Donald Knuth Is the Root of All Premature Optimization
Knuth's famous line "premature optimization is the root of all evil" has turned into a blunt rule on forums, Jason Sachs argues, and that overuse masks important nuance. He walks through concrete embedded examples, from dsPIC33E floating-point timings to an ROI analysis in the Kittens Game and a continuous optimization toy problem, to show when to measure, when to speculate, and why profilers can mislead.
Launch of Youtube Channel: My First Videos - Embedded World 2017
Stephane Boucher turned his Embedded World 2017 trip into a debut YouTube series of short booth highlight videos. He walks through the steep learning curve of trade-show filming, the specific gear he bought and rented to cope with low light and noise, and the practical mistakes he plans to fix. The post lists filmed vendors and asks readers for feedback to improve future episodes.
Intel 8088 - A blast from the past
The Intel 8088 is a reminder of how hands-on early microcomputer work really was. This short retrospective looks back at wire-wrapping, perfboard construction, and assembly language programming on a board built around the 8088 and its support chips. It is a fun contrast to today’s Raspberry Pi era, where far more performance comes in a sealed package you can’t build yourself.
Zebras Hate You For No Reason: Why Amdahl's Law is Misleading in a World of Cats (And Maybe in Ours Too)
Amdahl’s Law is a useful warning, but Jason Sachs argues it can be misleading if you stop at the equation. Using the Kittens Game as a playful model, he shows how Gustafson’s perspective, positive feedback loops, and system-level synergy can turn modest component speedups into big real-world wins. The article closes with concrete embedded-systems examples like ISR timing and developer productivity.
Favorite Tools: C++11 std::array
Firmware teams that avoid malloc or new need safer alternatives, and this post makes a strong case for C++11 std::array as that alternative. It highlights zero-overhead, type-safe, compile-time buffers and points to an ESP32 LED-strip demo where NUM_PIXELS_ fixes RAM usage at build time. Read it to see std::array used with std::rotate, passed to C libraries via data(), and as a low-risk path to std::vector later.
Who else is going to Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg?
Stephane Boucher is gearing up for Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg, and he wants the EmbeddedRelated community to help shape what he covers. He plans to roam the show floor, film standout demos, and report back on vendors and products that matter most to engineers who cannot attend. If you're going, he is also floating the idea of an informal meetup in Nuremberg.
My little runaway...
A runaway vehicle is a lot less fun when it tips, rolls, or crashes off the bench, so a simple stand can save both time and parts. In this short post, the author shows a homemade storage and work stand built from leftover wood for 1/10 scale and smaller vehicles, with an eye toward stability, portability, and easy disassembly.
The Other Kind of Bypass Capacitor
Most engineers treat bypass capacitors as supply decoupling, but Jason Sachs digs into the other kind: a capacitor placed in the feedback path to tame unpredictable high-frequency plant behavior. He walks through real examples, Bode plots, and a simple RC model to show how the cap forces unity-gain feedback at high frequency, stabilizing switching regulators and wideband amplifiers while revealing the speed versus stability tradeoff.
It ain't heavy, it's my robot...
For anyone building a man-portable unmanned ground vehicle this post collects practical design constraints and mission trade-offs engineers actually face. It summarizes weight and cost classes, locomotion options from throwables to wheeled skid-steers, sensor and camera requirements, power and battery strategies, communications range, and field-repair issues. Use it as a checklist to match platform choices to intended tasks and environments.
Unmanned Ground Vehicles - Design Considerations for Snow and Cold Environments
Winter conditions expose UGV weaknesses: snow, ice and extreme cold change traction, sensor performance, batteries and lubrication. This post walks through snow mechanics, ground-pressure tradeoffs for wheels versus tracks, and practical mitigations like heaters, insulation, sensor covers and low-temperature lubricants. If you design autonomous ground systems for cold climates, these engineering checks and referenced studies will help you avoid mission-ending failures.
Signal Processing Contest in Python (PREVIEW): The Worst Encoder in the World
Jason Sachs previews a hands-on Python contest to find the best velocity estimator for a noisy, low-cost quadrature encoder. The post explains the Estimator API, submission constraints, and a 5 second, 10 kHz evaluation harness that uses a simulated "Lucky Wheel" encoder with realistic manufacturing timing errors. Jason also includes a simple baseline estimator and discusses the practical tradeoff between noise reduction and phase lag in velocity estimation.
Polynomial Inverse
One of the important steps of computing point addition over elliptic curves is a division of two polynomials.
Getting Started With Zephyr: Writing Data to EEPROM
In this blog post, I show how to implement a Zephyr application to interact with EEPROM. I show how the Zephyr device driver model allows application writers to be free of the underlying implementation details. Unfortunately, the application didn't work as expected, and I'm still troubleshooting the cause.
A wireless door monitor based on the BANO framework
Fabien Le Mentec built a battery-powered wireless door monitor and a reusable node framework called BANO to monitor doors across seven floors without wired links. The post highlights BANO's 17-byte key,value protocol, the node runtime that enables wake-on-interrupt low-power operation, and practical RF choices like the NRF905 plus a 330 µF cap to handle coin-cell transmission peaks. It includes source, PCB, and base station notes.
How to test a Tesla?
Tesla’s autopilot system is moving from headlines to real roads, and that raises an immediate testing question. This short post revisits the UK legal angle and points to early driver reports covered by the Express, giving a quick snapshot of how people are starting to evaluate the system in practice.
