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by jason mcdonald, senior editor | read other blog posts

According to Wikipedia, the MIL-STD-1553 is military standard published by the United States Department of Defense that defines the mechanical, electrical and functional characteristics of a serial data bus. It was originally designed for use with military avionics, but has also become commonly used in spacecraft on-board data handling (OBDH) subsystems, both military and civil. It's an old standard, but one that still remains in use and one that (surprisingly) has many new products, and even a Youtube (!) video. Here is a quick blog post about MIL-STD-1553. (& thanks to Noelle Decambra for excellent background research on the topic!)

contents of this post:

1. educating yourself on mil-std-1553
2. product news on mil-std-1553
3. mil-std-1553 meets youtube
4. feedback - read it
5. feedback - give it

educating yourself on mil-std-1553

Fortunately, the Internet has some great resources on the standard, including some from the 1970s that have been posted on the Net. I would begin on Wikipedia, where their overview explains the difference between MIL-STD-1553 "A" and "B" among other issues. It's pretty basic, and seems to have been last updated in 2005.

In most cases, you have to turn to the vendor community to get really pertinent information on the 1553 standard. For example, Condor Engineering published a good tutorial, which somehow or other got posted to an Italian website, here . It's quite a bit more detailed than the Wikipedia entry. We have a complete list of up-to-date tutorials, overviews, white papers, etc., at eg3.com/1553.htm .

If you are utilizing (or plan to utilize) the standard in a commercial or military project, the other "learning" strategy is to query vendors that you might be considering. As with so much of embedded systems, the true knowledge lies in the vendor ecosystem and not really in educational sources or on the Net. Some vendors active in the space include:

• GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms
• AcQ InduCom
• ITCN
• RC MODULE, Research Center 'Module'
• Alphi Technology
• Data Device Corporation

For a complete list, click here .

product news on mil-std-1553

The MIL-STD-1553 standard, while old, regularly attracts new products. It remains heavily in use in the military, and - to a lesser extent - in commercial applications. It is one of those "never die" areas of embedded computing. One company that remains very active in generating new products is Data Device Corporation of Bohemia, New York. For example, in October, 2008, the company announced:

Data Device Corporation (DDC) introduces updated Software Development Kits (SDK) for MIL-STD-1553 and ARINC 429 data bus applications that support Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) under the latest Linux operating system versions. SMP support can increase the performance of a Linux system. DDC’s SDKs allow users to develop C source code to simulate, monitor, or troubleshoot 1553 and/or ARINC 429 data buses simultaneously or independently, with support for Linux 2.6 with Symmetric Multi-Processing and Hyper-Threading. This SDK allows you to quickly integrate DDC’s cards into your C code applications.
(Details, here )

Other recent (April, 2009 / past six months) releases from the company include:

• DDC Announces Linux Support for Symmetric Multi-Processing Systems
• DDC Announces New Multi-I/O MIL-STD-1553 / ARINC 429 PCI Card
• DDC Introduces New MIL-STD-1553 PCI-Express Card and Updated Multi-RT
• DDC Introduces The World’s First Fully Integrated MIL-STD-1553 Terminal
• DDC Announces New DO-254 Certifiable MIL-STD-1553 Interfaces!
• DDC Announces Windows Server® 2003 and Vista® Support for 1553 PCI Card

You can find this, and other news on 1553, at the eg3.com micropage for the technology, here .

mil-std-1553 meets youtube

One area I wish more vendors would explore would be Youtube videos explaining their products and related technologies. I searched Youtube and to my surprise found a pretty good (but basic) video on the MIL-STD-1553 standard, here .

The company producing it is Excalibur Systems, Inc. (ESI). It's not the best video every produced on Youtube, but it's a great example of using the Web in some new ways. Kudos Excalibur!

Next perhaps there will be TWEETS on Twitter … Who knows. At any rate, if you are searching for MIL-STD-1553 information, we hope you can use the information provided by eg3.com and our e-clips news alert service to help you get educated. If you know of other exciting 1553 resources (video or not), please send us an email here .

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