Finally! I have a J-Trace in hand and I am ready to wreak havoc on those pesky software bugs that always toy with me! A little more than a year ago I decided that I couldn’t stand using low-cost, one-off debuggers any longer and needed to invest in a real debugging tool that I could … Continue reading Tools – A First Encounter with the SEGGER J-Trace
Every embedded software developer should be using a revision control system. I cannot even begin to quantify how much time I’ve saved using such systems through-out my career. When something has broken, and cannot be undone, the ability to roll back to the previous version is a life saver. Even as developers recognize and use … Continue reading 5 Revision Control Best Practices
There are several different revision control systems that developers have available to them in order to control changes to their code base. These include: SVN Git Mercurial I still see many teams using SVN and Git but in the past year I have seen more and more teams starting to use Mercurial. (I’ve also seen … Continue reading Tools – TortoiseHg
Selecting the right RTOS for a project can be tricky business. Engineers often come to the table with predisposed opinions that can cloud their judgment and pull them in a direction that isn’t optimal. Let’s face it, many of us have been involved in an engineering decision where the choice was dictated by the loudest … Continue reading Tools – The RTOS Selection KT Marix
Let’s face it, every embedded software developer knows that management is more likely to approve the purchase for a $50,000 spectrum analyzer than a $1200 debug probe with ETM trace capabilities. Purchasing a compiler, trace software, analyzers or any other tool that would make software development easier, faster or cheaper simply results in management asking … Continue reading Tools – 5 Justifications for Purchasing a New Software Tool
The tools that embedded software developers use are extremely important to maximize development efficiency and minimize costs, time-to-market and perhaps most importantly, developer headaches. There are a lot of great tools and toolchains available to developers today, the one that has been catching my attention lately, and the one we will be exploring in this … Continue reading Tools – Renesas Synergy(TM) Configurator
Nearly every product requires a software update at some point or another. Whether it’s our cellphones, TV’s or even our refrigerators (yea I went there). Microcontroller based systems typically aren’t running a high-level operating system that allows files to be replaced. Instead, developers need a bootloader. Microcontroller vendors have been including firmware update capabilities inside … Continue reading Tools – The Device Firmware Update (DFU) Utility
The smart watchdog is a customizable, external watchdog solution that behaves similar to a supervisory processor except that its primary purpose is detect when a fault has occurred and power cycle the microcontroller. A simple example showing how a smart watchdog can be integrated into a project can be seen in the diagram below: Smart … Continue reading Tools – Enter the Smart Watchdog
The linker is probably the least talked about tool available to embedded software developers. For many, the linker is ignored for most if not the entire development cycle. Yet, the linker allows a developer to do very powerful things such as splitting up flash memory into multiple sections. Let’s look at a quick example how … Continue reading Tools – Partitioning Flash Space with the Linker
Embedded software development is usually performed under severe resource constraints not only from a business stand-point but from the microcontroller as well. Upgrading to a higher end processor may result in a project that is not financially feasible especially for high volume applications where every penny can make difference. I’ve recently been playing with a … Continue reading Tools – Optimizing Firmware using DRT
