Monte Carlo Integration
Suppose we want to measure the area of a circle. Yeah, yeah, you already know this, it’s \( \pi r^2 \), but let’s say we want to measure a circle of radius 1 with something called Monte Carlo integration:
- We generate pairs \( (x,y) \) where \( x \) and \( y \) are independent and uniformly distributed between 0 and 1.
- We count the fraction of pairs \( (x,y) \) that are inside our circle, by testing each one: the point \( (x,y) \) is inside the circle if \( x^2 + y^2 < 1...
Can an RTOS be really real-time?
Real-Time Operating Systems are meant for real-time applications. But with conventional shared-state concurrency and blocking, can you honestly know the worst-case execution time of an RTOS thread?
Always-On Intelligence Without the Cloud: Why it matters more than you think
Much of the AI conversation today is still focused on scale: larger models, more data, more compute. Embedded systems live in a different reality, where constraints are unavoidable, and efficiency is the priority. What’s emerging is not a smaller version of cloud AI, but a different approach altogether, the one that values locality, predictability, resilience, and trust. Always-on intelligence without the cloud isn’t just a technical milestone. It’s a change in how we think about where intelligence belongs.
Designing for Humans: Viewing DFM and Industrialization Through the Lens of the Fitts MABA–MABA List
"Operator’s fault" and "Inadequate Training" are the phrases you typically hear when yield loss and stubborn manufacturing issues are discussed. While these factors may play a role, they rarely tell the whole story. This article views DFM and industrialization through the lens of a classic human factors principle; the Fitts MABA-MABA list, and highlights a critical, yet less-discussed factor: the lack of manufacturing-focused human factors considerations in product design. It explores practical examples like Proprioceptive Fatigue and Visual SNR, and shows how lots of chronic manufacturing issues are results of bad upstream design decisions, echoing the fact that in many cases, inspection exists not because it is inherently valuable, but because the design failed to encode correctness directly into the product or process. If you’ve ever wondered why "retraining" never seems to fix a recurring defect, this take on industrialization and manufacturing might explain why.
Stuck with Jira — and Stuckons
Jason Sachs vents about Jira’s quirks and why it still feels stuck despite years of fixes. He walks through concrete pain points: nonstandard markup, relentless notification noise, poor meta-task support, and limited analytics that make day-to-day engineering work harder. To explain why schedules blow up, he introduces a simple kepton model of planons, workons, and stuckons that highlights unexpected work.
Project Log: Pixelblaze Christmas Lights
Festive fun and the hacker spirit combine in my janky attempt to adorn my house with addressable LEDs! In this post, I show you how I used a Pixelblaze and a cheap strip of WS2811 RGB LEDs (and not a little bit of hot glue and paper clips) to make a super cool set of Christmas lights.
Baking in Process Improvements
Jason Sachs uses a backyard cookie-baking session with his niece to illustrate practical process improvements engineers can apply. He documents batch-by-batch tweaks — temperature, dough placement, and a pipelined scooping step — that raised throughput and improved quality, then connects the lesson to pilot projects and small automations like a Python script for JIRA. The piece makes the case for quick experiments and a culture that rewards refinement.
Getting Started With Zephyr: DTS vs DTSI vs Overlays
Devicetrees can be daunting for traditional embedded software engineers that are new to Zephyr. In this blog post, I address these fears and show how navigating Devicetrees can be much easier if you understand that they represent the layered structure of the underlying hardware.
Breaking AES with an Oscilloscope
AES is a powerful encryption algorithm that protects some our most important secrets. But did you know that many devices are inadvertently leaking the value of their private key through their power pins?! Join me in this special preview of my upcoming workshop at the Embedded Systems Summit (14-16 October 2025 in San Jose, CA) as we explore the world of hardware security and discover just how easy it could be to break AES encryption with only an oscilloscope and some math.
