Donald Knuth Is the Root of All Premature Optimization
This article is about something profound that a brilliant young professor at Stanford wrote nearly 45 years ago, and now we’re all stuck with it. TL;DR The idea, basically, is that even though optimization of computer software to execute...
Intel 8088 - A blast from the past
The Intel 8088 is an 8 bit processor related to the 16 bit 8086. The Microcomputer class consisted of wire-wrapping the chips to perfboard using sockets.I had taken computers apart, soldered, etc., but had never used wire-wrapping to construct a...
Zebras Hate You For No Reason: Why Amdahl's Law is Misleading in a World of Cats (And Maybe in Ours Too)
I’ve been wasting far too much of my free time lately on this stupid addicting game called the Kittens Game. It starts so innocently. You are a kitten in a catnip forest. Gather catnip. And you click on Gather catnip and off you go....
Favorite Tools: C++11 std::array
Many embedded software and firmware projects must be developed to high standards of reliability. To meet these reliability requirements, firmware project teams will consider many design tradeoffs. For example, an engineering team may avoid...
The Other Kind of Bypass Capacitor
●1 commentThere’s a type of bypass capacitor I’d like to talk about today. It’s not the usual power supply bypass capacitor, aka decoupling capacitor, which is used to provide local charge storage to an integrated circuit, so that the...
It ain't heavy, it's my robot...
Unmanned Ground Vehicles - Design considerations for man-portable/packable vehiclesA UGV is “a ground based mechanical device that can sense and interact with its environment.” (Carlson, How) A Field Robot is expected to work outdoors,...
Unmanned Ground Vehicles - Design Considerations for Snow and Cold Environments
It's that time of year when the white stuff falls from the sky across the US, and with it comes lower temperatures. These conditions must be taken into consideration when designing a vehicle for outdoor use. A few definitions from...
Vala applications on Embedded Linux: maybe a cleaver chice [part 1]
Vala is a sexy, open source, high level programming language that appeared in 2006, it counts with a modern typing system, is object oriented, compiled and statically typed, it has a almost identical syntax to C# and is maintained by GNOME. The...
How to Succeed in Motor Control: Olaus Magnus, Donald Rumsfeld, and YouTube
Almost four years ago, I had this insight — we were doing it wrong! Most of the application notes on motor control were about the core algorithms: various six-step or field-oriented control methods, with Park and Clarke transforms,...
Round Round Get Around: Why Fixed-Point Right-Shifts Are Just Fine
Today’s topic is rounding in embedded systems, or more specifically, why you don’t need to worry about it in many cases.One of the issues faced in computer arithmetic is that exact arithmetic requires an ever-increasing bit length to...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - Beginnings
●9 commentsWelcome to this Introduction to Microcontroller Programming tutorial series. If you are looking to learn the basics of embedded programming for microcontrollers (and a bit of embedded hardware design as well), I hope these tutorials will help you...
Analyzing the Linker Map file with a little help from the ELF and the DWARF
●4 commentsWhen you're writing firmware, there always comes a time when you need to check the resources consumed by your efforts - perhaps because you're running out of RAM or Flash or you want to optimize something. The map file generated by your linker is...
MSP430 Launchpad Tutorial - Part 2 - Interrupts and timers
●4 commentsWhat is an "interrupt"? It is a signal that informs our MCU that a certain event has happened, causing the interruption of the normal flow of the main program and the execution of an "interrupt routine", that handles the event and takes a...
How to Read a Power MOSFET Datasheet
●4 commentsOne of my pet peeves is when my fellow engineers misinterpret component datasheets. This happened a few times recently in separate instances, all involving power MOSFETs. So it’s time for me to get on my soapbox. Listen up! I was going to post...
MSP430 Launchpad Tutorial - Part 1 - Basics
●3 commentsTI's LaunchPad is a complete MSP430 development environment: all you have to do is download and install CCS IDE (login required), connect your G2231-ready LaunchPad to your computer with the included mini-usb cable, and you are ready to...
MSP430 LaunchPad Tutorial - Part 4 - UART Transmission
●3 commentsToday we are going to learn how to communicate using UART with the Launchpad. For this purpose I will replace the default microcontroller that comes with the board with the MSP430G2553. It is the most powerful device in the MSP430 Value Line and...
Thermistor signal conditioning: Dos and Don'ts, Tips and Tricks
●4 commentsIn an earlier blog entry, I mentioned this circuit for thermistor signal conditioning: It is worth a little more explanation on thermistor signal conditioning; it's something that's often done poorly, whereas it's among the easiest...
MSP430 LaunchPad Tutorial - Part 3 - ADC
●2 commentsIn this new episode of our journey into MSP430 I will explain the basics of Analog to Digital Conversion on the MSP430G2231.We will write a program that will read an ADC channel and will toggle some leds based on the result of the...
Adventures in Signal Processing with Python
●1 commentAuthor’s note: This article was originally called Adventures in Signal Processing with Python (MATLAB? We don’t need no stinkin' MATLAB!) — the allusion to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has been removed, in deference to being...
How to Estimate Encoder Velocity Without Making Stupid Mistakes: Part I
●3 commentsHere's a common problem: you have a quadrature encoder to measure the angular position of a motor, and you want to know both the position and the velocity. How do you do it? Some people do it poorly -- this article is how not to be one of...
