Embedded Basics – 7 Tips for Managing RTOS Memory Performance and Usage
There are two excuses that I typically hear from developers on why they refuse to use a RTOS: • An RTOS memory footprint is too big • The RTOS has too much overhead These excuses might have had some merit five years ago but today they hold no weight. A typical RTOS will load the …

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 …

Tools – OS-Aware Debugging
The greatest annoyance that I’ve ever encountered when developing embedded software is when I have to guess at what the software is doing. Back in the day, the best insight a developer could get into their application was to blink an LED and correlate it to the code that was executing. Today’s processors and development …

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 …
