• What we've been reading in September (2024)

    by Gillian Minnehan

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

  • What we've been reading in August (2024)

    by Gillian Minnehan

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

  • How Memory Usage Patterns Can Derail Real-time Performance

    by Bert Schiettecatte

    In this article, we will learn how memory usage patterns can affect the real-time performance of an embedded application, drawing from a recent experience tracing an audio DSP application running on an embedded Linux platform. First, I will introduce the product in question and the real-time audio software I developed for it. Then, I’ll describe the issues I encountered with audio callbacks and the strategy I followed to determine the cause of the issues, ending with my solution and lessons learned.

  • Diving into JTAG — Security (Part 6)

    by Aliaksandr Kavalchuk

    The JTAG interface is an important tool for debugging and testing embedded systems, providing low-level access to the internal workings of microcontrollers and other integrated circuits. However, this powerful interface also presents significant security threats. In the sixth and final part of this Diving into JTAG article series, we will focus on security issues related to JTAG and the Debug Port.

  • What we've been reading in July (2024)

    by Gillian Minnehan

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

  • GitHub Actions for STM32CubeIDE

    by Noah Pendleton

    In this article, we will explore how to use GitHub Actions to automate building STM32CubeIDE projects. Eclipse-based IDEs like STM32CubeIDE are often used for developing embedded systems but can be a little tricky to build in a headless environment.

  • Considerations when Building Embedded Databases

    by Chris Merck

    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

    by Mark Schulte

    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.