Your Career Archive
Background checks have turned routine hiring into a paperwork sprint, and many engineers find themselves scrambling for proof. This post shows how to build a practical career archive of job records, education documents, and tax/payroll forms, plus advice on redaction, storage formats, and backups. Capture verifiable details when you get them to avoid last-minute stress and make future vetting simple and reliable.
Painting with Light to Measure Time
When Jason Sachs needed to verify a first-order sigma-delta LED dimming implementation but had no oscilloscope, he turned to long-exposure "light painting" to turn time into space on a photograph. By sweeping the camera across blinking LEDs he captured pulse trains, read the bit patterns from the light trail, and confirmed the result with a tiny Python accumulator model. The post shares practical tips on timing accuracy, exposure, and avoiding ambient-light artifacts.
The DSP Online Conference - Right Around the Corner!
Three months after a forum post, Stephane Boucher and Jacob Beningo pulled together the DSP Online Conference, a two-day virtual event featuring 14 talks from leading DSP experts. Most sessions are 30 to 60 minutes with a 30-minute Zoom Q&A, while extended deep dives from speakers like fred harris are included. Registered attendees get one-year on-demand access, and free or reduced passes are available.
Review: Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers
Brian Amos's Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers delivers a practical path from bare-metal to full RTOS applications using FreeRTOS on an STM32 Nucleo-F767ZI board. The book combines clear explanations of concurrency, interrupts, and DMA with step-by-step toolchain setup and runnable examples that show building, debugging, monitoring, and scaling embedded systems for real projects and coursework.
Review: Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager
You don't need a PMP to manage effective engineering projects. Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, by Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood, distills PMBOK concepts into readable, lightweight procedures for people who end up coordinating work without formal training. The book emphasizes people-first behaviors, simple process groups, and concise documentation so engineers can manage risk, scope, and change without heavy bureaucracy.
Scorchers, Part 3: Bare-Metal Concurrency With Double-Buffering and the Revolving Fireplace
Jason Sachs presents a practical, low-overhead concurrency pattern for tiny bare-metal systems where an ISR (Speedy) must safely exchange data with a nonreal-time main loop (Poky). He describes the "revolving fireplace", a double-buffering variant that swaps ownership of two shared memory regions, and walks through C examples, atomic/volatile considerations, and testing strategies so you can implement it on RAM-constrained MCUs.
Absolute Beginner's Guide To Getting Started With Raspberry Pi
Getting started with Raspberry Pi can feel overwhelming. This guide strips the noise and shows the simplest path from unboxing to a working desktop. It recommends buying a preloaded NOOBS microSD to avoid imaging hassles, lists exact parts and suppliers, and walks through booting, recovery, and making a backup. If you want embedded electronics it also lists starter parts and ESD safety tips.
Make Hardware Great Again
US weakness in 5G and the coming AI race stems from a deeper problem, hardware decline and lack of CPU innovation. Jeff Brower argues that the software-only narrative has hollowed out semiconductor leadership, leaving only a few chipmakers and blocking vital R&D. He calls for targeted government action, funding for neural-net chips, and an industrial Hardhattan Project to rebuild CPU and hardware capabilities.
Tolerance Analysis
Jason Sachs walks through practical tolerance analysis by designing a 24V overvoltage detector from the ground up, combining resistor tolerances, temperature coefficients, reference and comparator errors, hysteresis, and dynamic RC behavior. He demonstrates worst-case stacking with real datasheet numbers, shows how solder and mechanical stress affect resistor choice, and sizes filtering so the comparator meets a microsecond-range trip requirement. The article is a hands-on guide full of worked examples and trade-offs for embedded hardware engineers.
The Self-Directed Virtual Internship
Summer internships may be gone, but your career momentum does not have to be. This post shows how to design a self-directed, unpaid virtual internship in embedded systems, with concrete options: project-based builds, tutorials, reports, or open-source contributions. Follow the one-page plan approach, treat it like a real remote job, and produce demonstrable deliverables to show employers.
C to C++: 3 Proven Techniques for Embedded Systems Transformation
Jacob Beningo lays out a pragmatic, low-risk path for embedded teams to start using C++ without adding bloat or runtime cost. He recommends beginning by treating C++ as a cleaner C with namespaces, constexpr, and smart pointers, then adopting object-oriented design with composition, and finally introducing templates for static polymorphism where it makes sense. The post focuses on practical guardrails for resource-constrained firmware.
Watchdog Timer Anti-patterns
A watchdog timer can be useless or even harmful when misused. This post catalogs the most common watchdog anti-patterns, including feeding the watchdog unconditionally from a timer ISR, suspending it during long operations, sprinkling resets across code, timeout auctions, incomplete reset trees, and treating process supervision as a substitute for hardware. It finishes with practical rules to design watchdogs that genuinely improve embedded system reliability.
One Clock Cycle Polynomial Math
Error correction codes and cryptographic computations are most easily performed working with GF(2^n)
C++ Assertion? Well Yes, But Actually No.
Assertions are a double-edged sword - on one side you enforce program correctness catching bugs close to their origin, on the other your application is subject to run-time error, like any interpreted language. This article explores what C++ can offer to get the advantages of assertions, without risking the crashes by moving contract checking at compile time.
Arduino robotics #3 - wiring, coding and a test run
Lonnie Honeycutt walks through wiring, coding, and the first test run of Clusterbot, a budget Arduino robot build costing about $50. The post provides a clear pin-mapping to the TB6612FNG motor driver, ready-to-upload Arduino movement functions, and practical tips like tinning thin battery wires. You also get PWM calibration values and the measured RPM timing the author used to make reliable turns.
