With college classes now back in session, I thought it would be a good idea to provide a few engineering tips for our up and coming developers. There are many engineering lessons to learn but one that every engineering graduate quickly learns after graduating college is that despite being educated for years on engineering theories … Continue reading 7 Tips for engineering students
Month: August 2018
Where oh Where are My Test Points!
For the umpteenth time in my career, I am debugging a prototype board that has exactly zero test points. I didn’t design this board, but have inherited it from a frantic colleague who is behind schedule and is having trouble communicating with an onboard SPI device. The first step in this troubleshooting endeavor is to … Continue reading Where oh Where are My Test Points!
Writing a Multi-Port ITM Function to Improve Debugging
In “Improve Debug Efficiency with the ITM”, I discussed how the ITM on the Arm® Cortex-M processors can be used to quickly, and efficiently print debug information to a coresight terminal. We saw that the ITM is extremely fast, much faster than a UART which minimizes the overhead associated with printing log and debug information … Continue reading Writing a Multi-Port ITM Function to Improve Debugging
Getting Started with Amazon FreeRTOS
As many readers have probably heard, back in 2017, Amazon announced a “new” RTOS, Amazon FreeRTOS, which is based on the popular open source real-time operating system (RTOS) FreeRTOS. Amazon FreeRTOS is designed to help developers creating IoT edge nodes to easily connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The interesting problem I found, was that … Continue reading Getting Started with Amazon FreeRTOS
Tools – Real-time Application Visualization Using Tracealyzer 4.2
It has often been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to debugging embedded software, a picture is worth a hundred thousand lines of code. For most of my career, I’ve always felt apprehensive about running code on a target and verifying a few external features to say that the … Continue reading Tools – Real-time Application Visualization Using Tracealyzer 4.2