Spread the Word and Run a Chance to Win a Bundle of Goodies from Embedded World
EmbeddedRelated is turning Embedded World into a live-streaming experiment, and the more engineers help spread the word, the better the coverage could get. Stephane Boucher is asking readers to follow updates on Twitter and LinkedIn, where every like, share, or repost adds another chance to win a box of vendor goodies. The prize mix includes t-shirts, dev kits, gadgets, and plenty of pens.
Launch of EmbeddedRelated.tv
Stephane Boucher launches EmbeddedRelated.tv to host live broadcasts from Embedded World, starting next week. The site will show a constantly evolving schedule, a Live! tab to find ongoing streams, and ad-hoc demos added from the show floor. Expect schedule conflicts and small hiccups, and plan to refresh the page and join the forum thread for real-time updates and feedback.
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.
What to See at Embedded World 2019
Skip the overwhelm at Embedded World 2019, Stephane Boucher lays out a practical preview of what to see and how to prioritize your time. The post helps embedded engineers focus on demos, vendor booths, and sessions that matter without getting lost on the show floor. Read it to plan a short, efficient visit that maximizes technical takeaways and networking opportunities.
Embedded Programming Video Course Teaches RTOS
From basic foreground/background loops to priority-inheritance protocols, this free video course walks you through building and improving an RTOS step by step. Lessons cover manual context switching, round-robin and preemptive priority schedulers, efficient thread blocking, and synchronization primitives. The series finishes with a practical port to a professional RTOS in the QP/C ecosystem, showing semaphores, mutexes, and ways to prevent priority inversion.
The Hardest Bug I Never Solved
A single overlooked sentence in the STM32 datasheet turned intermittent startup resets into a major time-leach. Senior engineers chased DMA buffers and overflows for hours until Unni discovered the ISR vector table had been relocated to RAM with only 256 byte alignment while the MCU required 512 bytes. The misalignment caused interrupts to jump to the reset handler, and fixing the alignment stopped the reboot loop for good.
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.
The Least Interesting Circuit in the World
Jason Sachs pulls apart the humble power-on reset and shows why the common RC-and-Schmitt trick is the least interesting but most dangerous circuit in your design. He walks through voltage thresholds, brown-out reset behavior, and how slow or noisy Vdd ramps can let parts start in indeterminate states. Read this for practical rules on choosing supervisors, comparators, and reset pulse timing to ensure reliable embedded startup.
Servo Troubleshooting notes
Most noisy, jittery, or hot servos turn out to be mechanical or power issues, not mysterious failures. This short checklist lists common servo malfunctions, probable causes, and straightforward corrective actions, covering gear wear, potentiometer contamination, underpowered or overloaded servos, wiring and battery problems, and alignment faults. Keep it handy when troubleshooting hobby or small robotics servos to speed repairs and avoid further damage.
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XVIII: Primitive Polynomial Generation
Jason Sachs walks through how to find primitive polynomials for GF(2) LFSRs, moving from naive exhaustive checks to smarter synthetic constructions. The article compares sieve and constructive methods, shows practical optimizations like parity checks and companion-matrix updates, and demonstrates decimation plus Berlekamp-Massey to generate all primitives from one seed; it also teases a novel Falling Coyote Algorithm for additional speedups.
GNU Linker Scripts. Part 1. .data, .bss, and the Startup Contract
Before your first line of C code executes, your system must establish a vital memory contract. Discover how the GNU Linker manages the transition from power-on to a ready-to-run state by deconstructing the roles of .data and .bss sections. Learn how to map Virtual and Load Memory Addresses effectively and decode the startup routines that initialize your global variables. By mastering these fundamental linker script mechanics, you gain total control over your embedded application's memory layout and ensure your startup code performs reliably every time.
Embedded Toolbox: Programmer's Calculator
A tiny but powerful cross-platform tool, QCalc evaluates full C-syntax expressions so you can paste results straight into firmware. It handles bitwise ops, mixed hex/decimal/binary constants, and scientific math, and it automatically shows integer results in formatted hex and binary. The post explains key features, variable handling, error messages, and how to run qcalc.tcl with the wish Tk interpreter.
Python Code from My Articles Now Online in IPython Notebooks
Jason M. Sachs has published the Python code from his EmbeddedRelated articles as standalone IPython notebooks. He automated extraction of example code and pushed the notebooks to a public Bitbucket repository under the Apache license, and they are viewable via nbviewer. The post lists available notebooks and asks readers to link back to EmbeddedRelated and share feedback on how they used the code.
DSPRelated and EmbeddedRelated now on Facebook & I will be at EE Live!
Stephane Boucher announces two practical updates for DSPRelated readers. He launched Facebook pages for DSPRelated and EmbeddedRelated so members can get faster updates, and he will be attending EE Live in San Jose from March 30 to April 3 with a $100-off promo code for early registration. He also asks the community for ideas on how to make his conference coverage most useful.
How to Estimate Encoder Velocity Without Making Stupid Mistakes: Part I
Encoder velocity estimation is easy to get wrong, and Jason Sachs walks through the traps engineers fall into. He demolishes the common advice to time between encoder edges, shows how encoder quantization and state-width errors break that approach, and argues for fixed-rate sampling with sensible filtering for most control uses. Part II will cover more advanced estimators for higher performance needs.
AI at the Edge - Can I run a neural network in a resource-constrained device?
AI at the edge is no longer science fiction, it can run on tiny, resource-constrained devices like Arm Cortex-M4 and M7 microcontrollers. This post introduces inference-only neural networks on MCUs, explains why edge AI matters for power, latency, and privacy, and points to practical toolchains such as STM32Cube.AI, Arm NN, and AWS Greengrass to get started quickly.
