Learning Rust For Embedded Systems

Steve Branam November 12, 2021
The Motivational Portion

Based on recommendations from Kevin Nause, the VolksEEG project is considering using Rust as the embedded system programming language. So I've been off on a tear skimming books and e-books and watching videos at 2x to evaluate it.

My conclusion? Do it!

Most of the rest of us participants are primarily C/C++ embedded developers. I had previously been sensitized to Rust for embedded systems by 


The 2021 IoT Online Conference

Jacob Beningo November 9, 2021

The IoT Online Conference is back, and this time the core focus is on IoT embedded systems and edge computing. This post will explore what will be happening at this year’s conference and how teams and developers can benefit.

The IoT Online Conference Overview

The IoT Online Conference will be taking place December 8 – 10, 2021. This is the conferences’ fourth year, although it started as a fall embedded systems conference which was a single day of webinars. The...


Six Software Design Tools

Steve Branam November 5, 20211 comment
Contents: Introduction

Here are six tools to help you with software design. The first two are very simple, almost deceptively trivial, while the last four are more involved. They apply universally, to all types of software, all types of systems, and all languages. This is part of good engineering discipline.

At face value, this is just a bunch of acronyms,...


VolksEEG Project: Initial Hardware Architecture

Steve Branam November 2, 20211 comment

The initial hardware architecture for the prototype VolksEEG uses an Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense, which connects to a PC via USB for UI (User Interface). Through several additional chips, this provides power to and acquires data from the ADS1299 ADC.

An important topic I mentioned in my introduction to the project is isolation, ensuring there is no conductive path for current through the patient. The architecture is therefore split into...


Introducing The VolksEEG Project

Steve Branam October 31, 2021
Introduction

The VolksEEG project is an open-source project with the goal of creating an electroenchephalogram (EEG) machine, fully cleared by the FDA for standard clinical use. All designs will be freely available for others to manufacture.

The project was founded by Alan Cohen, a medical device systems engineer with an electrical engineering/software (EE/SW) background in Boston, USA, and Dr. Bryan Glezerson


Video-Based STEM Embedded Systems Curriculum, Part 2

Steve Branam October 25, 2021
Contents: Introduction

This post continues from part 1. It contains the first three lesson plans.

Lesson Plan 1: Introducing Arduino

This lesson is first because Arduino is the simplest programming environment, yet allows lots of interaction with hardware. In...


Review: Prototype to Product

Steve Branam October 16, 2021

Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market, by Alan Cohen, is a must-read for anyone involved in product development, whether in a technical, management, or executive role.

I was reminded of it by Cohen's recent episode on Embedded.fm, 388: Brains Generate EMF, which is worth listening to a couple times through, especially if you're interested in medical device development. And in fact his first episode there, 


The 2021 DSP/ML Online Conference

Stephane Boucher September 29, 2021

The 2021 DSP/ML Online Conference is just around the corner and this year again, the program is packed with opportunities to learn. 

By registering for the conference, not only will you have full access to all talks, workshops, and Q&A sessions at this year's event, but you'll also gain instant access to all talks from last year's edition.  

We've asked the speakers to tell me a few words about their sessions, here are some of the answers we've...


Byte and Switch (Part 1)

Jason Sachs April 26, 201114 comments

Imagine for a minute you have an electromagnet, and a microcontroller, and you want to use the microcontroller to turn the electromagnet on and off. Sounds pretty typical, right?We ask this question on our interviews of entry-level electrical engineers: what do you put between the microcontroller and the electromagnet?We used to think this kind of question was too easy, but there are a surprising number of subtleties here (and maybe a surprising number of job candidates that were missing...


10 Circuit Components You Should Know

Jason Sachs November 27, 20113 comments

Chefs have their miscellaneous ingredients, like condensed milk, cream of tartar, and xanthan gum. As engineers, we too have quite our pick of circuits, and a good circuit designer should know what's out there. Not just the bread and butter ingredients like resistors, capacitors, op-amps, and comparators, but the miscellaneous "gadget" components as well.

