Interrupt

Considerations when Building Embedded Databases

Persisting to flash is a necessary evil for many embedded devices. Let’s take a look at some of the pitfalls and how they may be avoided.

A Schematic Review Checklist for Firmware Engineers

Schematic reviews are a part of the hardware development cycle in many if not most, hardware development companies. Typically led by the electrical engineering team, it is easy to overlook design issues that will be important to the firmware team. This post tells of a few stories of design misses that I have made and puts some common lessons learned into a checklist for other firmware engineers. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a starting point for a firmware engineer to build their own checklist with the goal of helping teams catch software/hardware interaction bugs earlier in the design cycle when they’re cheaper to fix.

What we've been reading in June (2024)

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this June.

Updating NVIDIA Jetson devices with Memfault OTA

NVIDIA offers one of the most comprehensive SDKs for developers of AI-heavy products. It includes a development kit that can emulate other devices in the lineup (Jetson AGX Orin DK), a simpler development kit for “entry-level” products (Jetson Orin Nano DK), a ton of exciting software libraries, AI models and even more examples of how to use them. It’s truly outstanding and out of the box shows up as a Ubuntu workstation which will feel very familiar.

However, it can be a bit daunting to figure out how to take this workstation experience and turn it into a headless unit that you can ship to customers far away and update remotely.

Diving into JTAG — Usage Scenarios (Part 5)

In previous articles, we have considered the primary uses of JTAG, including debugging and testing boards in production. For firmware developers, the first - debugging - is the most common. In this article, I want to look at two uses of JTAG Boundary Scan, which are also common tasks for a firmware developer: board bring-up and reverse engineering.

What we've been reading in May (2024)

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this May.

Practical Zephyr - West workspaces (Part 6)

In the previous articles, we used freestanding applications and relied on a global Zephyr installation. In this article, we’ll see how we can use West to resolve global dependencies by using workspace applications. We first explore West without even including Zephyr and then recreate the modified Blinky application from the previous article in a West workspace.

Embedded Open Source Summit 2024 Recap

We cover the talks I was able to see in person, as well as some talks seen by my colleagues since they were posted. Obviously this is just our little biased selection, we have not been able to see everything, let us know in the comments what we missed!