This course represents a brief journey that describes the processes which are involved in the development of special purpose systems to interface with the physical environment, or other automated systems. On our way, we acquire an overview of sensing, actuating and controlling techniques . The importance of modelling system state and fault tolerance are examined, as well as suitable real time operating systems. Finally, we investigate the applicability of real time embedded systems to the context of conventional system implementations, through experimentation and case study reviews that include robotic programming, mobile programming and development for sensor networks.