The start of a new year, especially one that is the start of a new decade, provides a great excuse to carefully evaluate and review how you develop embedded systems and put in place a plan to improve it. The techniques and processes that are used to effectively develop products are constantly changing and improving, … Continue reading 5 Tips for Improving Embedded Development (in 2020)
Category: Software
3 Painless Tips for Writing Documentation
Writing documentation is not the most exciting endeavor an engineer can embark on. It’s often boring, time consuming, and there are so many more interesting things that could be done. It sometimes amazes me how poorly development projects are documented if they are even documented at all. Documentation is meant to help preserve important concepts … Continue reading 3 Painless Tips for Writing Documentation
10 Pain-free Steps to Configure an Interrupt Controller
Properly setting up interrupts on a microcontroller isn’t easy. The number of times an engineer has setup interrupts in their career doesn’t seem to make a difference. Configuring interrupts always has some gotcha hidden away that leaves the developer scratching their head and seeking answers in an obscure data sheet or online code snippet. Thankfully … Continue reading 10 Pain-free Steps to Configure an Interrupt Controller
Tips and Tricks – 10 Steps for Selecting a Microcontroller (2017)
The way developers select a microcontroller for their embedded systems is dramatically changing. Traditionally developers have focused on the hardware first and thought about the software second. Selecting a microcontroller in this manner, will result in failure today. There are several new steps that developers need to follow if they are going to be successful … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 10 Steps for Selecting a Microcontroller (2017)
EETimes University – Fundamentals of IoT System Design
Designing an IoT device requires more than expertise in embedded system design. Developers also need to understand the IoT architecture and how their device fits into the grander scheme. IoT devices are not stand-alone but links in a chain that can affect the entire internet. Developers need to understand how to secure their device, provision … Continue reading EETimes University – Fundamentals of IoT System Design
Tips and Tricks – 5 Tips for Developing Real-time C++ Applications
Object-oriented programming has become a very popular and critical programming methodology for developing applications. While traditional embedded software development has mostly been developed using the procedural language C, C++ and other object oriented languages are slowly started to gain traction in real-time systems. In order to ensure that a C++ based applications doesn’t bloat code … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 5 Tips for Developing Real-time C++ Applications
Developing Reusable Firmware – A Practical Guide to API’s, HAL’s and Drivers
Developing firmware that can be reused is an important and critical skill. The majority of engineers and teams that I interact with are stuck constantly reinventing the wheel on every project that they work on. In order to help developers understand how they can create not just reusable application code but reusable firmware, down to … Continue reading Developing Reusable Firmware – A Practical Guide to API’s, HAL’s and Drivers
Tips and Tricks – Jumping from the Bootloader to the Application Code Cleanly
Bootloaders are included in nearly every embedded system and provide a great way to update application code in the field without having to access a programming port. As important as bootloaders are, developers often get tripped up trying to jump from the bootloader into their application code. The jump needs to be clean but there … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – Jumping from the Bootloader to the Application Code Cleanly
Getting Started Writing Portable Firmware
Developers who want to reuse software have several challenges to overcome in order to be successful. These challenges include but are not limited to: Endianness Processor architecture Bus width Ambiguous standards Development time and budget Modularity Code coupling Getting started can be overwhelming and lead to more stress and confusion than simply writing very functional … Continue reading Getting Started Writing Portable Firmware
Embedded Basics – Callback Functions
Callback functions are an essential and often critical concept that developers need to create drivers or custom libraries. A callback function is a reference to executable code that is passed as an argument to other code that allows a lower-level software layer to call a function defined in a higher-level layer(10). A callback allows a … Continue reading Embedded Basics – Callback Functions