The article is a good overview, but...]]> Wed, 09 Dec 2015 18:51:55 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/824.php Articles in this series:

• Coding Step 0 - Development Environments
• Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
• Coding Step 2 - Source Control
• Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
• Coding Step 4 - Design

The last article in this series discussed how to...]]> Wed, 25 Nov 2015 01:53:41 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/811.php CRCs are a very practical tool for embedded systems: you're likely to need to use one as part of a communications protocol or to verify the integrity of a program image before writing it to flash. But CRCs can be difficult to understand and tricky to implement. The first time I attempted to write CRC code from scratch I failed once. Then twice. Then...]]> Wed, 21 Oct 2015 02:00:21 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/803.php Articles in this series:

• Coding Step 0 - Development Environments
• Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
• Coding Step 2- Source Control
• Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
• Coding Step 4 - Design

If this series of articles has been light on one thing it's 'coding'. If it's been light on...]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2015 01:09:44 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/804.php 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...]]> Thu, 23 Jul 2015 12:45:22 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/784.php Articles in this series:

• Coding Step 0 - Development Environments
• Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
• Coding Step 2 - Source Control
• Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
• Coding Step 4 - Design

When I first started out in programming, version control was not an introductory topic. Not...]]> Thu, 07 May 2015 01:08:15 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/740.php Articles in this series:

• Coding Step 0 - Development Environments
• Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
• Coding Step 2 - Source Control
• Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
• Coding Step 4 - Design

Step 0 discussed how to install GCC and the make utility with the expectation of writing...]]> Wed, 11 Feb 2015 01:36:43 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/701.php Articles in this series:

• Coding Step 0 - Development Environments
• Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
• Coding Step 2 - Source Control
• Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
• Coding Step 4 - Design

You can easily find a million articles out there discussing compiler nuances,...]]> Tue, 25 Nov 2014 21:45:17 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/628.php 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...]]> Thu, 21 Aug 2014 01:50:24 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/614.php The key to effective communication is to say what you mean and avoid ambiguity.  Words and phrases with multiple meanings can confuse your audience and hinder communication. That’s why so many programmers prefer writing code to writing specifications: written human language introduces ambiguity and subsequently, confusion. Code only has one interpretation, period. This...]]> Mon, 07 Jul 2014 11:59:28 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/558.php I originate from an electrical engineering background and my first industry experience was in a large, staid defense contractor. Both of these experiences contributed to a significant lack of knowledge with regards to software development best practices. Electrical engineers often have a backwards view of software in general; large defense contractors have similar views of software and couple...]]> Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:38:32 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/543.php State machines are a great way to design software but they can be difficult to implement well.To illustrate this I’ll develop a simple state machine then increase the complexity to demonstrate some of the difficulties

We’ve all washed dishes before - it’s easy isn’t it? Scrub, rinse, dry, scrub, rinse dry. Scrub the dish until all of the gunk is off of it, rinse until the soap is off,...]]> Sat, 18 Jan 2014 22:37:22 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/491.php If you take a high-level view of software systems you might say that the overall goal of software is to generate outputs from inputs. It’s a gross simplification of a nuanced and complex field but the truth of the statement is unarguable: data goes in, is manipulated and then is spat out again.That’s what software does. The simplicity of the statement contributes to the joy of...]]> Sat, 05 Oct 2013 16:46:18 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/454.php 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...]]> Tue, 20 Aug 2013 01:45:43 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/174.php 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...]]> Tue, 21 May 2013 00:35:56 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/166.php 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...]]> Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:27:40 +0000 Stephen Friederichs https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/164.php In this article I’ll discuss one of the most basic debugging tools in an embedded system: the heartbeat LED.  Picture this: you’re developing your first program for a new microcontroller. You’ve written the code, configured the programmer, downloaded the HEX file and now... what Your program is running - isn’t it?

Truth is that it’s hard to tell with most embedded software....]]> Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:54 +0000 Stephen Friederichs