What we've been reading in April (2024)

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this April.

What have you been reading? Share in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

Articles & Learning

• Renode: Easy CI for your Weird Hardware - Sean Cross - YouTube
  A great video from FOSSASIA ’22 that covers the basics of emulators, what they’re useful for, and the Renode emulator and its capabilities. — Eric

• Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M: Part 7 – FreeRTOS | MCU on Eclipse
  Enabling FreeRTOS awareness when debugging in Visual Studio Code. — Noah

• What are random numbers and how they are managed on Linux? - sergioprado.blog
  Great overview of how randomness is generated in computing systems, with a deep dive on random number generation on Linux. — Gilly

• midipix
  Project to bring POSIX natively to Windows. (No cygwin, mingw or wsl hoops!) — Jonathen Beri

• Speeding Up C++ Build Times | Figma Blog
  Interesting article looking at uncached C++ build time speedups. (Spoiler, it’s the headers 😮‍💨) — Noah

• Diving Into Zephyr’s New Hardware Model // Zephyr Tech Talk #014 - YouTube
  Great walkthrough of the new Zephyr hardware model. (We posted a link to a live talk about this on the February blogroll; it’s also a great watch!) Definitely check it out if you’re working on (or interested in!) Zephyr projects. — Noah

For video game fans

• Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
  A neat look at the hardware inside SNES cartridges. — Eric

• How to cheat at Super Mario Maker and get away with it for years | Ars Technica
  A bit less technical and more on the fun side, but interesting look at Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS) technique + hardware applied to the Wii U for Super Mario Maker. — Eric

• Real gaming router | KittenLabs
  Hacking a wireless router to play GTA: Vice City by wiring in an external PCIe graphics card, quite a journey! — Noah

• BabbleSim | A physical layer simulator
  A physical layer simulator to develop, test, and debug shared medium networks. E.g. simulate a 2.4GHz BLE link between two simulated devices. — François

• elcritch/nesper: Program the ESP32 with Nim! Wrappers around ESP-IDF API’s.
  Program ESP32 chips with the Nim programming language. — Noah

News & Announcements

• State of IoT Software Development Report | A Benchmark Report for Embedded Teams and Leaders
  A new report based on research with 783 people personally involved in developing IoT products and/or embedded electronic systems. Use it to benchmark your project costs, deadlines, and resources against industry norms.

Upcoming Events

• April 29 - May 3 | Embedded Online Conference - Register/Login
  The Embedded Online Conference is back and includes a talk on GDB Deep Dive with Memfault’s own Gillian Minnehan that you can watch for free by clicking here. If you use promo code Memfault2024 by May 10th you’ll receive a $100 discount on the paid pass, giving you access to the full conference and archives for one year! Register here.

• May 7 | IoT Experts Have Their Say on the State of IoT Software
  A panel discussion hosted by François with engineering and technology leaders from Samsara, T-Mobile, Nordic Semiconductor, and Ovyl.

• May 28 & May 29 | Buy Tickets - Hardware Pioneers Max
  Hardware Pioneers is the UK’s largest exhibition and conference dedicated to cutting-edge technologies, solutions, and tools for innovation-driven engineering teams. Memfault will be exhibiting from May 28-29 at Stand #D8 - be sure to swing by for a custom demo featuring our latest product developments and limited edition swag! Use the promo code SPEX50 for a 50% discount applicable to both Standard and Premium tickets. Get your tickets.

Tyler Hoffman has worked on the embedded software teams at Pebble and Fitbit. He is now a founder at Memfault.