Tag: best-practices

  • Understanding Battery Performance of IoT Devices

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, I’ll cover how to start thinking about collecting metrics that contribute to battery life, how to dig into this data for individual devices, and finally how to aggregate all metrics from devices in the field to accurately predict the battery life of devices in the field for a given firmware release. All of these abilities will help projects optimize battery life and combat issues quickly when they arise, whether you have ten or a million devices in the field.

  • Proper Release Versioning Goes a Long Way

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this article, we are going to talk through all the various pieces of metadata to be included in your firmware binaries, debug symbols, and build artifacts so that developers and machines can quickly and easily know exactly which build is which and how to fetch associated files for the debug, test, and release pipeline.

  • Defensive Programming - Friend or Foe?

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this article, we’ll dive into what defensive and offensive programming are, where defensive programming falls short, how developers should think about using them within embedded systems, and how the techniques of offensive programming can surface bugs and help developers root cause them immediately at runtime.

  • Building a Tiny CLI Shell for Tiny Firmware

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, we go over why an embedded firmware should include a command-line shell interface, common use cases for it, how to build and extend one, and cover common issues that developers run into while build and maintaining one. The shell we will build will work over a UART serial port, which should make it applicable to most embedded systems.

  • Reproducible Firmware Builds

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article we will discuss what a Reproducible Build is, walk through the process of updating a firmware project so the build is reproducible, and explore how we can leverage what we have learned for other aspects of development.

  • Building Better Firmware with Continuous Integration

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, we introduce Continuous Integration as a modern technique to allow larger teams to move fast without breaking things. We’ll explain what Continuous Integration is, why you may want to use it, and walk you through setting up CircleCI on a firmware project step by step.

  • GNU Build IDs for Firmware

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, we demonstrate how to use the GNU Build ID to uniquely identify a build. We explain what the GNU build ID is, how it is enabled, and how it is used in a firmware context.