Here are ten circuit components you may not have heard of, but which are occasionally quite useful.

1. Multifunction gate (


Endianness and Serial Communication

Stephen Friederichs May 20, 20131 comment

Endianness is a consideration that is easily overlooked in the design of embedded systems. I myself am amply guilty of this oversight. It’s something you don’t ever have to worry about if you’re only working with a single processor or two processors that have the same endianness.  You can even avoid it if you have two processors that have different endianness but never transmit data between themselves that consists of more than one byte.  It’s easy to lull...


How to Build a Fixed-Point PI Controller That Just Works: Part I

Jason Sachs February 26, 20128 comments

This two-part article explains five tips to make a fixed-point PI controller work well. I am not going to talk about loop tuning -- there are hundreds of articles and books about that; any control-systems course will go over loop tuning enough to help you understand the fundamentals. There will always be some differences for each system you have to control, but the goals are the same: drive the average error to zero, keep the system stable, and maximize performance (keep overshoot and delay...


Data Hiding in C

Stephen Friederichs April 20, 201317 comments

Strictly speaking, C is not an object-oriented language. Although it provides some features that fit into the object-oriented paradigm it has never had the full object-oriented focus that its successor C++ offers. C++ introduced some very useful concepts and abilities that I miss when I’m developing in ANSI C. One such concept is protected member variables and functions.

When you declare a class in C++ you can also declare member variables and functions as part of that class. Often, these...


Ten Little Algorithms, Part 1: Russian Peasant Multiplication

Jason Sachs March 21, 20156 comments

This blog needs some short posts to balance out the long ones, so I thought I’d cover some of the algorithms I’ve used over the years. Like the Euclidean algorithm and Extended Euclidean algorithm and Newton’s method — except those you should know already, and if not, you should be locked in a room until you do. Someday one of them may save your life. Well, you never know.

Other articles in this series:

  • Part 1:

Arduino robotics #1 - motor control

Lonnie Honeycutt October 13, 20133 comments
Arduino Robotics

Beginner robotics is a series of article chronicling my first autonomous robot build, Clusterbot.  This build is meant to be affordable, relatively easy and instructive.  The total cost of the build is around $50.  

1. Arduino robotics - motor control2. Arduino robotics - chassis, locomotion and power3. Arduino robotics - wiring, coding and a test run4. 

Introduction to Microcontrollers - Buttons and Bouncing

Mike Silva October 26, 20135 comments

What Is A Button?

To your hardware, that is.  As discussed in Introduction to Microcontrollers - More On GPIO, a button (or key, or switch, or any form of mechanical contact) is generally hooked up to a microcontroller so as to generate a certain logic level when pushed or closed or "active," and the opposite logic level when unpushed or open or "inactive."  The active logic level can be either '0' or '1', but for reasons both historical and electrical, an...


Back from Embedded World 2019 - Funny Stories and Live-Streaming Woes

Stephane Boucher March 1, 20191 comment

When the idea of live-streaming parts of Embedded World came to me,  I got so excited that I knew I had to make it happen.  I perceived the opportunity as a win-win-win-win.  

  • win #1 - Engineers who could not make it to Embedded World would be able to sample the huge event, 
  • win #2 - The organisation behind EW would benefit from the extra exposure
  • win #3 - Lecturers and vendors who would be live-streamed would reach a (much) larger audience
  • win #4 - I would get...

DSPRelated and EmbeddedRelated now on Facebook & I will be at EE Live!

Stephane Boucher February 27, 20148 comments

I have two news to share with you today.

The first one is that I finally created Facebook pages for DSPRelated.com and EmbeddedRelated (DSPRelated page - EmbeddedRelated page). For a long time I didn't feel that this was something that was needed, but it seems that these days more and more people are using their Facebook account to stay updated with their favorite websites. In any event, if you have a Facebook account, I would greatly appreciate if you could use the next 5 seconds to "like"...


