Graphical user interfaces (GUI) are becoming more popular among embedded systems. The need for a convenient and connected interface is finding its way into wearable technologies, industrial equipment, commercial kitchens, and even home appliances. Throwing a GUI with a modern and sophisticated user experience (UX) on a device opens the door for many businesses’ use … Continue reading 5 Skills Every Embedded GUI Developer Needs
Category: Software Techniques
3 More Tips for Speeding Up Framework Interrupt Handlers
Last month, in 3 Tips for Speeding Up Framework Interrupt Handlers, we looked at several methods that could be used to speed up interrupts. In today’s post, we will explore three more tips on how to speed-up interrupt handlers. Let’s get to it! Tip #1 – Move Interrupt Handlers from Flash to RAM Depending on … Continue reading 3 More Tips for Speeding Up Framework Interrupt Handlers
CEC – Best Practices for Designing Real-Time Embedded Systems
Development teams today are faced with the need to develop systems within smaller budgets, shorter timeframes and with more features. In order to succeed in this challenging environment, teams need to leverage best practices, which are procedures shown my experience to produce optimal results. In this course, we will explore modern day best practices that … Continue reading CEC – Best Practices for Designing Real-Time Embedded Systems
3 Tips for Speeding Up Interrupt Handlers
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
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
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 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
Simulating Your Way to Embedded Software Success
As an embedded software engineer, it’s really easy to think that all the software for the product is reliant upon the hardware. Most embedded developers that I encounter want to get a development board right out of the gate and start writing software, including myself most of the time. It’s not necessarily wrong, it’s just … Continue reading Simulating Your Way to Embedded Software Success
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