ESC Boston's Videos are Now Up
In my last blog, I told you about my experience at ESC Boston and the few videos that I was planning to produce and publish. Here they are, please have a look and any feedback (positive or negative) is appreciated.
Short HighlightThis is a very short (one minute) montage of some of the footage that I shot at the show & conference. In future shows, I absolutely need to insert clips here and there of engineers saying a few words about the conference (why they...
How to Give Persistent Names To USB-Serial Devices on Ubuntu 14.04
If you have a bunch of USB-serial devices connected to your dock station and you needed to bind your USB-serial devices under static names so that all the USB-serial devices don't get to be assigned to random names by "udev" manager when you re-plug your laptop to the dock station, follow the instructions below. I will share the udev rules I created as a reference and give the step by step instructions to achieve persistent naming. All the steps worked on my Ubuntu 14.04...
Tenderfoot: Introduction to Magic (Numbers that is...)
Once upon a time, while participating in a source code review, I stumbled across the following C code in a header file:
struct Foo { //various structure fields char string_buffer[45+3]; //buffer requires about 45 bytes };My right eyebrow raised, I took a note, and continued with the code review, only to later stumble into this line of code in the body of a C function:
char * temp_string_buffer = (char*) malloc(45+3);Again, I took a note on this function, and continued...
Back from ESC Boston
NOT going to ESC Boston would have allowed me to stay home, in my comfort zone.
NOT going to ESC Boston would have saved me from driving in the absolutely horrible & stressful Boston traffic1.
NOT going to ESC Boston would have saved me from having to go through a full search & questioning session at the Canada Customs on my return2.
2017/06/06 update: Videos are now up!So two days...
Donald Knuth Is the Root of All Premature Optimization
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;DRThe 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...
Launch of Youtube Channel: My First Videos - Embedded World 2017
I went to Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg with an ambitious plan; I would make video highlights of several exhibits (booths) to be presented to the *Related sites audience. I would try to make the vendors focus their pitch on the essential in order to produce a one to three minutes video per booth.
So far my experience with making videos was limited to family videos, so I knew I had lots of reading to do and lots of Youtube videos and tutorials to watch. Trade shows are...
Intel 8088 - A blast from the past
The Intel 8088 is an 8 bit processor related to the 16 bit 8086.
The Microcomputer class consisted of wire-wrapping the chips to perfboard using sockets.I had taken computers apart, soldered, etc., but had never used wire-wrapping to construct a computer board to that point.Most people carried the board to class. A few people stared when I opened the plywood box with breadboard area, and plugged the full-sized power supply in. The lid is wide enough to hold the 11x17 paper the...
Zebras Hate You For No Reason: Why Amdahl's Law is Misleading in a World of Cats (And Maybe in Ours Too)
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
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...
Who else is going to Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg?
These days I am particularly excited. In a little bit less than a month and a half, I will be travelling to Nuremberg in Germany to attend Embedded World, by far the biggest Embedded Systems trade show with over 1000 vendors displaying their products and services.
I have downloaded the Duolingo app and I'm trying to do a minimum of 30 minutes per day to learn some German. So far, I know that 'Frau' is a woman, 'Mann' is a man, 'Danke' is thank you and 'tschüss' is bye - still a...
Code Metrics - SLOC Count
Many programmers will start having flashbacks at the title of this article because it contains the words 'metrics' and 'SLOC'. Newer programmers are probably wondering what all of the fuss is about - most probably have no negative connotations with the term 'code metrics' and some may not even know what SLOC is. While there is much baggage associated with metrics and SLOC you shouldn't be afraid to gather fundamentally useful data such as SLOC count from your programming projects...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part VII: LFSR Implementations, Idiomatic C, and Compiler Explorer
The last four articles were on algorithms used to compute with finite fields and shift registers:
- multiplicative inverse
- discrete logarithm
- determining characteristic polynomial from the LFSR output
Today we’re going to come back down to earth and show how to implement LFSR updates on a microcontroller. We’ll also talk a little bit about something called “idiomatic C” and a neat online tool for experimenting with the C compiler.
From bare-metal to RTOS: 5 Reasons to use an RTOS
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 LinksDigital PLL's -- Part 2
In Part 1, we found the time response of a 2nd order PLL with a proportional + integral (lead-lag) loop filter. Now let’s look at this PLL in the Z-domain [1, 2]. We will find that the response is characterized by a loop natural frequency ωn and damping coefficient ζ.
Having a Z-domain model of the DPLL will allow us to do three things:
Compute the values of loop filter proportional gain KL and integrator gain KI that give the desired loop natural...Mutex vs. Semaphores – Part 2: The Mutex & Mutual Exclusion Problems
Part 1 of this series we looked at the history of the binary and counting semaphore, and then went on to discuss some of the associated problem areas. In this posting I aim to show how a different RTOS construct, the mutex, may overcome some, if not all, of these weaknesses.
To address the problems associated with semaphore, a new concept was developed during the late 1980’s. I have struggled to find it’s first clear definition, but the major use of the term mutex (another...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part VI: Sing Along with the Berlekamp-Massey Algorithm
The last two articles were on discrete logarithms in finite fields — in practical terms, how to take the state \( S \) of an LFSR and its characteristic polynomial \( p(x) \) and figure out how many shift steps are required to go from the state 000...001 to \( S \). If we consider \( S \) as a polynomial bit vector such that \( S = x^k \bmod p(x) \), then this is equivalent to the task of figuring out \( k \) from \( S \) and \( p(x) \).
This time we’re tackling something...