More than just a pretty face - a good UI is essential
A user interface can make or break a device - determining its success in the marketplace. With careful design, the UI can make the product compelling and result in a high level of satisfaction from new and experienced users.
Linear Feedback Shift Registers for the Uninitiated, Part XI: Pseudorandom Number Generation
Jason Sachs breaks down when linear feedback shift registers make good pseudorandom sources and when they fail. He shows why LFSR output bits look very different from full-state integer samples, explains their two-valued autocorrelation and quasi-random behavior, and gives practical guidance on when an LFSR is acceptable for fast hardware bit generation and when you should use a proper PRNG instead.
Embedded Programming Video Course Shows How OOP Works Under the Hood
Want to see how OOP actually maps to machine level code? This free video course walks through encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism with hands-on comparisons between C and C++. You will inspect C implementations, compiler-generated code, and debug traces, and learn how encapsulation relates to RTOS concurrency. The polymorphism lesson reverses the usual order to expose runtime costs and previews implementing polymorphism in C.
How to Arduino - a video toolbox
Lonnie Honeycutt is kicking off a practical Arduino video series aimed at hobbyists who want the fastest, simplest way to get things working. The first few lessons cover the Arduino IDE, breadboards, a 16x2 LCD, servos, potentiometers, and analogRead. He also shares a behind-the-scenes look at his multi-camera filming setup and how it helps him focus on the project instead of the shot.
Use Microprogramming to Save Resources and Increase Functionality
Microprogramming can rescue an overfull FPGA, Michael Morris shows, by compressing control logic and time-multiplexing FIFO storage. He replaces an ABEL state machine with a small microprogram ROM that uses block RAM for deep Rx/Tx FIFOs and LUT RAM for pointers and counters, freeing about 25 percent of the device. The article includes Verilog comparisons, resource tables, and a microassembler link to reproduce the approach.
Mastering Modern FPGA Skills for Engineers
In the rapidly evolving tech industry, engineers must acquire proficiency in modern FPGA skills. These skills empower engineers to optimize designs, minimize resource usage, and efficiently address FPGA design challenges while ensuring functionality, security, and compliance.
Windows XP and Win32 - the Platform of the Future!
Victor Yurkovsky makes the contrarian case that an offline Windows XP VM running Win32 is the most practical platform for modern FPGA development. He explains how Xilinx ISE and related tools often behave far better under XP than on modern Linux distributions, and how VirtualBox fixes USB and GUI headaches. If you maintain FPGA toolchains or write compact C/C++ utilities, this retro setup can save time and frustration.
8 Weeks - 8 Giveaways!
Eight weeks, eight hardware and training prizes aimed at embedded engineers, from oscilloscopes to Tracealyzer licenses. Register for the 2021 Embedded Online Conference before each week's raffle date and you'll be automatically entered to win items like a Rigol scope, Saleae Logic Pro 8, Joulescope, RTOS workshops, and more. Use promo code ER90 to save $100 on registration through April. Practical prizes to boost your bench and skills.
Get Involved: Contribute Quiz Questions for the Embedded Systems Community for a Chance to Win a LAP-C Pro!
Submit a Quiz Question for a chance to win a Zeroplus Lac-C Pro!
What is Electronics
This article challenges the conventional circuit-theory view and defines electronics as the controlled flow of electromagnetic field energy in conducting structures. It argues that signals are manifestations of stored and moving energy in the space between conductors rather than energy residing primarily inside conductors, using transmission-line examples to illustrate how only a tiny fraction of electrons carry current while most energy occupies surrounding fields. The post contrasts Maxwell’s field-based perspective with lumped-circuit abstractions, explains wavefronts, reflections, and the exchange between electric and magnetic energy, and shows how those behaviors produce oscillation and signal issues. The practical conclusion is that PCB geometry, impedance control, and decoupling placement must be designed to provide smooth paths for field energy to minimize interference and support high-speed operation.
FPGA skills for the modern world
FPGA demand is booming across industries from automotive to edge AI, and employers want engineers who can think in hardware. This post explains the mindset shift to RTL-level, concurrent design, waveform-based debugging with ILAs, and modern verification flows. It also highlights the practical skills that make you marketable, including HDLs, SoC/Linux integration, RISC-V know-how, and high-speed design techniques.
Number Theory for Codes
If CRCs have felt like black magic, this post peels back the curtain with basic number theory and polynomial arithmetic over GF(2). It shows how fixed-width processor arithmetic becomes arithmetic in a finite field, how bit sequences are treated as polynomials, and why primitive polynomials generate every nonzero element. You also get practical insights on CRC implementation with byte tables and LFSRs.
Dumb Embedded System Mistakes: Running The Wrong Code
Running the wrong firmware on a board can waste hours. This post shows a practical marking strategy for embedded Linux that embeds searchable proof-of-life strings into kernel, rootfs, overlay, and application code. It walks through choosing early-boot log points, using compile-time timestamps, and a small shell script to set, find, and clear marks so you can verify builds before flashing.
Acceptance Tests vs. TDD
Writing the tests in a Jira ticket is not the same as doing TDD, this post explains why. It separates acceptance tests, which define business completeness and are written up-front by the customer, from TDD unit tests, which developers write incrementally as a design and feedback tool. Readable advice covers test speed, avoiding brittle tests, and how both test types fit into CI and maintainable embedded development.
One Clock Cycle Polynomial Math
Error correction codes and cryptographic computations are most easily performed working with GF(2^n)