Choosing a Microcontroller for Your Vehicle
Picking the right microcontroller can make or break an autonomous vehicle project, and this post gives a practical checklist to help. It walks through voltage and power needs, memory and IO planning, cost and availability tradeoffs, and when to step up from an 8-bit MCU to a 32-bit controller or single-board computer. Real-world board examples illustrate the choices.
Using GPIO in (Apache) NuttX RTOS
Blinking an LED is the embedded Hello World, and this tutorial walks through using GPIOs on NuttX running on a Raspberry Pi Pico. It shows how to enable the GPIO driver and example in menuconfig, build and flash the nuttx.uf2, and use NSH gpio device files to read and write pins. The post also explains polling versus interrupt-driven inputs and the pull-up/edge setup needed for button interrupts.
A Wish for Things That Work
Jason Sachs revisits his long-running gripe with poor user interfaces, cataloguing annoyances from his Toyota Prius dashboard to desktop apps and browsers. He mixes sharp, real-world examples with a short, practical wishlist for 2018 aimed at making embedded displays, update behavior, security cues, and developer tools noticeably less frustrating for engineers and end users alike.
Moulding the Embedded Systems Engineers of Tomorrow: Adapting to a Constantly Transforming Technological Terrain
Embedded systems engineers, previously focused on device architecture, are now steering the digital era, encompassing firmware, software, complex silicon, and cloud computing. To keep pace, mastery in new areas like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud technologies is critical. In today's highly connected world, security is foundational to design, necessitating knowledge in encryption, secure coding, and data protection laws. Additionally, expertise in AI and ML is essential for managing vast global data, requiring understanding of ethical implications and effective system design for data analysis. The advent of cloud technology mandates learning about cloud architectures and data security. In this fast-paced field, continuous learning and adapting these new skills is the key to staying relevant and spearheading future advancements.
StrangeCPU #4. Microcode
Victor Yurkovsky shows how a sliding-window opcode scheme turns tiny 8–9 bit tokens into wide microinstructions on an FPGA, letting you pack rich behavior into compact code. The post explains visibility ranges, instruction-data representation, and a low-cost way to add a Red-program counter so runs of microcode execute efficiently with minimal hardware overhead.
Short Takes (EE Shanty): What shall we do with a zero-ohm resistor?
When you need flexibility on a PCB, zero-ohm resistors are the obvious shortcut, but Jason M. Sachs shows why the label zero is misleading. He compares common SMT jumper specs, high-current specialty parts, and a practical workaround using 1 milliohm resistors to avoid voltage drop. Read this for a quick checklist to pick jumpers that actually carry your board's current.
Ancient History
Technology moves fast, and the tools, platforms, and assumptions you rely on can become outdated almost overnight. In this reflective post, the author contrasts the rapid evolution of embedded development with the much slower pace of social change, from programming turnaround times to the underrepresentation of women in engineering. It is a reminder to keep learning, but also to think about how we work and who gets included.
Developing software for a safety-related embedded system for the first time
Developing a safety-related embedded product is not the same as writing ordinary firmware, and this article lays out eight practical steps to get you started. Using a washing-machine controller as a running example, it covers scoping, key requirements, hazard analysis, applicable standards, platform and MCU choices, runtime monitoring, and prototyping. The checklist helps teams prepare for verification, testing, and later certification work.
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.
Modern Embedded Systems Programming: Beyond the RTOS
Blocking-based RTOS tasks make embedded systems brittle and hard to extend, this post argues, and presents a practical alternative: active objects organized as message pumps. It explains why one-blocking-call tasks and nonblocking event handlers improve responsiveness and reduce task proliferation, and recommends using frameworks plus hierarchical state machines and UML to enforce good architecture and make designs scalable.
Simple Automated Log Processing
You don't need heavy tools to make sense of megabytes of embedded logs. This post shows a practical bash script that trims noisy serial and semihosting output, samples hourly heap-profile lines, and converts them into a CSV ready for graphing. It gives a simple, adaptable pattern you can reuse to spot memory leaks or triage recurring log signatures quickly.
You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 3)
In this third article I'll share with you a few cooperative schedulers (with a mix of both free and commercial licenses) that implement a few of the OS primitives that the "Superduperloop" is currently missing, possibly giving you a ready-to-go solution for your system. On the other hand, I don't think it's all that hard to add thread flags, binary and counting semaphores, event flags, mailboxes/queues, a simple Observer pattern, and something I call a "marquee" to the "Superduperloop"; I'll show you how to do that in the second half of this article and the next. Although it will take a little more work than just using one of the projects above, it will give you the maximum amount of control over your system and it will let you write tasks in ways you could only dream of using an RTOS or other off-the-shelf system.
UML Statechart tip: Handling errors when entering a state
Handling synchronous failures during state entry is trickier than the UML spec implies, because UML forbids transitions inside entry actions. This post compares three practical firmware patterns: explicit guarded transitions, self-posting a failure event to a LIFO queue, and converting the operation into an asynchronous service. It lays out benefits, downsides, and when each approach is appropriate for small teams, mid-sized projects, or larger firmware efforts.
Supply Chain Games: What Have We Learned From the Great Semiconductor Shortage of 2021? (Part 1)
Jason Sachs argues the 2021 semiconductor shortage was not a single surprise but a set of structural imbalances exposed by COVID-19. He connects long lead times, constrained 200mm fabs and mature-node economics to why automotive features like heated seats became scarce, and shows how bullwhip dynamics and inventory practices amplified the problem. This first part uses concrete anecdotes and simple games to make the supply-chain lessons tangible.
