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Dark Corners of C - The Comma Operator

Stephen Friederichs ● July 23, 2015●8 comments

I've been programming in C for 16 years or so and the language has existed for much much longer than that. You might think that there'd be nothing left to surprise me after so long - but you'd be wrong. Imagine my surprise the first time I saw a line of code that looked something like this:

if (!dry_run && ((stdout_closed = true), close_stream (stdout) != 0))

My mind couldn't parse it - what's a comma doing in there (after...

Ten Little Algorithms, Part 4: Topological Sort

Jason Sachs ● July 5, 2015●1 comment

Other articles in this series:

Today we’re going to take a break from my usual focus on signal processing or numerical algorithms, and focus on...

Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part VI : Abstraction

Jason Sachs ● June 16, 2015●3 comments

Earlier articles:

We have come to the last part of the Important Programming Concepts series, on abstraction. I thought I might also talk about why there isn’t a Part VII, but decided it would distract from this article — so if you want to know the reason, along with what’s next,

Coding Step 2 - Source Control

Stephen Friederichs ● May 6, 2015●3 comments

Articles in this series:

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...

Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles

Stephen Friederichs ● February 10, 2015●6 comments

Articles in this series:

Step 0 discussed how to install GCC and the make utility with the expectation of writing and compiling your first C program. In this article, I discuss how to use those tools we installed last time. Specifically, how to use GCC to compile a C program and...

Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part V: State Machines

Jason Sachs ● January 5, 2015●8 comments

Other articles in this series:

Oh, hell, this article just had to be about state machines, didn’t it? State machines! Those damned little circles and arrows and q’s.

Yeah, I know you don’t like them. They bring back bad memories from University, those Mealy and Moore machines with their state transition tables, the ones you had to write up...

Coding - Step 0: Setting Up a Development Environment

Stephen Friederichs ● November 25, 2014●5 comments

Articles in this series:

You can easily find a million articles out there discussing compiler nuances, weighing the pros and cons of various data structures or discussing the  optimization of databases. Those sorts of articles are fascinating reads for advanced programmers but...

Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part IV: Singletons

Jason Sachs ● November 11, 2014●2 comments

Other articles in this series:

Today’s topic is the singleton. This article is unique (pun intended) in that unlike the others in this series, I tried to figure out a word to use that would be a positive concept to encourage, as an alternative to singletons, but

The CRC Wild Goose Chase: PPP Does What?!?!?!

Jason Sachs ● October 23, 2014●2 comments

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,...

Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part III: Volatility

Jason Sachs ● October 10, 2014

1vol·a·tile adjective \ˈvä-lə-təl, especially British -ˌtī(-ə)l\ : likely to change in a very sudden or extreme way : having or showing extreme or sudden changes of emotion : likely to become dangerous or out of control

— Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Other articles in this series:

[ C Programming Techniques: integer type optimization ]

Fabien Le Mentec ● May 22, 2013●1 comment

I am currently working on a voltage controller running on a ATMEGA328P, ATMEL AVR 8 bits microcontroller. The controller logic is implemented in the main() routine and relies on a periodical timer whose frequency is fixed at application setup. Among other things, the timer ISR handler increments some per tick counters which are then used by the main routine to implement the voltage controller timing logic.By looking at the code, one noticed that I use the uint8_t type for counters instead of...

You Will Make Mistakes

Jason Sachs ● September 28, 2014●1 comment
</scorpion>: FAIL

Anyone out there see the TV pilot of Scorpion? Genius hacker squad meets Homeland Security in a fast-paced thriller to save hundreds of airplanes from crashing after LAX air traffic control software upgrade fails and they didn’t save a backup of the old version (ZOMG!!!) so thousands of people are going to die because the planes… well, they just can’t land! They just can’t. Even if the weather is sunny and calm and there could quite possibly...

Lessons Learned from Embedded Code Reviews (Including Some Surprises)

Jason Sachs ● August 16, 2015●1 comment

My software team recently finished a round of code reviews for some of our motor controller code. I learned a lot from the experience, most notably why you would want to have code reviews in the first place.

My background is originally from the medical device industry. In the United States, software in medical devices gets a lot of scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration, and for good reason; it’s a place for complexity to hide latent bugs. (Can you say “

Best Firmware Architecture Attributes

Dr. Tayyar GUZEL ● June 4, 2016●5 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...

Cortex-M Exception Handling (Part 2)

Ivan Cibrario Bertolotti ● February 1, 2016●9 comments

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 MODE

Before discussing in detail the sequence of actions that occurs within the processor after an exception request...

Code Metrics - SLOC Count

Stephen Friederichs ● August 19, 2013

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...

C++ on microcontrollers 4 – input pins, and decoding a rotary switch

Wouter van Ooijen ● November 12, 2011●2 comments

previous parts: 1, 2, 3

 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.

So far I...

Tenderfoot: Embedded Software and Firmware Specialties

Matthew Eshleman ● August 20, 2017●10 comments

Once upon a time (seven years ago) I answered a question on Stack Overflow. Then Stephane suggested I turn that answer into a blog post. Great idea! This post dives deeper into the original question: “Is it possible to fragment this field (embedded software and firmware) into sub-fields?”

This post represents a detailed and updated response to my original Stack Overflow answer. I hope this post provides guidance and useful information to the “tenderfoots” in the...

Designing Embedded System with FPGA - 1

Pragnesh Patel ● October 28, 2007●11 comments

With the introduction of soft processors and related tools (like EDK from Xilinx), implementation of basic embedded system in FPGA is made easy. This requires very little or almost no knowledge of VHDL programming. Actually that’s how I started. If user is interested in taking full advantage of FPGA and its parallel processing power, then yes, detail understanding of soft processor, its peripheral bus and VHDL programming is required.

 

I will start with...

Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part VI : Abstraction

Jason Sachs ● June 16, 2015●3 comments

Earlier articles:

We have come to the last part of the Important Programming Concepts series, on abstraction. I thought I might also talk about why there isn’t a Part VII, but decided it would distract from this article — so if you want to know the reason, along with what’s next,