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Coding Step 4 - Design

Stephen Friederichs ● November 24, 2015

Articles in this series:

The last article in this series discussed how to write functional high-level requirements: specifications for what your software is supposed to do. Software design is the other side of the coin....

The three laws of safe embedded systems

Michael J. Pont ● November 12, 2015●1 comment

This short article is part of an ongoing series in which I aim to explore some techniques that may be useful for developers and organisations that are beginning their first safety-related embedded project.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss the contents of my previous article on this site with a group of very smart and enthusiastic engineers in Cairo (Egypt). As part of this discussion, it has become clear that I should add a few more details to explain the work...

Developing software for a safety-related embedded system for the first time

Michael J. Pont ● October 31, 2015●1 comment

I spend most of my working life with organisations that develop software for high-reliability, real-time embedded systems. Some of these systems are created in compliance with IEC 61508, ISO 26262, DO-178C or similar international standards.

When working with organisations that are developing software for their first safety-related design, I’m often asked to identify the key issues that distinguish this process from the techniques used to develop “ordinary” embedded software.

...

“Smarter” cars, unintended acceleration – and unintended consequences

Michael J. Pont ● October 20, 2015●1 comment

In this article, I consider some recent press reports relating to embedded software in the automotive sector.

In The Times newspaper (London, 2015-10-16) the imminent arrival of Tesla cars that “use autopilot technology to park themselves and change lane without intervention from the driver” was noted.

By most definitions, the Tesla design incorporates what is sometimes called “Artificial Intelligence” (AI).Others might label it a “Smart” (or at least “Smarter”)...

Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements

Stephen Friederichs ● August 17, 2015●2 comments

Articles in this series:

If this series of articles has been light on one thing it's 'coding'. If it's been light on two things the second is 'embedded'. In three articles I haven't gotten past Hello World on a desktop PC. That changes (slowly) with this article. In this article I'll...

Lessons Learned from Embedded Code Reviews (Including Some Surprises)

Jason Sachs ● August 16, 2015●2 comments

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 “

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...

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...

[ 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...

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 3 - High-Level Requirements

Stephen Friederichs ● August 17, 2015●2 comments

Articles in this series:

If this series of articles has been light on one thing it's 'coding'. If it's been light on two things the second is 'embedded'. In three articles I haven't gotten past Hello World on a desktop PC. That changes (slowly) with this article. In this article I'll...

Watchdog Timer Anti-patterns

Alexandru Lazar ● June 8, 2019

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...

Project Directory Organization

Stephen Friederichs ● August 20, 2014●2 comments

A recent question on Reddit’s C Programming sub asked what sort of directory structure people use for their projects. Perhaps not unsurprisingly this didn’t elicit a flood of answers - maybe there are no organizational schemes that people are happy with or perhaps few people consider it a glamorous topic (not that the C Programming subreddit is filled with glamorous people -no offense I love you all). Personally I find it to be a very interesting topic. Organization and process are...

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...

Favorite Tools - Look Up Tables

Matthew Eshleman ● October 22, 2016●3 comments

As we grow in our engineering careers, we must continually add new tools to our collective tool kits. One favorite tool in my toolkit will be obvious to many experienced embedded software engineers. I still remember learning this approach early in my career via code written by colleague David Starling. The tool in question: 

Look up tables 

Look up tables simplify code and improve firmware maintenance. What is a look up table? A look up table is often nothing more complex than a...

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...

Linux Kernel Development - Part 1: Hello Kernel!

Denis Cavalli ● June 2, 2019●2 comments

Our very first program in every language or framework usually is the notorious "Hello World" program. For this Linux Kernel Modules Development introduction we will follow the same concept, but instead of the usual "Hello World" we will make a "Hello Kernel!" and you will understand the reason in a few moments. Note that in this article I will not focus on a deep explanation about this topic for the moment, since this is only the introduction.

But before we dive into code we need to have the...