Page 170 - The Art of Designing Embedded Systems

Troubleshooting Tools 157

Leases are the most attractive way to get equipment you can’t afford
to buy outright. A lease with buyout clause is nothing more than a financed
purchase. It may have certain tax benefits as well, though this part of the
law changes constantly.
Even for a single scope you can get leases amortized over practically
any amount of time. Three years is a common period. The monthly pay-
ment will be something like 3% of the unit’s purchase price per month. A
$5000 logic analyzer will set you back around $200 per month. For less
than your car payment you can get a nice scope and logic analyzer. Unlike
the car, neither will wear out before the payments are up.
Sometimes it makes sense just to purchase gear outright, especially
since the IRS permits you to expense $17,500 of capital equipment per
year. When cash is tight, consider getting used, refurbished test equip-
ment. A number of outfits sell reconditioned gear for around 50 cents on
the dollar. Good test equipment lasts almost forever.
One acquaintance has just a shell of a company, a so-called “virtual
corporation” that changes dynamically as business ebbs and flows. He
shares an office suite with other like-structured organizations. All are in
the digital business and use a common lab area with shared test equipment.
For small outfits, this is a neat way to make the dollar go a lot further.

Tool Woes

After reading the glossy brochures and hearing the promises of suited
tool salespeople, you’re no doubt convinced that their latest widget will
solve all of your debugging problems in a flash.
Not.
Be wary of putting too much faith in the power of tools. Too many
engineers, burned by previous projects, do a good job of surveying the tool
market and selecting a reasonable development environment, but then put
all their hopes of debugging salvation in the toolchain.
The fact is, vendors tend to overpromise and underdeliver. Perhaps
not maliciously, but their advertisements do play into our desperate
searches for solutions. The embedded tool business is a very fragmented
market. With hundreds of extant microprocessors, the truth is that typically
only dozens to (maybe) a couple of thousand users exist for any single tool.
With such a small user base, bugs and problems are de rigueur.
I write this as an ex-tool vendor who strongly believes that an im-
portant component of productivity comes from using a first-class develop-
ment environment. But, as an ex-vendor, all too often I saw engineers who
expected that spending five or ten thousand on the gadget would miracu-