A New App Marketplace: Your Car

January is a great time to be a geek. Even better if you’re also a car geek, because January is the month of both CES and the North American International Auto Show. New technologies continue to permeate every corner of our lives, and the car has never been an exception. It’s fitting then, that these…

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Multidisciplinary Teams in Embedded Development

Most electronics companies are partitioned in groups like: electrical, mechanical, software, and a testing group. This is, of course, a logical arrangement. New engineers can learn from more experienced engineers, processes can be defined, crafted and debated among people that serve similar roles. The only drawback is that at certain stages of project development it…

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A Practical Example of TDD Working

I’d like to share a pretty good TDD experience I had recently with a moderately large embedded project (32bit about 130k). This example will show that TDD pays off big time even when you have an old project with only about 50% of its code covered with unit tests. I was tasked with taking out…

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Having Fun at GiveCamp

Friday night I participated in GiveCamp. This is an event in which developers and other volunteers have a chance to give back to the community by helping non-profit organizations accomplish their technical or social media objectives. As a professional embedded developer I knew I would be a little out of element. I noticed one of…

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I want to love Eclipse

In June I wrote a post about the need for more open source tools for embedded development. More and more I see Eclipse as the answer for an open source IDE for embedded developers. There are several emerging and converging factors that have been pulling in this direction.

Posted in Embedded Software, Tools | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

When is it OK to not TDD?

I came across this blog post about when not to follow TDD. The author in this post breaks development down into two modes. Experimentation and Focused mode. In Experimentation mode it’s ok to not do TDD. While I generally agree that TDD doesn’t make sense when you don’t know what your doing I think we have…

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Posted in Embedded Software, Risk, Testing | 4 Comments

In Defense of MISRA

Recently I was part of a conversation debating the value of sticking to MISRA guidelines for C development in automotive applications. First off I’d like to submit that the notion of following any particular guideline exactly and without exception is usually not a good idea. The particular rule I’d like to discuss is 17.4.(No more than…

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Posted in Embedded Software | 5 Comments

The Case for Open Source Embedded Development Tools

We love gcc. As embedded developers we also love IAR as a tool chain vendor. Their products are well known and produce quality code. Most importantly is the fact that IAR’s compiler and debugger/simulator can be used via the command line in batch mode. This allows it to play nicely with our open source testing…

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Posted in Embedded Software, Reviews, Tools | 3 Comments

Android Open Accessory Standard

So, there was a lot of interesting things announced this week at Google I/O, to say the least. One that I’m particularly interested in is the Open Accessory Standard (http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/google-announces-android-open-accessory-standard-arduino-based/) Basically your “Made for ipod” standard, but for android. Previously the android SDK did not provide any API for serial communication. There were ways of…

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Testing and Automating for Embedded Developers

For my first blog post with Atomic Embedded I wanted to muse about what test driven development (TDD ) is, as I see it, and what all the fuss is about. I’m going to present a few cases for the usefulness of TDD based on my own experience in industry. Hopefully some of the battle…

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