Happy 50th Birthday to the microprocessor! This month, 50 years ago, the first microprocessor became commercially available, the Intel 4004. This little 4-bit processor launched a revolution that has not only kept electrical and software engineers busy, but has completely revolutionized, well, everything! It’s quite interesting that the original intent for the 4004 processor was … Continue reading Celebrating the Microprocessors 50th Birthday
Category: Embedded Basics
A Simple, Scalable RTOS Initialization Design Pattern
I often find that developers initialize task code in seemingly random places throughout their application. This can make it difficult to make changes to the tasks, but more importantly just difficult to understand what all is happening in the application. It also makes it so that the application is not very scalable or easy to … Continue reading A Simple, Scalable RTOS Initialization Design Pattern
3 Strategies for Handling Errors in Embedded Software
It’s very tempting to assume that a system is going to behave as perfectly in the field as it does on the engineering bench. During development, embedded software is written under the best of conditions. The developer knows, or at least has their own concept of, how the system is supposed to work. Things usually … Continue reading 3 Strategies for Handling Errors in Embedded Software
Announcing the 2021 Embedded Online Conference
It’s official! The 4th annual Embedded Online Conference is on the calendar for May 18 – 20, 2021. Once again this year, Stephane Boucher and I are joining forces to bring the embedded system industry a top notch event from industry experts around the world! For this year’s edition, we are delighted to announce that … Continue reading Announcing the 2021 Embedded Online Conference
3 Tips for Writing External Device Drivers
A major advantage to using a microcontroller today is that embedded software developers typically don’t have to write their own drivers anymore. It’s very common for the microcontroller vendor to provide software frameworks that abstract the hardware and allow developers to make simple function calls to initialize, read and write to peripherals such as SPI, … Continue reading 3 Tips for Writing External Device Drivers
5 Best Practices for Over-the-Air (OTA) Updates
In my last post, I explored how OTA updates are typically performed using Amazon Web Services and FreeRTOS. OTA updates are critically important to developers with connected devices. In today’s post, we are going to explore several best practices developers should keep in mind with implementing their OTA solution. Most of these will be generic … Continue reading 5 Best Practices for Over-the-Air (OTA) Updates
How to Organize a Firmware Project
There are many benefits to having a software project that is organized. First, it makes it easy to find modules and files when you them rather than wasting time hunting around things. Second, an organized project can help with project scalability by not requiring constant adjustments to a project make file or project properties. Third, … Continue reading How to Organize a Firmware Project
3 Tips for Validating Sensor and Communication Data in Embedded Systems
Software engineers have a bad habit of being very optimistic. This optimism often doesn’t just include their calculation on how long it will take for a specific task to be completed but also on potential failure modes for their system. If it works on the bench, the assumption is that it will also work in … Continue reading 3 Tips for Validating Sensor and Communication Data in Embedded Systems
Simplified Software Development using MCU Configurators
When I first started writing embedded software, nearly every project started the same. For the first 3 – 6 months, every single day was spent pouring through microcontroller datasheets and writing a driver for each peripheral that was going to be used on a project. It was a lot of fun. Every microcontroller worked slightly … Continue reading Simplified Software Development using MCU Configurators
One “RTOS” to Rule them All
It’s always nice to have a choice, but when it comes to real-time operating systems (RTOS), there are just too many! If you’ve ever taken the time to search the web, you’d find that there are over a hundred different RTOS’s out there! Some are general, some try to differentiate by industry such as the … Continue reading One “RTOS” to Rule them All