3 Tips for Developing Embedded Systems with AI
Explore how to leverage AI in developing embedded systems with three practical tips, learn why documenting your workflows, supercharging testing and debugging, and adopting AI-assisted code generation can save time, reduce errors, and boost performance in your projects, and discover actionable insights to streamline development in resource-constrained environments, this blog explains how to prepare for AI integration while keeping the expertise of experienced engineers intact, offering real-world examples that show how even incremental AI adoption can revolutionize your development process, whether you’re new to AI or seeking to enhance existing practices, these strategies provide a clear roadmap to build smarter, more efficient embedded systems using AI.
Bit-Banged Async Serial Output And Disciplined Engineering
This post covers implementing asynchronous serial output directly on a GPIO with bit-banging. This can be a valuable debug tool for getting information out of a system. It also covers disciplined engineering, using the bit-banging module as an example and template you can apply to other projects.
The Other Kind of Bypass Capacitor
There’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...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XVI: Reed-Solomon Error Correction
Getting Started With Zephyr: Devicetree Bndings
This blog post shines some light on how devicetrees are used in The Zephyr Project. Specifically, we understand the mechanisms that enable us to use nodes in the devicetree in the C source files. We use a sample provided in the Zephyr repository itself and work our way through portions of the Zephyr codebase to get insight into the mechanisms that make this possible.
Zephyr: West Manifest For Application Development
In this blog post, I show a simpler way to create custom West manifest files. This technique eliminates the need to duplicate the complex West manifest from upstream Zephyr. I also show how we can use the West manifest to include out-of-tree board and SoC definitions, and include our own out-of-tree drivers.
Getting Started With Embedded Linux - From Nothing To A Login Prompt
One of the famous observations that have been made related to embedded systems is referred to as “Moore’s Law”, which states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every year. This observation has held mostly true...
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part VII: LFSR Implementations, Idiomatic C, and Compiler Explorer
The last four articles were on algorithms used to compute with finite fields and shift registers: multiplicative inverse discrete logarithm determining characteristic polynomial from the LFSR output Today we’re going to come back...
You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 2)
In this second article, we'll tweak the simple superloop in three critical ways that will improve it's worst-case response time (WCRT) to be nearly as good as a preemptive RTOS ("real-time operating system"). We'll do this by adding task priorities, interrupts, and finite state machines. Additionally, we'll discuss how to incorporate a sleep mode when there's no work to be done and I'll also share with you a different variation on the superloop that can help schedule even the toughest of task sets.
Unuglify C++ FSM with DSL
Domain Specific Languages (DSL) are an effective way to avoid boilerplate or repetitive code. Using DSLs lets the programmer focus on the problem domain, rather than the mechanisms used to solve it. Here I show how to design and implement a DSL using the C++ preprocessor, using the FSM library, and the examples I presented in my previous articles.
Turn It On Again: Modeling Power MOSFET Turn-On Dependence on Source Inductance
This is a short article explaining how to analyze part of the behavior of a power MOSFET during turn-on, and how it is influenced by the parasitic inductance at the source terminal. The brief qualitative reason that source inductance is undesirable is that it uses up voltage when current starts increasing during turn-on (remember, V = L dI/dt), voltage that would otherwise be available to turn the transistor on faster. But I want to show a quantitative approximation to understand the impact of additional source inductance, and I want to compare it to the effects of extra inductance at the gate or drain.
A design non-methodology
Although writing an RTOS or kernel may be an interesting project, it is unlikely to be a wise course of action.
Working with Microchip PIC 8-bit GPIO
The third in a series of five posts looks at GPIO with PIC 8-bit microcontrollers. After a detailed review of the registers for configuring and managing GPIO on the PIC18F47Q10 processor, a basic application is stood up programming those registers to blink external LEDs at 0.5Hz.
Blinkenlights 2.0
Nothing spells old movie computers like a panel of randomly blinking lights, but in fact, these so-called "blinkenlights" can be valuable indicators - especially in embedded systems where the user interface must be minimal, small and cheap. Control of these lights can be achieved using a very simple, real-time interpreted script, and this kind of solution may be extended to other and more complex embedded tasks.
The volatile keyword
Although the C keyword volatile is very useful in embedded applications, care is needed to use it correctly and vigilance is required to ensure its correct implementation by compilers.
When a Mongoose met a MicroPython
This is more a framework than an actual application, with it you can integrate MicroPython and Cesanta's Mongoose.
Mongoose runs when called by MicroPython and is able to run Python functions as callbacks for the events you decide in your event handler. The code is completely written in C, except for the example Python callback functions, of course. To try it, you can just build this example on a Linux machine, and, with just a small tweak, you can also run it on any ESP32 board.
Tenderfoot: Embedded Software and Firmware Specialties
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...
Six Software Design Tools
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...
Definite Article: Notes on Traceability
Electronic component distibutor Digi-Key recently announced part tracing for surface-mount components purchased in cut-tape form. This is a big deal, and it’s a feature that is a good example of traceability. Some thing or process that has...
Understanding and Preventing Overflow (I Had Too Much to Add Last Night)
Happy Thanksgiving! Maybe the memory of eating too much turkey is fresh in your mind. If so, this would be a good time to talk about overflow. In the world of floating-point arithmetic, overflow is possible but not particularly common. You can...
Analyzing the Linker Map file with a little help from the ELF and the DWARF
When 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...
Choosing a Microcontroller for Your Vehicle
There are many things to take into consideration when choosing a microcontroller or microprocessor for your autonomous vehicle.VoltageSome processors run on 5V and others use 3.3V. Be sure to check the documentation before you buy. ...
Introduction to Microcontrollers - More On GPIO
Now 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...
How to Read a Power MOSFET Datasheet
One 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...
Analog-to-Digital Confusion: Pitfalls of Driving an ADC
Imagine the following scenario:You're a successful engineer (sounds nice, doesn't it!) working on a project with three or four circuit boards. More than even you can handle, so you give one of them over to your coworker Wayne to design....
Coroutines in one page of C
A coroutine is a function that you can jump back into after returning from it - and it remembers where it was in the code, and all the variables. This is very useful at times. One use is generating a sequence of values. Here's how you can...
