Course Overview: The IoT edge devices have embedded written all over them. Sensor nodes that acquire data and transmit them to the cloud is quickly becoming common place. In this series, Jacob Beningo will walk attendees through the steps and processes necessary to create a sensor node using an ESP8266 which is an integrated microcontroller … Continue reading CEC – Designing IoT Sensor Nodes using the ESP8266
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5 Forbidden C Features that just might not be
Best practices and industry standards develop and evolve over time but they represent a snap shot of guiding wisdom. Best practices can be slow to evolve and often become entrenched despite technological advances that void the previously known best practice. The use of C language features within the embedded systems space has suffered the same … Continue reading 5 Forbidden C Features that just might not be
5 Revision Control Best Practices
Every embedded software developer should be using a revision control system. I cannot even begin to quantify how much time I’ve saved using such systems through-out my career. When something has broken, and cannot be undone, the ability to roll back to the previous version is a life saver. Even as developers recognize and use … Continue reading 5 Revision Control Best Practices
7 Reasons to Avoid Open Source Software
Blasphemy! Open source software is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the industry! It’s free! Why on Earth would we ever want to avoid open source software? This may surprise some readers but despite our love for “open source” and “free software”, there are several reasons that developers should consider that justify avoiding … Continue reading 7 Reasons to Avoid Open Source Software
Embedded Basics – Developing Reusable Firmware
Writing embedded software for microcontrollers that is reusable and portable can be challenging. Different microcontrollers contain different architectures and peripherals which makes creating any cross-platform application code difficult to achieve. The fact is, developers can write embedded software that is reusable and portable in a microcontroller based environment. Over the last year or so I’ve … Continue reading Embedded Basics – Developing Reusable Firmware
Tips and Tricks – 7 Tips to Improve Embedded Software Code Quality
There is nothing worse than purchasing a product that occasionally flakes out, freezes up, is slow to respond or has other issues. For developers, there is nothing worse than trying to maintain and update code that is so poor in quality that they are constantly chasing their own tail. For many development teams, software code … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Tips to Improve Embedded Software Code Quality
Tools – TortoiseHg
There are several different revision control systems that developers have available to them in order to control changes to their code base. These include: SVN Git Mercurial I still see many teams using SVN and Git but in the past year I have seen more and more teams starting to use Mercurial. (I’ve also seen … Continue reading Tools – TortoiseHg
Managing the Heap Space in Micro Python
Python is becoming ever more and more popular and now that real-time embedded software developers have access to Python on the microcontroller through Micro Python, its important now more than ever that developers understand the Micro Python heap. There are several heap related libraries and kernel options that developers need to be aware of. First, … Continue reading Managing the Heap Space in Micro Python
Embedded Basics – Setting up Tracealyzer to Debug FreeRTOS Applications
Peering into a microcontroller and seeing how the embedded software is executing has always been important to embedded software developers. In the good old days, developers used to have to instrument their hardware with extra outputs and use all kinds of tricks in order to take a stab at understanding what was happening with their … Continue reading Embedded Basics – Setting up Tracealyzer to Debug FreeRTOS Applications
Tips and Tricks – 7 Cardinal Sins of Embedded Software Development
Every industry has their best practices and their sinful practices. The cardinal sins are the practices that many are aware of but that are just too tempting or too easy to fall into. The embedded software industry has a number of these cardinal sins but there are seven in particular that seem to have pervaded … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Cardinal Sins of Embedded Software Development