One of the top complaints about electronic devices in our modern, mobile society is that their batteries don’t last as long as expected. Human beings have to some degree become addicted to our ability to always be connected and streaming data of one form or another. The increased use of mobile devices has resulted in … Continue reading 7 Tricks for Estimating Battery Life
Best practices and industry standards develop and evolve over time but they represent a snap shot of guiding wisdom. Best practices can be slow to evolve and often become entrenched despite technological advances that void the previously known best practice. The use of C language features within the embedded systems space has suffered the same … Continue reading 5 Forbidden C Features that just might not be
There is nothing worse than purchasing a product that occasionally flakes out, freezes up, is slow to respond or has other issues. For developers, there is nothing worse than trying to maintain and update code that is so poor in quality that they are constantly chasing their own tail. For many development teams, software code … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Tips to Improve Embedded Software Code Quality
Every industry has their best practices and their sinful practices. The cardinal sins are the practices that many are aware of but that are just too tempting or too easy to fall into. The embedded software industry has a number of these cardinal sins but there are seven in particular that seem to have pervaded … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Cardinal Sins of Embedded Software Development
The use of an RTOS or a bare metal scheduler is a popular topic to debate among embedded system developers. On the bare metal side, developers argue they can use a combination of priority based interrupts and timers to get equivalent behavior with better performance and memory footprint. The RTOS side argues ease of scheduling … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Reasons to Choose an RTOS
Managing memory in a real-time system can be challenging. There are many aspects to consider such as code space memory management, RAM memory management, memory optimizations and how they affect performance and so on. Below are seven general tips that will help real-time developers start to manage their memory. Tip #1 – Avoid malloc In … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Tips for Memory Management
Embedded systems must meet their real-time deadlines in order to function efficiently and as expected. No one likes to press a button and wait thirty seconds before the system finally responds. More importantly, safety critical systems need to meet their deadlines or else very bad things could happen, such as injury or death. There are … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – 7 Tips for Meeting Real-time Deadlines
Watchdogs are a critical and important component in developing a robust and fail-safe embedded system. In many circumstances, I run into development teams that either have not fully thought through their watchdog strategy or have their watchdog disabled. In order to improve system robustness and ensure that the watchdog can detect a system fault, here … Continue reading Tips and Tricks for Watchdog Design
Speed is imperative in the business world. Getting to market before competitors, leading the way in innovation, the development cycle can be relentless. For embedded systems engineers, deadlines are always yesterday. There is always a push to get things done faster. How quickly can we get this done? So and so needs this as fast … Continue reading Slowing Down to Go Faster
I have recently become interested in brain training applications that are designed to test and improve mental speed, attention, memory, flexibility and problem solving. Despite believing that I have a superb and extraordinary memory, I am constantly surprised at how poorly I perform in the memory games. One of my favorite games displays a grid … Continue reading Tips and Tricks – Limiting Function Complexity shall be a Requirement!
