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

What have you been reading? Share in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

Articles & Learning

• LILYGO T-Halow | CNX Software
  Low cost WiFi HaLoW development board. I haven’t seen a lot of adoption of the WiFi HaLoW (802.11ah) standard yet, but it’s a really interesting connectivity standard, and I’m excited to see it grow! — Noah

• Reverse Engineering a Smartwatch | Benjamen Lim
  Reverse engineering device firmware is always fun to read about. The manufacturer shipped without read/write protection of the firmware and with a programming interface enabled to allow for this. — Heiko

• Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor | Ken Shirriff
  An in-depth look at the basic building blocks of CPUs, standard cells! This article explains in detail the standard cells used to build various components of an Intel Pentium CPU. — Eric

• Understanding orphan sections | MaskRay
  Nice article explaining a pretty obscure linker warning. — Noah

• Best practices in firmware | M0AGX / LB9MG
  This is a great article on development practices and lifehacks that apply uniquely to firmware. — François

• Introduction to Memory Management in Linux | The Linux Foundation YouTube
  An introduction to MMUs and Linux from a talk at Embedded Linux Conference 2017. Great overview on how the kernel stitches user memory, kernel memory (logical and virtual), and swap memory. — Eric

• USB PD on the CH32V003 | eeucalyptus
  Bit-banging USB PD on a $0.10 microcontroller. — Noah

• Build an image and perform updates with RAUC on Rockchip | Konsulko Group
  Pretty cool tutorial that uses RAUC + Yocto to create an updatable Linux system on the Rock Pi 4 single board computer. — Pat

• Beating the compiler | Matt Keeter
  I might be biased because I’m staring at assembly, but this is a really well-written post about hand-tuning an interpreter in assembly and beating the compiler. — Eric

• Memory mapping an FPGA from an STM32 | Andrew Zonenberg
  Fascinating write-up of an open-source FPGA+STM32 system. — Noah

• The Elegance of the ASCII Table | Dan Q
  A historical look at the ASCII table! — Eric

Projects & Tools

• Some useful tools for binary formats | LWN.net
  A selection of tools that could come in handy when working with various binary data formats. — François

• The EM language is dead, long live EM !!! | Blogging Zig•EM
  Zig + EM (Embedded programming language) — Matheus Catarino França

• Announcing Zephyr 3.7: New Long-Term Support Release of Zephyr RTOS | Zephyr Blog
  Zephyr released a new LTS with version 3.7.

• Beginning of Rust support in Zephyr by d3zd3z | zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr
  This package implements the bare minimum support needed to build a simple Zephyr application written in Rust.

News & Announcements

• The end of Mbed marks a new beginning for Arduino | Arduino Blog
  Big deal: Arduino moving from Mbed to Zephyr. — François

• 2024 Developer Survey | Stack Overflow
  Biased towards web, but there are still some interesting statistics for embedded developers. — IzidorM

• Olympics Officials Work to Prevent Motor Doping in Cycling | IEEE Spectrum
  At the Paris games, cyclists have their bikes tested for hidden motors.

Community Conversations

• LinkedIn Discussion — “What resources would you recommend for embedded software?”
  Check out the community’s recommendations for embedded software resources and add your own.