Why Containers Are the Cheat Code for Embedded DevOps
Embedded software teams have long accepted toolchain setup as “part of the job,” but it’s a hidden productivity killer. Manual installs waste days, slow onboarding, and derail CI pipelines with “works on my machine” issues. While enterprise software solved this years ago with containerization, many embedded teams are still stuck replicating fragile environments. Containers offer a proven fix: a portable, reproducible build environment that works identically on laptops and CI servers. No brittle scripts, mismatched versions, or wasted time—just code that builds. IAR has gone further by delivering pre-built, performance-tuned Docker images for Arm, RISC-V, and Renesas architectures, ready for GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines. For regulated industries, containers simplify audits and compliance by enabling validation once and reuse everywhere. The result: faster onboarding, consistent builds, and stronger safety assurance. Containers aren’t a luxury—they’re the cheat code embedded teams need to modernize DevOps and compete effectively.
Chebyshev Approximation and How It Can Help You Save Money, Win Friends, and Influence People
Are expensive math libraries or huge lookup tables eating CPU and flash on your microcontroller? In this practical guide Jason Sachs shows how Chebyshev polynomial approximation (with range reduction, splitting, and small interpolated tables) can give near-minimax accuracy while using far less code and runtime. The post compares Taylor series, plain and interpolated tables, and explains how to fit empirical sensor data and evaluate coefficients efficiently.
Lost Secrets of the H-Bridge, Part V: Gate Drives for Dummies
Learn the most important issues in power MOSFET and IGBT gate drives: - Transistor behavior during switching - Calculating turn-on and turn-off times - Passive components used between gate drive IC and transistor - Reverse recovery - Capacitively-coupled spurious turn-on - Factors that influence a good choice of turn-on and turn-off times - Gate drive supply voltage management - Bootstrap gate drives - Design issues impacting reliability
In TCL FPGA Wizards Trust
In TCL FPGA wizards trust. The best way to learn TCL is exposure therapy which we will be doing here using two examples: One for creation of a project with synthesis and implementation steps and another for simulation.
Supply Chain Games: What Have We Learned From the Great Semiconductor Shortage of 2021? (Part 2)
Jason Sachs zooms through semiconductor history, fab economics, and the microcomputer era to explain why the 2021 chip shortage unfolded the way it did. He blends technical explainers on photolithography, yields, and node migration with business lessons about risky multi-year fab investments and cyclic demand. Engineers get historical case studies and practical signals to watch when designing products for greater supply resilience.
Supply Chain Games: What Have We Learned From the Great Semiconductor Shortage of 2021? (Part 3)
Jason Sachs pulls back the curtain on Moore's Law and the foundry business to explain why the semiconductor shortage exposed brittle economics. He traces how roadmaps, depreciation schedules, and node mix force foundries to juggle expensive new fabs and mature capacity, and shows why leading-edge nodes punch above their volume share in revenue. Engineers get practical insight into how capacity and timing decisions ripple through the supply chain.
Development of the MOS Technology 6502: A Historical Perspective
A tiny team at MOS Technology pulled off one of the most influential microprocessor wins of the 1970s, creating the 6502 by marrying clever circuit choices with pragmatic manufacturing techniques. This excerpt by Jason Sachs focuses on the NMOS depletion-load process, mask and layout workflows, and yield-improving tricks like Micralign projection lithography and spot-knocking, showing how engineering and process decisions made a low-cost CPU ubiquitous.
Can an RTOS be really real-time?
Real-Time Operating Systems are meant for real-time applications. But with conventional shared-state concurrency and blocking, can you honestly know the worst-case execution time of an RTOS thread?
++i and i++ : what’s the difference?
Although the ++ and -- operators are well known, there are facets of their operation and implementation that are less familiar to many developers.
So You Want To Be An Embedded Systems Developer
This is a practical, boots-on-the-ground roadmap of books, videos, and inexpensive dev boards you can actually use to become an embedded systems developer. It contrasts hobbyist platforms like Arduino and Raspberry Pi with professional ARM-based evaluation kits, lists must-read resources for firmware, real-time systems, and testing, and emphasizes hands-on practice and the safety responsibilities of working with real-world devices.
