Already 3000+ Attendees Registered for the Upcoming Embedded Online Conference
Chances are you already know, through the newsletter or banners on the Related sites, about the upcoming Embedded Online Conference.
Chances are you also already know that you have until the end of the month of February to register for free.
And chances are that you are one of the more than 3000 pro-active engineers who have already registered.
But If you are like me and have a tendency to do tomorrow what can be done today, maybe you haven't registered yet. You may...
So You Want To Be An Embedded Systems Developer
Contents:- Introduction
- What's An Embedded System?
- Hobbyist vs. Professional Hardware
- The Primary Resources
- Some Advanced Resources
- Some Hardware
- Glossaries
- Other Links
- Final Thought
Racing to Sleep
Today we’re going to talk about low-power design.
Suppose I’m an electrical engineer working with wildlife biologists who are gathering field data on the Saskatchewan ringed-neck mountain goat. My team has designed a device called the BigBrotherBear 2000 (BBB2000) with a trip cable and a motor and a camera and a temperature sensor and a hot-wire anemometer and a real-time clock and an SD card and a battery and a LoRa transceiver. The idea is something like...
Jaywalking Around the Compiler
Our team had another code review recently. I looked at one of the files, and bolted upright in horror when I saw a function that looked sort of like this:
void some_function(SOMEDATA_T *psomedata) { asm volatile("push CORCON"); CORCON = 0x00E2; do_some_other_stuff(psomedata); asm volatile("pop CORCON"); }There is a serious bug here — do you see what it is?
Shibboleths: The Perils of Voiceless Sibilant Fricatives, Idiot Lights, and Other Binary-Outcome Tests
AS-SALT, JORDAN — Dr. Reza Al-Faisal once had a job offer from Google to work on cutting-edge voice recognition projects. He turned it down. The 37-year-old Stanford-trained professor of engineering at Al-Balqa’ Applied University now leads a small cadre of graduate students in a government-sponsored program to keep Jordanian society secure from what has now become an overwhelming influx of refugees from the Palestinian-controlled West Bank. “Sometimes they visit relatives...
Embedded Programming Video Course Shows How OOP Works Under the Hood
If you'd like to understand how Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) really works under the hood, here is a free video course for you:
OOP part-1: Encapsulation: This first lesson on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) introduces the concept of Encapsulation, which is the ability to package data and functions together into classes. You'll see how you can emulate Encapsulation in C, what kind of code is generated, and how to debug such code. Next, you will translate the C design into C++ using...
Round-robin or RTOS for my embedded system
First of all, I would like to introduce myself. I am Manuel Herrera. I am starting to write blogs about the situations that I have faced over the years of my career and discussed with colleagues.
To begin, I would like to open a conversation with a dilemma that is present when starting a project ... must I use or not any operating system?
I hope it helps you to form your own criteria and above all that you enjoy it.
Does my embedded system need an...
Watchdog Timer Anti-patterns
The humble watchdog timer has been an essential part of our reliability tool chest for decades now. The way it works is straightforward and easy to understand, and most practical designs are easy to interface with.
There is a wealth of reference material that covers both the theory behind watchdog timers and practical design tips. But what we'll talk about today is of a slightly different nature.
Despite its straightforward operation and long history, the watchdog timer does occasionally get...
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...
Designing Communication Protocols, Practical Aspects
For most embedded developers always comes the time when they have to make their embedded MCU talk to another system. That other system will be a PC or a different embedded system or a smartphone etc. For the purpose of this article I am assuming that we are in the control of the protocol between the two ends and we don’t have to follow something that is already in place on one side.
So let’s say that we have our embedded MCU, we have implemented and configured the USB stack (or just...
Discrete-Time PLLs, Part 1: Basics
In this series of tutorials on discrete-time PLLs we will be focusing on Phase-Locked Loops that can be implemented in discrete-time signal proessors such as FPGAs, DSPs and of course, MATLAB.
Wye Delta Tee Pi: Observations on Three-Terminal Networks
Today I’m going to talk a little bit about three-terminal linear passive networks. These generally come in two flavors, wye and delta.
Why Wye?The town of Why, Arizona has a strange name that comes from the shape of the original road junction of Arizona State Highways 85 and 86, which was shaped like the letter Y. This is no longer the case, because the state highway department reconfigured the intersection
Designing Communication Protocols, Practical Aspects
For most embedded developers always comes the time when they have to make their embedded MCU talk to another system. That other system will be a PC or a different embedded system or a smartphone etc. For the purpose of this article I am assuming that we are in the control of the protocol between the two ends and we don’t have to follow something that is already in place on one side.
So let’s say that we have our embedded MCU, we have implemented and configured the USB stack (or just...
Open-Source Licenses Made Easy with Buildroot and Yocto for Embedded Linux
In this article I will try to explain what are the copyrights/copyleft, what are the popular opensource software licenses, and how to make sure that your Embedded Linux system complies with them using popular build systems ; Buildroot or YOCTO projec
Round-robin or RTOS for my embedded system
First of all, I would like to introduce myself. I am Manuel Herrera. I am starting to write blogs about the situations that I have faced over the years of my career and discussed with colleagues.
To begin, I would like to open a conversation with a dilemma that is present when starting a project ... must I use or not any operating system?
I hope it helps you to form your own criteria and above all that you enjoy it.
Does my embedded system need an...
BGA and QFP at Home 1 - A Practical Guide.
