My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow: Arthur S., Arthur T., and the Soup Nazi
Warning: In the interest of maintaining a coherent stream of consciousness, I’m lowering the setting on my profanity filter for this post. Just wanted to let you know ahead of time. I’ve been a user of Stack Overflow since December of...
Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles
Articles in this series:Coding Step 0 - Development EnvironmentsCoding Step 1 - Hello World and MakefilesCoding Step 2 - Source ControlCoding Step 3 - High-Level RequirementsCoding Step 4 - DesignStep 0 discussed how to install GCC and...
Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part V: State Machines
●1 commentOther articles in this series: Part I: Idempotence Part II: Immutability Part III: Volatility Part IV: Singletons Part VI: Abstraction Oh, hell, this article just had to be about state machines, didn’t it? State machines! Those...
Coding - Step 0: Setting Up a Development Environment
●1 commentArticles in this series: Coding Step 0 - Development Environments Coding Step 1 - Hello World and Makefiles Coding Step 2- Source ControlCoding Step 3 - High-Level RequirementsCoding Step 4 - Design You can easily find a million articles...
Book Review: "Turing's Cathedral"
My library had Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson on its new acquisitions shelf, so I read it. I’d recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of computing. Turing’s Cathedral...
Important Programming Concepts (Even on Embedded Systems) Part I: Idempotence
●2 commentsThere are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of subtle concepts that contribute to high quality software design. Many of them are well-known, and can be found in books or the Internet. I’m going to highlight a few of the ones I think...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - 7-segment displays & Multiplexing
●1 comment[quicklinks] Doing the 7 Segment Shuffle The 7 segment display is ubiquitous in the modern world. Just about every digital clock, calculator and movie bomb has one. The treadmills at my gym have 6 or 7, each one displaying 3 or 4...
Using the C language to program the am335x PRU
Introduction Some weeks ago, I published an article on how we used the PRU to implement a power supply control loop having hard realtime constraints: http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/586.php Writing this kind of logic in assembly...
Musings on Publication — and Zero Sequence Modulation
Perhaps you don’t think about it, but in order for you to read these articles, someone has to do something. And I don’t just mean writing them. Stephane Boucher has set up this website so that it’s automatic, for the most part...
Lost Secrets of the H-Bridge, Part IV: DC Link Decoupling and Why Electrolytic Capacitors Are Not Enough
●3 commentsThose of you who read my earlier articles about H-bridges, and followed them closely, have noticed there's some unfinished business. Well, here it is. Just so you know, I've been nervous about writing the fourth (and hopefully final) part of this...
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....
Cortex-M Exception Handling (Part 2)
●1 commentThe 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...
From bare-metal to RTOS: 5 Reasons to use an RTOS
●1 commentDevelopers can come up with amazing and convoluted reasons to not use an RTOS. I have heard excuses ranging from they are too expensive (despite open source solutions) all the way to they aren’t efficient and use too much memory. In some...
Arduino robotics #1 - motor control
●2 commentsArduino 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....
Scorchers, Part 3: Bare-Metal Concurrency With Double-Buffering and the Revolving Fireplace
This is a short article about one technique for communicating between asynchronous processes on bare-metal embedded systems. Q: Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road? A: to To other side. get the — Jason Whittington There...
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...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - 7-segment displays & Multiplexing
●1 comment[quicklinks] Doing the 7 Segment Shuffle The 7 segment display is ubiquitous in the modern world. Just about every digital clock, calculator and movie bomb has one. The treadmills at my gym have 6 or 7, each one displaying 3 or 4...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - More On GPIO
●2 commentsNow that we have our LED Blinky program nailed down, it's time to look more closely at outputs, add button/switch inputs, and work with reading inputs and driving outputs based on those inputs. [quicklinks] It's ON - No, It's...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - More On Interrupts
[quicklinks] A Little More Detail About The Interrupt Mechanism It's time to look a little closer at what happens in an interrupt request and response. Again this is in general terms, and different microcontroller designs may do...
Using the C language to program the am335x PRU
Introduction Some weeks ago, I published an article on how we used the PRU to implement a power supply control loop having hard realtime constraints: http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/586.php Writing this kind of logic in assembly...
