Embedded software developers today are a bit spoiled. Many microcontrollers come with an ecosystem that includes peripheral drivers, an RTOS, middleware and even example application code. Many developers can spend most of their time in high-level application code, ignoring the software that meets the hardware. The problem is that while this prebuilt ecosystem can accelerate … Continue reading 3 Tips for Speeding Up Interrupt Handlers
Category: Embedded Basics
Understanding Weak Symbols
If a developer closely looks at framework and library files, they may come across functions that have __weak in front of them. The weak symbol is a special linker symbol that denotes a function that can be overridden during link time. In today’s post, we will take quick look at weakly linked functions. Weak symbols … Continue reading Understanding Weak Symbols
There is No Hardware
My favorite line from the Matrix is that “there is no spoon”, and today that is a wise statement for embedded software developers to take to heart. Embedded software developers traditionally are hardware centric, believing that they can’t move forward without the hardware (sometimes this is true). Much like Neo, developers need to accept that … Continue reading There is No Hardware
Finding a Buffer Overflow issue using a Map File
Buffer overflows are one of those bugs that wreak havoc on embedded software. The system appears to be working perfectly and then all of a sudden, weird things start to happen! Variables that have been behaving suddenly end up with values that are unexpected. Developers often will be stumped and spend days trying to figure … Continue reading Finding a Buffer Overflow issue using a Map File
Celebrating the Microprocessors 50th Birthday
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
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