It is almost universally accepted by the hobbyists that you can't work with high-density packages at home. That is entirely incorrect. I've been assembling and reflowing BGA circuit boards at home for a few years now. BGAs and 0.5mm-pitch QFPs are well within the realm of a determined amateur.
This series of articles presents practical information on designing and assembling boards with high-density packages at home. While the focus is on FPGA packages, most of...
The CRC Wild Goose Chase: PPP Does What?!?!?!
I got a bad feeling yesterday when I had to include reference information about a 16-bit CRC in a serial protocol document I was writing. And I knew it wasn’t going to end well.
The last time I looked into CRC algorithms was about five years ago. And the time before that… sometime back in 2004 or 2005? It seems like it comes up periodically, like the seventeen-year locust or sunspots or El Niño,...
Getting Started With Embedded Linux - From Nothing To A Login Prompt
One of the famous observations that have been made related to embedded systems is referred to as “Moore’s Law”, which states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every year. This observation has held mostly true for the past several decades, so powerful CPUs are no longer simply relegated to servers, desktops, and laptops. Instead, we see powerful CPUs with increased capabilities being introduced into embedded systems on devices that live at “the edge”....
What does it mean to be 'Turing complete'?
The term "Turing complete" describes all computers and even some things we don't expect to be as powerful as a typical computer. In this article, I describe what it means and discuss the implications of Turing completeness on projects that need just a little more power, on alternative processor designs, and even security.
The DSP Online Conference - Right Around the Corner!
It is Sunday night as I write this blog post with a few days to go before the virtual doors of the very first DSP Online Conference open..
It all started with a post in the DSPRelated forum about three months ago. We had just had a blast running the 2020 Embedded Online Conference and we thought it could be fun to organize a smaller event dedicated to the DSP community. So my goal with the post in the forum was to see if...
C to C++: Bridging the Gap from C Structures to Classes
In our last post, C to C++: Proven Techniques for Embedded Systems Transformation, we started to discuss the different ways that C++ can be used to write embedded software. You saw that there is no reason to be overwhelmed by trying to adopt complex topics like metaprogramming out of the gate. An important concept to understand is that you can make the transition gradually into C++ while still receiving the many benefits that C++ has to offer.
One of the first concepts that a C...
The Other Kind of Bypass Capacitor
There’s a type of bypass capacitor I’d like to talk about today.
It’s not the usual power supply bypass capacitor, aka decoupling capacitor, which is used to provide local charge storage to an integrated circuit, so that the high-frequency supply currents to the IC can bypass (hence the name) all the series resistance and inductance from the power supply. This reduces the noise on a DC voltage supply. I’ve...
Jaywalking Around the Compiler
Our team had another code review recently. I looked at one of the files, and bolted upright in horror when I saw a function that looked sort of like this:
void some_function(SOMEDATA_T *psomedata) { asm volatile("push CORCON"); CORCON = 0x00E2; do_some_other_stuff(psomedata); asm volatile("pop CORCON"); }There is a serious bug here — do you see what it is?
How to make a heap profiler
We'll see how to make a heap profiler. Example code for this post makes up heapprof, a working 250-line heap profiler for programs using malloc/free.
It works out of the box on Linux (tested on "real" programs like gdb and python). The main point though is being easy to port and modify to suit your needs. The code, build and test scripts are at github.
Why roll your own heap profiler?
- It's easy! And fun, if you're that sort of person. What, not reasons enough? OK, how...
Tolerance Analysis
Today we’re going to talk about tolerance analysis. This is a topic that I have danced around in several previous articles, but never really touched upon in its own right. The closest I’ve come is Margin Call, where I discussed several different techniques of determining design margin, and ran through some calculations to justify that it was safe to allow a certain amount of current through an IRFP260N MOSFET.
Tolerance analysis...
Stairway to Thévenin
This article was inspired by a recent post on reddit asking for help on Thévenin and Norton equivalent circuits.
(With apologies to Mr. Thévenin, the rest of the e's that follow will remain unaccented.)
I still remember my introductory circuits class on the subject, roughly as follows:
(NOTE: Do not get scared of what you see in the rest of this section. We're going to point out the traditional approach for teaching linear equivalent circuits first. If you have...
Metal detection: beat frequency oscillator
Plan Introduction Theory Electronics Software Tests ReferencesNext part: building the detector 1. IntroductionThis article discusses the implementation of a beat frequency oscillator (BFO) stage for metal detector. While they are mentioned here and there, the article does not detail other important electronic stages such as the power supply, and user interface, the coil or the detector frame. I may write other articles on these topics, and other detection methods.Before...
Little to no benefit from C based HLS
Last updated 07-Nov-2015
As I write this I am on a plane and my destination is EELive 2014 where I am going to give a talk hardware design: the grunge era. It is a shotgun introduction to three alternative hardware description languages (alt.hdl). The three languages briefly introduced in the talk are: bsv, chisel, and myhdl. The goal of the talk is simply to raise awareness of the three...
A wireless door monitor based on the BANO framework
IntroductionI have been thinking for a while about a system to monitor the states of my flat and my garage doors from a remote place. Functionnaly, I wanted to monitor the state of my doors from a remote place. A typical situation is when I leave for holidays, but it can also be useful from the work office. To do so, I would centralize the information on a server connected on the Internet that I could query using a web browser. The server itself would be located in the appartement, where...