Cracking the (embedded) Coding Interview
Landing your first embedded job is thrilling, but surviving months of interviews is brutal. This post condenses one engineer’s recent experience into a pragmatic playbook, covering behavioral prep, targeted coding practice, and the embedded theory you actually get asked about. Read it for a focused roadmap: what to study, which platforms to use, and how to present yourself so interviewers root for you.
Introduction to Microcontrollers - Beginnings
Mike Silva's beginner tutorial series walks through core microcontroller concepts and practical steps to get started, from wiring an LED blinky to understanding startup code. He compares embedded and desktop programming, explains why C and assembly matter, and introduces AVR and STM32 Cortex-M3 toolchains and hardware. Expect clear examples, no-nonsense tool advice, and the essential hardware knowledge to move from simulator to a real board.
Analyzing the Linker Map file with a little help from the ELF and the DWARF
Running out of Flash or RAM is a familiar pain for firmware engineers, and the linker map only tells part of the story. This post shows how to combine the linker MAP with ELF symbol tables and DWARF debug info to recover static symbols, sizes, and source files that the map omits. It also describes a C# WinForms viewer that automates the parsing with binutils and helps you spot module and symbol-level memory waste.
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 3 - VHDL testbench
Gene Breniman walks a complete VHDL testbench workflow for a CPLD-based data acquisition engine, from Xilinx ISE testbench generation to stimulus processes. He shows clock and SPI gating, a simulated ADC data generator tied to ADC_LRCK and ADC_BCK, and how simulation revealed a timing bug in the nvSRAM header that was then fixed in the VHDL. Practical and hands-on for verification work.
MSP430 Launchpad Tutorial - Part 2 - Interrupts and timers
Interrupts let the MSP430 respond to events without wasting CPU time, and this tutorial walks through using TimerA and Port 1 interrupts on the LaunchPad. Enrico shows how to configure TACTL, CCR0 and CCTL0 to generate a periodic TimerA interrupt, and how to set up P1IE, P1IES and P1IFG to catch a button press. The code toggles LEDs and enters LPM0 while waiting for interrupts.
How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one
Yossi Kreinin argues that FPGAs are no longer just programmable gate arrays, they are becoming a mainstream programmable acceleration and I/O platform. The article explains how modern FPGAs pair a sea of LUTs and switch boxes with DSP slices, RAMs, and hard CPUs to deliver massive parallelism, deterministic timing, and surprising energy efficiency, and it includes a readable Verilog convolution example to show how this works in practice.
Chebyshev Approximation and How It Can Help You Save Money, Win Friends, and Influence People
Are expensive math libraries or huge lookup tables eating CPU and flash on your microcontroller? In this practical guide Jason Sachs shows how Chebyshev polynomial approximation (with range reduction, splitting, and small interpolated tables) can give near-minimax accuracy while using far less code and runtime. The post compares Taylor series, plain and interpolated tables, and explains how to fit empirical sensor data and evaluate coefficients efficiently.
MSP430 LaunchPad Tutorial - Part 4 - UART Transmission
Want to stream sensor or debug data from an MSP430 LaunchPad to a PC or Bluetooth module? Enrico swaps in an MSP430G2553 and shows how to configure SMCLK, P1 pin multiplexing, and UCA0 baud/dividers (with modulation) to approximate 115200 baud. The post also walks through interrupt-driven RX/TX handling and a low-power wait loop that sends a "Hello World" reply on demand.
How to Read a Power MOSFET Datasheet
Jason Sachs takes a soapbox to stop a recurring mistake: misreading power MOSFET datasheets. This practical guide separates marketing blurbs and typical graphs from the specifications you can actually rely on, and explains how to use RDS(on), VGS, gate charge, SOA and thermal data in real designs. Read this before you pick a MOSFET or size a gate driver.