Practical CRCs for Embedded Systems
CRCs are a very practical tool for embedded systems: you're likely to need to use one as part of a communications protocol or to verify the integrity of a program image before writing it to flash. But CRCs can be difficult to understand and tricky to implement. The first time I attempted to write CRC code from scratch I failed once. Then twice. Then three times. Eventually I gave up and used an existing library. I consider myself intelligent: I got A's...
Homebrew CPUs: Messing around with a J1
In this article I will examine James Bowman's excellent J1 CPU; I will then proceed to mess around with various parts of it, making it smaller, more appropriate to my particular application, and possibly faster. I hope this will show you how easy it is to fiddle around with homemade CPUs and encourage you to make something weird and wonderful.
J1 CPUMy hat is off to James Bowman. J1 is pretty cool. It is a stack machine; it executes instructions in one cycle, it is...
Choosing a Microcontroller for Your Vehicle
There are many things to take into consideration when choosing a microcontroller or microprocessor for your autonomous vehicle.
Voltage
Some processors run on 5V and others use 3.3V. Be sure to check the documentation before you buy. Make sure your supply has a high enough amp rating that your microcontroller doesn't lose pwer.
Power
Can the system run using batteries? Large, automotive sized vehicles can be run from large batteries or inverters in the vehicle. Smaller...
Simple Automated Log Processing
Text log data offers a wealth of information from an embedded system. At least during prototyping and development phases, most systems have some kind of serial log output, or use semihosting methods to log to a serial output channel in a debugger. Then you can capture the logs to a file.
The problem is that they tend to accumulate large volumes of data. Logs can be many thousands of lines long, especially when you run long duration tests. Finding information and evaluating trends in the...
First-Order Systems: The Happy Family
Все счастли́вые се́мьи похо́жи друг на дру́га, ка́ждая несчастли́вая семья́ несчастли́ва по-сво́ему.— Лев Николаевич Толстой, Анна Каренина
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.— Lev Nicholaevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I was going to write an article about second-order systems, but then realized that it would be...
Signal Processing Contest in Python (PREVIEW): The Worst Encoder in the World
When I posted an article on estimating velocity from a position encoder, I got a number of responses. A few of them were of the form "Well, it's an interesting article, but at slow speeds why can't you just take the time between the encoder edges, and then...." My point was that there are lots of people out there which take this approach, and don't take into account that the time between encoder edges varies due to manufacturing errors in the encoder. For some reason this is a hard concept...
Using XML to describe embedded devices (and speak to them)
This article discusses one of the typical development cycles in embedded device and communication design and presents a possible, light weight solution using the free DClib/netpp framework.
The challengeAssume we're faced with the design of an embedded device, be it a simple SoC unit or a more complex, uC controlled engine with various attached peripherals. From first prototype to the market, the following development cycle is typically walked through:
Padé Delay is Okay Today
This article is going to be somewhat different in that I’m not really writing it for the typical embedded systems engineer. Rather it’s kind of a specialized topic, so don’t be surprised if you get bored and move on to something else. That’s fine by me.
Anyway, let’s just jump ahead to the punchline. Here’s a numerical simulation of a step response to a \( p=126, q=130 \) Padé approximation of a time delay:
Impressed? Maybe you should be. This...
10 More (Obscure) Circuit Components You Should Know
The interest in my previous article on obscure but useful electronics parts, "10 Circuit Components You Should Know" was encouraging enough that I thought I would write a followup. So here are another 10:
1. "Ideal Diode" controllers
Load-sharing circuits use diodes tied together at their cathode terminal to take the most positive voltage among the sources and connect it to a load. Works great: you have a DC/DC power supply, a battery, and a solar cell, and it will use whichever output is...
Coding Step 2 - Source Control
Articles in this series:
- Coding Step 0 - Development Environments
- Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
- Coding Step 2 - Source Control
- Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
- Coding Step 4 - Design
When I first started out in programming, version control was not an introductory topic. Not in the least because it required a 'server' (ie, a computer which a teenaged me couldn't afford) but because it seemed difficult and only useful to teams rather than...
Cortex-M Exception Handling (Part 2)
The first part of this article described the conditions for an exception request to be accepted by a Cortex-M processor, mainly concerning the relationship of its priority with respect to the current execution priority. This part will describe instead what happens after an exception request is accepted and becomes active.
PROCESSOR OPERATION AND PRIVILEGE MODEBefore discussing in detail the sequence of actions that occurs within the processor after an exception request...
Energia - program a TI MSP430 using Arduino sketches
TI MSP430 Launchpad
I started tinkering with microcontroller a couple of years ago with an Arduino Uno. I had a little experience with C, so programming in the Arduino environment has been relatively easy and straightforward for me. My code is not necessarily elegant or efficient, but I can usually figure out how to make an Arduino do what I want it to do eventually. A lot of credit to the Arduino userbase, as it is very easy to figure most things out with a quick Google...
VGA Output in 7 Slices. Really.
Ridiculous? Read on - I will show you how to generate VGA timing in seven XilinxR Spartan3R slices.Some time ago I needed to output video to a VGA monitor for my Apple ][ FPGA clone. Obviously (I thought), VGA's been done before and all I had to do was find some Verilog code and drop it into my design. As is often the case (with me anyway), the task proved to be very different from my imagined 'couple of hours to integrate the IP'.I found some example code for my board. I...
Ten Little Algorithms, Part 5: Quadratic Extremum Interpolation and Chandrupatla's Method
Other articles in this series:
- Part 1: Russian Peasant Multiplication
- Part 2: The Single-Pole Low-Pass Filter
- Part 3: Welford's Method (And Friends)
- Part 4: Topological Sort
- Part 6: Green’s Theorem and Swept-Area Detection
Today we will be drifting back into the topic of numerical methods, and look at an algorithm that takes in a series of discretely-sampled data points, and estimates the maximum value of...
