Embedded Software

Not Tending to “The Build” – A Common Anti-Pattern

By Greg Williams | Published: May 17, 2013

The Build is an essential cog of any software project, but it is most often maintained by identified “experts.” This needs to stop. Agile depends on shared code ownership and understanding of the system — all parts of the system. Consequences of Ignoring the Build Most sufficiently-sized projects use a continuous integration system and some…

Also posted in Project Planning, Risk, Testing | Tagged c, embedded | Leave a comment

Wireless Communication Between Raspberry Pi and Your Computer

By Jordan Schaenzle | Published: April 22, 2013

Imagine for a moment that you want to develop a product that uses a Raspberry Pi. Let’s say that this product requires the ability to connect up to a wireless network. Maybe it’s a device that streams music from an online web-service, or maybe it hosts some type of webpage. This functionality should be easy to accomplish…

Also posted in Unix, Linux, and Bash | Tagged raspberry pi | 2 Comments

Adventures in Undefined Behavior

By Scott Vokes | Published: April 17, 2013

I recently had to write my own malloc. While replacing important bits of the C standard library would normally be serious over-engineering, it turned out to be the only option. The Backstory We had taken over an embedded project with known stability issues, and I quickly determined that thread race conditions were involved. After fixing…

Posted in Embedded Software | Tagged malloc | 2 Comments

Working with Custom Return Values in GoogleMock

By Jesse Hill | Published: April 16, 2013

When working with the GoogleMock C++ mocking library, you can get pretty far using only default expectation return values or explicitly specifying expectation return values. There are some additional options that can save you a lot of effort in some circumstances though. Let’s take a look at a few of them. Standard Values Consider an…

Also posted in Testing, Tools | Tagged googlemock, mocks | Leave a comment

Getting Accustomed to Embedded Development

By Mitchell Johnson | Published: April 4, 2013

I have a bachelor’s degree with majors in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering, and have a pretty solid base of theory for programming at pretty much any level of computing. Most of my professional experience to date has been working on either desktop software or web applications. As such, I relished an opportunity that…

Posted in Embedded Software | Tagged c | Leave a comment

Writing C on Raspberry Pi with Test-Driven Development

By Jordan Schaenzle | Published: March 20, 2013

The Raspberry Pi is a great product. Undeniably, it presents us tinkerers with unlimited possibilites to get our hands dirty writing custom programs and bringing the Pi to life. If you want to write a program to run on the Pi, you have a lot of languages to choose from. Being an embedded developer, I thought…

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heatshrink: An Embedded Data Compression Library

By Scott Vokes | Published: March 14, 2013

In embedded systems, space is always tight. Adding pennies of extra storage can be enough to kill a budget (when multiplied by hundreds of thousands or even millions of units), so available space has to be used effectively. For my current project, I need to fit a lot of data into 16 MB of flash:…

Also posted in Tools | Tagged compression | 13 Comments

Why Haskell Is Worth Learning

By Job Vranish | Published: March 5, 2013

When I recommend learning Haskell to the uninitiated, I often get asked: “Why Haskell?” “Is it a practical language?” and ”Is it something I can actually use?” My answer is definitely yes. Haskell isn’t my primary language at work (I mostly write C code for embedded systems), I’ve still found it incredibly useful. And even if…

Also posted in Languages, Tools | Tagged c, embedded, haskell | 13 Comments

Using UDP Broadcast Messages to Discover Local Clients

By John Van Enk | Published: February 17, 2013

On my current project, we have a group of networked devices that will be assigning their own IP address semi-randomly based on a serial number burned into the CPU. This leaves us with a problem: we need to be able to quickly determine who’s on the network. We’ve chosen to have each device listen on…

Posted in Embedded Software | 2 Comments

Bit-banding – An Elegant Approach to Setting & Clearing Bits

By Jordan Schaenzle | Published: February 8, 2013

I was recently working on an embedded project when the term Bit-banding came up. I had never heard this term before. I asked around to a handful of my coworkers, and they hadn’t heard of it either. The Problem with Read-Modify-Write Before I explain what Bit-Banding is, let me give a little bit of context….

Posted in Embedded Software | Tagged ARM, Bit-banding, CPU | Leave a comment