A Library for Driving NeoPixels with the ESP32 Micro Controller

The NeoPixel is a very cool little device. It combines three LEDs (red, green, and blue) with a specialized microprocessor, all in a package about the same size as a traditional LED. These smart LEDs open up a wide range of new project possibilities because they reduce the amount of circuitry and processor pins that would otherwise be necessary to drive an array of lights. Read more on A Library for Driving NeoPixels with the ESP32 Micro Controller…

Adding an OLED to Your Particle Device

Anyone who knows me very well could probably tell you that I’m a pretty big fan of Particle, a provider of hardware and software components for building internet-connected products (IoT). I love their product suite because they have abstracted the common functions of IoT products into easy-to-use components while still allowing access to all the nitty-gritty details for those of us who need to get down to that level. Read more on Adding an OLED to Your Particle Device…

A Simple Message Queue for C

Let’s face it, when you’re doing embedded development, you really don’t have a lot of great tools at your disposal. If you’re lucky, you might have a C99-compliant compiler and a microcontroller with floating-point hardware and DMA. If you’re unlucky you might have a microcontroller that doesn’t actually have a stack and a compiler that doesn’t support using structures as function arguments!

Get Started with XBee – A Beginner’s Tutorial

You may have heard the news: Atomic Object is moving to a new building later this summer. We’re excited about designing the new space. For my part, I found an opportunity to try out a technology that I have not worked with before, the wireless networking system XBee. Read more on Get Started with XBee – A Beginner’s Tutorial…

Using Rust in an Embedded Project: A Simple Example

I’ve written a few posts on using Rust for embedded projects:

I think they gave a decent overview of a couple of tricky parts, but as always, the devil is in the details. To help with all the gritty details, I’ve written up a more complete example. Read more on Using Rust in an Embedded Project: A Simple Example…

Rust Sysroots for Easier Embedded Projects

Rust now has usable support for Rust sysroots. This makes it must easier and useful to use cargo to build your embedded projects. You should be able to even use stable rust once 1.9 is out, but you will have to use a nightly for now.

Using Rust 1.8 Stable for Building Embedded Firmware

A lot of things have changed since I wrote my last blog post on using Rust to build embedded firmware.

Since Rust 1.6 was released, libcore is now stable, and nostd is now a stable feature. This means we can now build Rust libraries for our embedded firmware using the official stable version of the compiler!

Assembling Your Computer’s Brain, Byte by Byte

Computers are amazing machines. They can perform massive amounts of stuff every second, and they’re being put into everything around us to make the things we interact with on a day-to-day basis smarter and better.

This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that computers are astonishingly dumb. My favorite explanation of just how dumb computers are can be found in one of my favorite recorded talks, Richard Feynman’s lecture about computer heuristics. (Start around the 10-minute mark for the particularly relevant bit.)

One of the secrets to making these dumb machines do smart things is the way applications get loaded and executed within your OS. But have you ever thought about who loads the code that loads your code?
Read more on Assembling Your Computer’s Brain, Byte by Byte…

5 Steps to Getting Started with Embedded Programing

I’ve been getting asked the question, “So how would I get started with embedded development?” more and more often lately.

This is actually a really tricky question. It’s not like, “How would I get started with Haskell?” or “How would I get started with Rust?” Embedded development is such a weird and diverse thing that it’s almost like asking, “How do I get started with programming?” except in an alternate universe where 128k is still a lot of RAM. I’m not sure where to even begin.

Focus-Handling Methods for Qt Quick StackViews

On my current project, we’re building the GUI in Qt 5. It’s (mostly) open-source, has some really intriguing platform support, and Qt Quick 2 has a fairly advanced model for both keyboard focus and transitioning focus between widgets just with the keyboard.

When I started work on a spike to prove out some ideas I had about using a Qt Quick StackView to structure the navigation of our app, I still managed to run into some problems with transitioning focus between widgets. Read on for my solution. Read more on Focus-Handling Methods for Qt Quick StackViews…

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

Embedded Systems