Dumb Embedded System Mistakes: Running The Wrong Code
Running the wrong firmware on a board can waste hours. This post shows a practical marking strategy for embedded Linux that embeds searchable proof-of-life strings into kernel, rootfs, overlay, and application code. It walks through choosing early-boot log points, using compile-time timestamps, and a small shell script to set, find, and clear marks so you can verify builds before flashing.
Advice For High School Students
Short attention span engineering is a recipe for disaster, so this post gives practical, no-nonsense advice to high school students thinking about engineering majors. It explains how to build college-ready study habits, why hands-on projects like Arduino or Raspberry Pi matter, which math you should focus on, and which soft skills will make you a reliable engineer.
Your Career Archive
Background checks have turned routine hiring into a paperwork sprint, and many engineers find themselves scrambling for proof. This post shows how to build a practical career archive of job records, education documents, and tax/payroll forms, plus advice on redaction, storage formats, and backups. Capture verifiable details when you get them to avoid last-minute stress and make future vetting simple and reliable.
Review: Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers
Brian Amos's Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers delivers a practical path from bare-metal to full RTOS applications using FreeRTOS on an STM32 Nucleo-F767ZI board. The book combines clear explanations of concurrency, interrupts, and DMA with step-by-step toolchain setup and runnable examples that show building, debugging, monitoring, and scaling embedded systems for real projects and coursework.
Review: Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager
You don't need a PMP to manage effective engineering projects. Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, by Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood, distills PMBOK concepts into readable, lightweight procedures for people who end up coordinating work without formal training. The book emphasizes people-first behaviors, simple process groups, and concise documentation so engineers can manage risk, scope, and change without heavy bureaucracy.
Absolute Beginner's Guide To Getting Started With Raspberry Pi
Getting started with Raspberry Pi can feel overwhelming. This guide strips the noise and shows the simplest path from unboxing to a working desktop. It recommends buying a preloaded NOOBS microSD to avoid imaging hassles, lists exact parts and suppliers, and walks through booting, recovery, and making a backup. If you want embedded electronics it also lists starter parts and ESD safety tips.
The Self-Directed Virtual Internship
Summer internships may be gone, but your career momentum does not have to be. This post shows how to design a self-directed, unpaid virtual internship in embedded systems, with concrete options: project-based builds, tutorials, reports, or open-source contributions. Follow the one-page plan approach, treat it like a real remote job, and produce demonstrable deliverables to show employers.
Simple Automated Log Processing
You don't need heavy tools to make sense of megabytes of embedded logs. This post shows a practical bash script that trims noisy serial and semihosting output, samples hourly heap-profile lines, and converts them into a CSV ready for graphing. It gives a simple, adaptable pattern you can reuse to spot memory leaks or triage recurring log signatures quickly.
Some Advice For Working From Home
Treat working from home like an intentional, repeatable process rather than a perk. Keep regular hours, a dedicated workspace, and clear household boundaries to preserve productivity and personal time. This post bundles practical setup and network tips, cybersecurity reminders, and quick mental-health habits such as exercise, meditation, and low-stress hobbies, with a reminder about social responsibility when teams shift to remote work.
Examining The Stack For Fun And Profit
Stack bloat can hide in short initialization paths, and this post walks through finding it with hands-on debugging. The author builds a tiny test program and uses gdb plus custom stack-helper scripts to scan, watch, and walk the stack. That process reveals getaddrinfo pulling in glibc DNS code that allocates large local buffers and uses alloca and PLT resolution, consuming roughly 11KB of stack.
Review: Modern Software Engineering
Long-lived branches, manual releases, and slow feedback waste engineering time. This review of three Dave Farley books distills a practical playbook: continuous delivery pipelines, trunk-based development, and disciplined TDD to keep trunk always releasable. It shows how fast, automated feedback at every stage shrinks cycle time, reduces merge pain, and makes teams far more productive.
Learning From Engineering Failures
Engineering failures are the best teachers when you study them with curiosity and rigor. This post gathers the author's approach and curated resources for learning from incidents, with an emphasis on treating human error as a symptom of layered systemic problems rather than the root cause. Read on for practical guidance, longtime sources like Risks Digest, and a mindset: trust nothing, and verify.
VolksEEG Project: Initial Hardware Architecture
The VolksEEG prototype pairs an Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense MCU with an ADS1299 analog front end, organized into non-isolated and isolated domains to protect patients. The post explains why isolation is required, which chips bridge the domains, and why simple, high-level power and signal diagrams help clarify the KiCad schematics for engineers and reviewers.
Six Software Design Tools
Software design need not be mysterious, these six practical tools give a disciplined way to shape readable, testable, and maintainable code. The post walks through naming (DAMP), duplication control (DRY), complexity metrics (MCC), SOLID principles, API layering, and test-driven development, showing how each idea applies across languages and embedded systems. Use them as checklists for code reviews and design thinking.
Review: Prototype to Product
Alan Cohen's Prototype to Product is a practical systems engineering playbook for anyone taking an embedded idea to market. The review emphasizes uncovering surprises early, disciplined planning, and cross-discipline collaboration across electrical, mechanical, software, and manufacturing domains. It highlights concrete topics such as prototyping, DFM/DFA, staged testing, and regulatory considerations that help avoid costly late-stage rework.
