Embedded Toolchain TCO: The Hidden Cost of Free Compilers
Ask a procurement manager or a software lead why they use open-source toolchains, and you’ll likely hear the same shrug:…
Jacob's Blog
Category Archives: Software Techniques
Ask a procurement manager or a software lead why they use open-source toolchains, and you’ll likely hear the same shrug:…
Every firmware developer has done it. You need to send a sensor reading from your microcontroller (MCU) to a host…
There was a time when the embedded development environment was simple. You installed one vendor IDE, opened it, created a…
The maiden flight of Ariane 5 lasted 39 seconds. At T+36.7 seconds, the back-up Inertial Reference System placed a diagnostic…
Embedded CI/CD has become table stakes in modern firmware development. In fact, Embedded CI/CD and DevOps in general were one…
Most developers using Claude Code treat it like a smarter terminal. Type a request, get a response, repeat. It works….
Every embedded engineer has a printf story. You add a quick debug statement, rebuild, flash, and suddenly the timing bug…
When most developers evaluate an RTOS, they start with the kernel. Scheduling. Context switches. Mutexes. Semaphores. Those things matter, but…
If you’ve been building embedded systems for a while, you’ve probably configured hardware the “traditional” way. Diving into header files,…
If you’ve been in the embedded systems industry for at least a few years, you’ve undoubtedly encountered FreeRTOS. It’s the…
A firmware update failure is a major project red flag. Yet, most firmware engineers think the goal of an update…
In embedded software development, Cyclomatic Complexity is one of the most overlooked metrics. Yet, it’s one of the most powerful…