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Donald Knuth Is the Root of All Premature Optimization

Jason Sachs April 17, 20172 comments

This article is about something profound that a brilliant young professor at Stanford wrote nearly 45 years ago, and now we’re all stuck with it.

TL;DR

The idea, basically, is that even though optimization of computer software to execute faster is a noble goal, with tangible benefits, this costs time and effort up front, and therefore the decision to do so should not be made on whims and intuition, but instead should be made after some kind of analysis to show that it has net...


Zebras Hate You For No Reason: Why Amdahl's Law is Misleading in a World of Cats (And Maybe in Ours Too)

Jason Sachs February 27, 20171 comment

I’ve been wasting far too much of my free time lately on this stupid addicting game called the Kittens Game. It starts so innocently. You are a kitten in a catnip forest. Gather catnip.

And you click on Gather catnip and off you go. Soon you’re hunting unicorns and building Huts and studying Mathematics and Theology and so on. AND IT’S JUST A TEXT GAME! HTML and Javascript, that’s it, no pictures. It’s an example of an


Favorite Tools: C++11 std::array

Matthew Eshleman February 26, 20172 comments

Many embedded software and firmware projects must be developed to high standards of reliability. To meet these reliability requirements, firmware project teams will consider many design tradeoffs. For example, an engineering team may avoid or outright ban the use of dynamic memory allocation, a feature typically accessed via the C library call "malloc" or the C++ allocator "new". When authoring software under such...


Vala applications on Embedded Linux: maybe a clever choice [part 1]

Felipe Lavratti December 19, 2016

Vala is a sexy, open source, high level programming language that appeared in 2006, it counts with a modern typing system, is object oriented, compiled and statically typed, it has a almost identical syntax to C# and is maintained by GNOME. The language was created as a power abstraction of the GLib and GTK libraries, two considerably lightweight and powerful libraries written in C, and it is used in projects such as GNOME Clocks, Shotwell, GXml and Elementary OS.

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Favorite Tools: C++11 User-defined literals

Matthew Eshleman November 14, 20161 comment

In many software domains units of measurement are frequently critical to the software's data processing requirements. Those same units, or rather the use of the wrong units, are often the source of bugs and disastrous mistakes. Although useful for other purposes, user-defined literals are an excellent addition to the C++11 standard and handy when working with units of measurement.

Suppose a device measures velocity. To help prevent errors, the software specification requires...


Surprising Linux Real Time Scheduler Behavior

Matthew Eshleman November 5, 2016

I have recently been helping with embedded software design and development for a data acquisition and visualization device. The software executes within an embedded Linux context and consists of various animated user interfaces rendering the acquired data.

The data is received via a UART and a SPI connection. During project development we noticed poor UART data latency issues during heavy user interface animations. For this product to properly meet its acquisition requirements, the UART...


Favorite Tools - Look Up Tables

Matthew Eshleman October 22, 20163 comments

As we grow in our engineering careers, we must continually add new tools to our collective tool kits. One favorite tool in my toolkit will be obvious to many experienced embedded software engineers. I still remember learning this approach early in my career via code written by colleague David Starling. The tool in question: 

Look up tables 

Look up tables simplify code and improve firmware maintenance. What is a look up table? A look up table is often nothing more complex than a...


From bare-metal to RTOS: 5 Reasons to use an RTOS

Jacob Beningo October 18, 20167 comments

Developers can come up with amazing and convoluted reasons to not use an RTOS. I have heard excuses ranging from they are too expensive (despite open source solutions) all the way to they aren’t efficient and use too much memory. In some circumstances some excuses are justified but there are many reasons why a developer should look to an RTOS to help with their real-time scheduling needs.

From bare-metal to RTOS Quick Links
  • Part 1: 

Best Firmware Architecture Attributes

Tayyar GUZEL June 4, 20166 comments

Architecture of a firmware (FW) in a way defines the life-cycle of your product. Often companies start with a simple-version of a product as a response to the time-to-market caveat of the business, make some cash out of the product with a simple feature set. It takes only less than 2-3 years to reach a point where the company needs to develop multiple products derived from the same code base and multiple teams need to develop...


Modern Embedded Systems Programming: Beyond the RTOS

Miro Samek April 27, 20167 comments

An RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) is the most universally accepted way of designing and implementing embedded software. It is the most sought after component of any system that outgrows the venerable "superloop". But it is also the design strategy that implies a certain programming paradigm, which leads to particularly brittle designs that often work only by chance. I'm talking about sequential programming based on blocking.

Blocking occurs any time you wait explicitly in-line for...