The Missing Agile Conversation
In this article, we learn about Agile practices and how they use stories as units of development. Stories consist of a brief description, one to a few sentences. They don’t contain details sufficient to allow a developer to implement them. The Agile practice is to defer details as long as possible because conditions may change. When a developer takes on a story to implement, that’s the time for them to perform the work that has been deferred. They do this by having a conversation, a series of specific discussions working closely with the various SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) who have information relevant to the story.
Introducing The VolksEEG Project
VolksEEG is an open-source effort to build an FDA-cleared clinical EEG and publish every design so others can manufacture it. The volunteer-driven project centers on the TI ADS1299 8-channel, 24-bit biopotential ADC and combines medical and electrical engineering expertise to confront regulatory, safety, and usability challenges. This blog series will document technical decisions, isolation and safety concerns, and ways engineers can contribute.
Video-Based STEM Embedded Systems Curriculum, Part 2
Part 2 delivers three ready-to-run lesson plans for a video-based STEM embedded course, starting with Arduino hands-on projects using an Elegoo UNO starter kit and Bryan Vines video walkthroughs that explain the code. It then teaches Fritzing for pictorial and schematic circuit drawings, followed by Collin Cunningham videos that cover resistors, capacitors, transistors, schematics, and other core components. The sequence stresses design, draw, build, test to keep students engaged.
My Guiding Principles As An Engineer
An embedded-systems veteran distills 40 years of experience into practical guiding principles for engineers. The post mixes classic quotes with hard-earned aphorisms focused on testing, instrumentation, planning, and integrity, showing how persistence, preparation, and evidence-based thinking prevent mistakes. Read it for concise, actionable habits you can apply to firmware, hardware-software integration, and team practices.
Some Advice For Working From Home
Treat working from home like an intentional, repeatable process rather than a perk. Keep regular hours, a dedicated workspace, and clear household boundaries to preserve productivity and personal time. This post bundles practical setup and network tips, cybersecurity reminders, and quick mental-health habits such as exercise, meditation, and low-stress hobbies, with a reminder about social responsibility when teams shift to remote work.
Review: Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager
You don't need a PMP to manage effective engineering projects. Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, by Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood, distills PMBOK concepts into readable, lightweight procedures for people who end up coordinating work without formal training. The book emphasizes people-first behaviors, simple process groups, and concise documentation so engineers can manage risk, scope, and change without heavy bureaucracy.
Learning From Engineering Failures
Engineering failures are the best teachers when you study them with curiosity and rigor. This post gathers the author's approach and curated resources for learning from incidents, with an emphasis on treating human error as a symptom of layered systemic problems rather than the root cause. Read on for practical guidance, longtime sources like Risks Digest, and a mindset: trust nothing, and verify.
Some Advice For Working From Home
Treat working from home like an intentional, repeatable process rather than a perk. Keep regular hours, a dedicated workspace, and clear household boundaries to preserve productivity and personal time. This post bundles practical setup and network tips, cybersecurity reminders, and quick mental-health habits such as exercise, meditation, and low-stress hobbies, with a reminder about social responsibility when teams shift to remote work.
Introducing The VolksEEG Project
VolksEEG is an open-source effort to build an FDA-cleared clinical EEG and publish every design so others can manufacture it. The volunteer-driven project centers on the TI ADS1299 8-channel, 24-bit biopotential ADC and combines medical and electrical engineering expertise to confront regulatory, safety, and usability challenges. This blog series will document technical decisions, isolation and safety concerns, and ways engineers can contribute.
My Guiding Principles As An Engineer
An embedded-systems veteran distills 40 years of experience into practical guiding principles for engineers. The post mixes classic quotes with hard-earned aphorisms focused on testing, instrumentation, planning, and integrity, showing how persistence, preparation, and evidence-based thinking prevent mistakes. Read it for concise, actionable habits you can apply to firmware, hardware-software integration, and team practices.
The Missing Agile Conversation
In this article, we learn about Agile practices and how they use stories as units of development. Stories consist of a brief description, one to a few sentences. They don’t contain details sufficient to allow a developer to implement them. The Agile practice is to defer details as long as possible because conditions may change. When a developer takes on a story to implement, that’s the time for them to perform the work that has been deferred. They do this by having a conversation, a series of specific discussions working closely with the various SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) who have information relevant to the story.
Advice For High School Students
Short attention span engineering is a recipe for disaster, so this post gives practical, no-nonsense advice to high school students thinking about engineering majors. It explains how to build college-ready study habits, why hands-on projects like Arduino or Raspberry Pi matter, which math you should focus on, and which soft skills will make you a reliable engineer.
Your Career Archive
Background checks have turned routine hiring into a paperwork sprint, and many engineers find themselves scrambling for proof. This post shows how to build a practical career archive of job records, education documents, and tax/payroll forms, plus advice on redaction, storage formats, and backups. Capture verifiable details when you get them to avoid last-minute stress and make future vetting simple and reliable.
VolksEEG Project: Initial Hardware Architecture
The VolksEEG prototype pairs an Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense MCU with an ADS1299 analog front end, organized into non-isolated and isolated domains to protect patients. The post explains why isolation is required, which chips bridge the domains, and why simple, high-level power and signal diagrams help clarify the KiCad schematics for engineers and reviewers.
Review: Prototype to Product
Alan Cohen's Prototype to Product is a practical systems engineering playbook for anyone taking an embedded idea to market. The review emphasizes uncovering surprises early, disciplined planning, and cross-discipline collaboration across electrical, mechanical, software, and manufacturing domains. It highlights concrete topics such as prototyping, DFM/DFA, staged testing, and regulatory considerations that help avoid costly late-stage rework.
