and is running it on the development board.
(Fig 01: Simple, accurate, and easy to use electronic stethoscope! [Image credit – project home page])
The device is in its early stages of development and the project proposal and feasibility study is completed.
1 comment
This linux thing is just getting crazy .. why on the earth a stethoscope need an OS? How much file I/O, networking does a device like this really do?
Don’t get me wrong here, I love Linux but this is just getting out of hand 😉