C to C++: Bridging the Gap from C Structures to Classes
Jacob Beningo walks through a practical, beginner-friendly path from C structures to C++ classes for embedded systems, using an LED example to make the ideas concrete. You will see how function pointers in C approximate methods, how C++ structs and classes let you place methods with data, and how access specifiers and constructors improve encapsulation and initialization. This gives a low-risk way to start adopting C++ features.
Getting Started With Zephyr: Saving Data To Files
In this blog post, I show how to implement a Zephyr application to mount a microSD card, create a new file on the microSD card, and write data to it. The lessons learned from such an application can be helpful for devices out in the field that need to write data to off-board memory periodically, especially in cases where Internet access may be sporadic.
Call for Bloggers!
Are you passionate about embedded systems? Do you have valuable insights, tips, or stories to share with the embedded community? Do you want to reach a large and engaged audience of embedded enthusiasts and professionals? We are currently looking at adding a few more inspired writers to our team of bloggers.
Using a RTLSDR dongle to validate NRF905 configuration
Fabien Le Mentec wanted to be sure his nRF905 radio link was configured correctly before trusting it across seven floors. Instead of guessing, he used a cheap RTLSDR dongle, rtl_fm, and a small custom decoder to inspect the 433 MHz traffic directly. The result was a practical way to validate packet framing, Manchester coding, and signal strength without relying only on the radio module’s own feedback.
From Baremetal to RTOS: A review of scheduling techniques
Jacob Beningo walks through five common embedded scheduling techniques, showing how each scales from a single super loop to a full RTOS. He highlights practical trade-offs for round-robin, interrupt-driven, queued, cooperative, and RTOS approaches so you can spot when timing becomes fragile and when added complexity is justified. This primer sets up the next post on when to adopt an RTOS.
Margin Call: Fermi Problems, Highway Horrors, Black Swans, and Why You Should Worry About When You Should Worry
Jason Sachs walks through practical strategies for choosing engineering margin, from split-second Fermi estimates to industry-grade safety factors. He blends highway and boiler anecdotes with a MOSFET thermal example to show why probabilistic thinking, experiments, and documentation matter when you must decide fast or later justify your choices. Read this to learn how to balance conservatism, cost, and risk in real projects.
Going back to Germany!
A conference conversation turned into a return trip to Germany for Stephane Boucher, this time to visit SEGGER’s headquarters in Dusseldorf and produce videos. The post shares how a chance introduction at ESC Boston led to the invitation, and it teases coverage from SEGGER’s 25th anniversary celebration. He also invites local tips and customer questions before the trip.
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XIII: System Identification
Jason Sachs shows how the output of a linear feedback shift register can be used for active system identification, not just spread-spectrum testing. The article compares traditional sine-wave probing with LFSR-based PRBS methods, demonstrates a worked Ra-Rb-C example, and unpacks practical issues such as reflected pseudonoise, ADC quantization, sample counts, and noise-shaping tricks to improve estimates.
Project Directory Organization
A tidy project tree can make a bigger difference than you might think. Stephen Friederichs lays out a practical directory scheme for small software projects, using familiar folders like src, obj, bin, test, reports, docs, and conf to keep builds, tests, and documentation from turning into a mess. He also explains why the root directory should welcome contributors, not confuse them.
Live Streaming from Embedded World!
Stephane Boucher will bring Embedded World to engineers who cannot attend, streaming high-quality HD video from the show floor. He plans to use a professional camera and a device that bonds three internet links to keep the stream stable, and he is coordinating live sessions with vendors and select talks. Read on to learn how to vote for the presentations you want streamed.
Crowdfunding Articles?
Technical writers in the embedded world often have the expertise, but not always the time or incentive to turn it into a post. Stephane Boucher explores a crowdfunding model for technical articles, where readers would pledge small amounts to back promising abstracts before the writing begins. It is an interesting attempt to create more high quality EE content by paying authors upfront.
Wye Delta Tee Pi: Observations on Three-Terminal Networks
Three-terminal passive networks, wye, delta, tee, and pi, are more interchangeable than many engineers expect. Jason Sachs walks through Kennelly's wye-delta formulas, Z and Y matrix representations for tee and pi two-port networks, and worked examples ranging from balanced to highly skewed impedances. The post highlights practical payoffs, including using topology transforms to substitute hard-to-source capacitors with simpler, precision-friendly parts.
Coding Step 3 - High-Level Requirements
Stephen Friederichs turns the series toward embedded code by showing how to write a single high-level requirement for an embedded Hello World. He explains when requirements pay off, how they support testing and scope control, and why you should not write them for every small script. He then lays out five practical rules and applies them to a concrete EHW-001 serial transmission requirement.
2025 Embedded Online Conference: Your Guide to This Year's Schedule
Stephane Boucher lays out a clear day-by-day guide to the 2025 Embedded Online Conference, highlighting keynotes, live workshops, and new features. The post explains the new track-based group Q&A format moderated by Jacob Beningo, early release of sponsored talks on May 9, and an attendee-only Discord for networking and follow-ups. Use this guide to plan which sessions and panels to prioritize.
C to C++: 3 Proven Techniques for Embedded Systems Transformation
Jacob Beningo lays out a pragmatic, low-risk path for embedded teams to start using C++ without adding bloat or runtime cost. He recommends beginning by treating C++ as a cleaner C with namespaces, constexpr, and smart pointers, then adopting object-oriented design with composition, and finally introducing templates for static polymorphism where it makes sense. The post focuses on practical guardrails for resource-constrained firmware.