Free Embedded Systems Books

Stephane Boucher May 28, 2013

Following the success of the Collaborative Writing Experiment: What are your favorite Embedded Systems Online Resources? blog post, let's try a second collaborative writing experiment.  This time, let's work on a file that will list the best embedded systems books that are available online for free.  I am not talking about books that are illegally made available for download by pirates, but books that are made available online by authors and/or publishers.

Do you know of...


Collaborative Writing Experiment: What are your favorite Embedded Systems Online Resources?

Stephane Boucher May 20, 20139 comments

Edit 22/05 - Wow, this went better than expected.  I will try submitting this blog post to Reddit/ece and see if we can get a few more interesting links before I close the document.  Thanks to everyone who contributed!  

_______

Edit 28/05 - The document is now closed to editing.  If there is a link that you would like to see added, please use the comment system at the end of this blog.  Thanks to all who participated!  

Up next, Free...


Success Story

Stephane Boucher April 24, 20132 comments

A blog post has just broken the all-time record for the number of pageviews in 24 hours on the related sites. The blog post in question is titled Data Hiding in C and was written by Stephen Friederichs.  It has been viewed by more than 7000 individuals since its publication a few days ago.  

One reason that explains the success of this blog post is the wide appeal of the subject of the article (c programming) which allowed me to


Code Snippets Winners Announced

Stephane Boucher April 12, 20132 comments

Wow, thanks a lot for all the code snippets - I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of the code that has been shared and I am very grateful.  

Now, as you know, to give momentum to the section I had announced a special reward program for code snippets submitted by the end of March.

The partner members and I had a very hard time selecting the 5 "most useful" snippets out of the more than 50 who have been submitted. 

Here's our selection:


Now on Twitter + More Code Snippets Incentives

Stephane Boucher February 28, 20134 comments

Now on Twitter!

Better late than never, the three related sites (DSPRelated, FPGARelated and EmbeddedRelated) now have their Twitter accounts.  If you are already on Twitter, please consider following.  I'll make sure to keep the tweets interesting and informative.  Plus, once in a while, I will tweet a link where the first x persons to visit will receive a gift (book, gift certificate, etc).  

@DSPRelated


New Code Snippet Section

Stephane Boucher January 15, 20134 comments

More incentives announced

Following the success of the code snippet section on DSPRelated.com, I am happy today to announce the launch of the code snippet section on EmbeddedRelated.com.  

If you have a piece of code that you would like to share with the Embedded Systems community, please go ahead and fill the form.  

If the piece of code you submit is approved, you will be sent $10 through Paypal.

If...


Two jobs

Stephane Boucher December 5, 201223 comments

For those of you following closely embeddedrelated and the other related sites, you might have noticed that I have been less active for the last couple of months, and I will use this blog post to explain why. The main reason is that I got myself involved into a project that ended up using a better part of my cpu than I originally thought it would.

edit - video of the event:

I currently have two jobs: one as an electrical/dsp engineer recycled as a web publisher and the other...


October winner announced

Stephane Boucher November 15, 20121 comment

If you are a regular visitor of EmbeddedRelated, you are most likely aware that I have been running monthly draws lately for users of the site who are helping me to clean up the archives by rating threads in the forums section.  

For the month of August, the member "Cryptoman" won a iPad, and for the month of September, 10 members won $50 each.  

For October, the winner of the new iPod Touch is the member with the username "hssathya".

The winner of the next draw will win...


Behold, the New Comments System!

Stephane Boucher September 18, 201229 comments

I have just finished implementing a new system for commenting the blogs.  It uses Ajax extensively, so the page won't reload if you post a comment.  And it is a 'threaded' system, which means that if you post a reply to a comment, it will be attached to it.  

What do you think?  I personally love it.  Please go ahead and test it with a quick comment.

Although it is better to be logged in to post a comment, non-registered users can also comment, but they will have...