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
Microcontrollers are becoming more powerful every day, causing many developers to forget the resource constrained nature that many are working within. Microcontrollers are not general computing devices that can be treated like they have infinite memory and clock speeds equivalent to that found on modern PC’s (or cell phones). Most microcontroller based applications are designed … Continue reading Embedded Basics – Don’t Forget about Real-time
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
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
Embedded software development teams have a unique challenge before them; how to develop more and more firmware in shorter and shorter timeframes. How can developers get everything on their plate completed within the time allotted? Here are seven tips as food for thought. Tip #1 – Continuously Innovate Focus cannot simply be on creating code … Continue reading 7 Tips to Accelerate Firmware Development
Setting a watchdog strategy is easy. Just enable the microcontrollers internal watchdog timer and setup an interrupt to occasionally clear the timer and keep the dog happy right? Not exactly. Watchdogs help ensure that the embedded system we are creating is robust and can detect if something runs amiss. The chances for something going wrong on … Continue reading Embedded Basics – Selecting the Right Watchdog Strategy
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
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
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
The 32-bit microcontroller has been increasing in capabilities and decreasing in cost which has resulted in real-time operating systems becoming the dominant scheduler in many embedded systems. While there are more than a hundred different RTOS flavors out on the market, engineers sometimes struggle with basic terminology. Take for example threads and task which under … Continue reading Embedded Basics – Threads vs Tasks