Author: Scott Vokes

Property-Based Testing – Testing Assumptions You Don’t Know You’re Making

Finding good test input can be tricky. Even with loads of unit tests, bugs still get through. Consider a wear-leveling algorithm for flash memory — it takes a series of write operations and spreads them over the flash, because individual blocks can only be written and erased so many times before they wear out. If […]

Getting Started with MQTT

As more and more things around us become networked, the communication protocols tying them together need careful rethinking. This network of devices, sometimes called the “Internet of Things” or “Machine-to-Machine” network (though it could also just be called “the Internet”), includes many embedded devices with very limited resources. Protocols designed for typical ethernet networks, such […]

Lightweight Indexing for Small Strings

Lately, I have been investigating performance improvements for heatshrink, my data compression library for embedded systems. Since it may be processing sensor data in real-time, or compressing data as it transfers over a network, compression can directly impact overall throughput. After experiments with string search and indexing algorithms, I’ve settled on a particularly effective method, […]

Comparing the Cost of Different Multiple-return Techniques in C

C’s design limits functions to directly returning at most one value. Unfortunately, there are many cases where returning more than one makes sense — returning a data buffer and its size, returning either a success code and data requested or an error code, splitting a tree node into two, etc. Making returning multiple values awkward […]

Completing the Circuit: From Arduino to AVR Microcontrollers for Hobbyist Projects

The Arduino platform has a lot of advantages. It’s designed so that artists and hobbyists can do lots of cool stuff. There are plenty of tutorials for beginners, and the standard hardware means that incompatibilities won’t add extra confusion when learning microcontroller programming. Getting started is inexpensive — for $25ish, one can get a relatively […]

Knocking Out Bugs with greatest

I looked into various options for unit-testing C, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them. First, I looked at Unity. While its suite of tools work quite well, they depend on Ruby/rake/YAML, require creating a full project configuration, and take on many other responsibilities. I wanted a tool for testing embedded C, not a whole […]

A Field Guide to Lua Coroutines

Lua is a deceptively simple language. Its designers have done such a good job of keeping it downwardly scalable to simple uses that it’s easy to overlook the advanced parts. One of these is its polished implementation of coroutines. Why Coroutines Matter The combination of coroutines, tail-call optimization, and closures means that many sophisticated control […]