Understanding and Preventing Overflow (I Had Too Much to Add Last Night)
Integer overflow is stealthier than you think, and in embedded systems it can break control loops or corrupt data. Jason Sachs walks through the usual culprits, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, shifting and Q15 fixed-point traps, plus C-specific pitfalls such as undefined signed overflow and INT_MIN edge cases. He then lays out practical defenses: prefer fixed-width types, widen and saturate intermediates, enable wraparound where appropriate, and reason about modular congruence for compound arithmetic.
MSP430 Launchpad Tutorial - Part 1 - Basics
A working button-driven LED on the MSP430 LaunchPad is only a few steps away. Enrico Garante walks through creating a CCS project, setting P1.0 as the LED output and enabling P1.3 button interrupts, then shows the interrupt service routine that toggles the LED. The short tutorial covers stopping the watchdog, configuring P1DIR/P1OUT, clearing flags, and launching the code so you can get blinking quickly.
The Embedded Systems Summit - Risk Free Early Bird
The inaugural Embedded Systems Summit runs October 14-16, 2025 in Silicon Valley, limited to just 70 seats to keep things intentionally intimate. Day one is a full-day Zephyr Bootcamp, followed by two days of talks and workshops focused on real-world embedded challenges. Early Bird registration comes with a flexible cancellation policy to reduce risk and help you secure discounted hotel space. Lock your seat before the Early Bird window closes.
The Embedded Systems Summit 2025 - Registration are now open!
Registration is open for the inaugural Embedded Systems Summit 2025, happening October 14–16 at the Sonesta Silicon Valley. Stephane Boucher and Jacob Beningo put together a small, in-person event focused on hands-on Zephyr training and compact conference sessions to boost embedded careers. Expect a full-day Zephyr Developer Bootcamp, two days of technical talks on RTOS, tooling, and testing, and only 70 seats with an early-bird discount.
Call for Speakers: Inaugural Embedded Systems Summit
A new, practical in-person event for embedded engineers lands in Silicon Valley this October. Stephane Boucher and Jacob are inviting hands-on, engineer-to-engineer talks for the inaugural Embedded Systems Summit, October 14-16, 2025, with emphasis on RTOS, AI, bare-metal, IoT, edge computing, security, tooling, and firmware architecture. Submit session proposals focused on lessons learned, debugging war stories, and reproducible design patterns by August 8, 2025.
The Inaugural Embedded Systems Summit is Coming to Silicon Valley!
Stephane Boucher and Jacob Beningo are launching the first Embedded Systems Summit, an in-person, engineer-run conference in Silicon Valley from October 14 to 16, 2025. Expect practical, hands-on sessions and familiar speakers from the Embedded Online Conference. Passes are limited, so read on to learn why this event could be a high-impact investment in your embedded engineering career.
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.
2024 Embedded Online Conference's Schedule
Packed with live workshops, keynotes, and dozens of on-demand talks, the 2024 Embedded Online Conference hands you a full week of embedded-systems learning. Most theatre talks and microtalks drop early on April 26 to let you binge ahead, while major workshops and keynotes run live on Zoom with multiple 20-minute Q&A sessions. Use the schedule to add sessions to your agenda and expect occasional last-minute changes.
EOC 2024 - I Will Attend Giveaways!
Win serious test gear by helping spread the word about the Embedded Online Conference, invites Stephane. Share the provided image on LinkedIn with #EOC2024 and #embeddedsystems by April 29 to enter raffles for gear like a LulzBot Mini 2, Saleae Logic Pro 8, Joulescope JS220, and a DSC-5300 oscilloscope. It only takes a few minutes to qualify.
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.
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!
Free Sessions @ the 2023 Embedded Online Conference
The 2023 Embedded Online Conference has pre-released 37 theatre talks and demos you can watch for free today by creating an account and skipping payment. Stephane Boucher walks through the free sessions and the paid portion of the weeklong program, highlighting live Q&A, hands-on workshops, and keynote talks across April 24–28. Add sessions to your agenda and check the schedule daily for last-minute changes.