Tenderfoot: Recommended Reading

Matthew Eshleman June 28, 20171 comment

Twenty years ago I read Code Complete by Steve McConnell. And then read it again. And again. And again. Of all the books I have read during my career, I believe this was the book that catapulted me from a young electrical engineer to a young and aspiring embedded software engineer. So to all the ‘tenderfoots’ embarking upon an embedded systems and especially embedded software and firmware career, this entry is for you.

First, I would certainly recommend that all engineers read and read...


3 Tips for Developing Embedded Systems with AI

Jacob Beningo March 1, 2025

Explore how to leverage AI in developing embedded systems with three practical tips, learn why documenting your workflows, supercharging testing and debugging, and adopting AI-assisted code generation can save time, reduce errors, and boost performance in your projects, and discover actionable insights to streamline development in resource-constrained environments, this blog explains how to prepare for AI integration while keeping the expertise of experienced engineers intact, offering real-world examples that show how even incremental AI adoption can revolutionize your development process, whether you’re new to AI or seeking to enhance existing practices, these strategies provide a clear roadmap to build smarter, more efficient embedded systems using AI.


Introduction to Deep Insight Analysis for RTOS Based Applications

Jacob Beningo September 20, 20171 comment

Over the past several years, embedded systems have become extremely complex. As systems become more complex, they become harder and more time consuming to debug. It isn’t uncommon for development teams to spend more than 40% development cycle time just debugging their systems. This is where deep insight analysis has the potential to dramatically decrease costs and time to market.

Defining Deep Insight Analysis

Deep insight analysis is a set of tools and techniques that can be...


Surprising Linux Real Time Scheduler Behavior

Matthew Eshleman November 5, 2016

I have recently been helping with embedded software design and development for a data acquisition and visualization device. The software executes within an embedded Linux context and consists of various animated user interfaces rendering the acquired data.

The data is received via a UART and a SPI connection. During project development we noticed poor UART data latency issues during heavy user interface animations. For this product to properly meet its acquisition requirements, the UART...


Understanding Yocto Project Layers: A Modular Approach to Embedded Systems Development

Aaksha Jaywant September 16, 2024

In the world of embedded systems, flexibility and modularity are key to managing complex projects efficiently. The Yocto Project, a powerful build system for creating custom Linux distributions, embraces this philosophy through the use of layers. These layers are essentially sets of repositories that contain the instructions and metadata required to build a specific target image. By leveraging layers, developers can modularize their projects, reusing and sharing previously developed metadata...


Deeply embedded design example - Logic replacement

Gene Breniman July 9, 2011

I have always believed that some of the low-cost, low-pin count, low-resource microprocessors would make an excellent choice for the replacement of discrete logic components.  In these cases the deeply embedded microprocessor would become less of a general purpose computer and more of a logic replacement, providing a prescribed function with no connection to the outside world.  In a world of bigger, faster and more expensive, it is a pleasant change of pace...


Simulating Your Embedded Project on Your Computer (Part 2)

Nathan Jones November 4, 20243 comments

Having a simulation of your embedded project is like having a superpower that improves the quality and pace of your development ten times over! To be useful, though, it can't take longer to develop the simulation than it takes to develop the application code and for many simulation techniques "the juice isn't worth the squeeze"! In the last article, I showed you how to use the terminal (i.e. printf/getchar) to easily make a completely functional simulation. In this article, we'll take simulation to the next level, either in terms of realism (by using virtual hardware) or in terms of user experience (by using a GUI to simulate our hardware, instead of using the terminal).


C++ on microcontrollers 3 – a first shot at an hc595 class with 8 output pins

Wouter van Ooijen November 2, 2011

 previous parts: 1, 2

This blog series is about the use of C++ for modern microcontrollers. My plan is to show the gradual development of a basic I/O library. I will introduce the object-oriented C++ features that are used step by step, to provide a gentle yet practical introduction into C++ for C programmers.  Reader input is very much appreciated, you might even steer me in the direction you find most interesting.

In the first part of...


Vala applications on Embedded Linux: maybe a clever choice [part 1]

Felipe Lavratti December 19, 2016

Vala is a sexy, open source, high level programming language that appeared in 2006, it counts with a modern typing system, is object oriented, compiled and statically typed, it has a almost identical syntax to C# and is maintained by GNOME. The language was created as a power abstraction of the GLib and GTK libraries, two considerably lightweight and powerful libraries written in C, and it is used in projects such as GNOME Clocks, Shotwell, GXml and Elementary OS.

namespace...

The 2025 Embedded Online Conference