What we've been reading in July (2024)

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

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

Articles & Learning

• LILYGO T-Halow | CNX Software
  Low cost WiFi HaLoW development board. I haven’t seen a lot of adoption of the WiFi HaLoW (802.11ah) standard yet, but it’s a really interesting connectivity standard, and I’m excited to see it grow! — Noah

• Reverse Engineering a Smartwatch | Benjamen Lim
  Reverse engineering device firmware is always fun to read about. The manufacturer shipped without read/write protection of the firmware and with a programming interface enabled to allow for this. — Heiko

• Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor | Ken Shirriff
  An in-depth look at the basic building blocks of CPUs, standard cells! This article explains in detail the standard cells used to build various components of an Intel Pentium CPU. — Eric

• Understanding orphan sections | MaskRay
  Nice article explaining a pretty obscure linker warning. — Noah

• Best practices in firmware | M0AGX / LB9MG
  This is a great article on development practices and lifehacks that apply uniquely to firmware. — François

• Introduction to Memory Management in Linux | The Linux Foundation YouTube
  An introduction to MMUs and Linux from a talk at Embedded Linux Conference 2017. Great overview on how the kernel stitches user memory, kernel memory (logical and virtual), and swap memory. — Eric

• USB PD on the CH32V003 | eeucalyptus
  Bit-banging USB PD on a $0.10 microcontroller. — Noah

• Build an image and perform updates with RAUC on Rockchip | Konsulko Group
  Pretty cool tutorial that uses RAUC + Yocto to create an updatable Linux system on the Rock Pi 4 single board computer. — Pat

• Beating the compiler | Matt Keeter
  I might be biased because I’m staring at assembly, but this is a really well-written post about hand-tuning an interpreter in assembly and beating the compiler. — Eric

• Memory mapping an FPGA from an STM32 | Andrew Zonenberg
  Fascinating write-up of an open-source FPGA+STM32 system. — Noah

• The Elegance of the ASCII Table | Dan Q
  A historical look at the ASCII table! — Eric

• Some useful tools for binary formats | LWN.net
  A selection of tools that could come in handy when working with various binary data formats. — François

• The EM language is dead, long live EM !!! | Blogging Zig•EM
  Zig + EM (Embedded programming language) — Matheus Catarino França

• Announcing Zephyr 3.7: New Long-Term Support Release of Zephyr RTOS | Zephyr Blog
  Zephyr released a new LTS with version 3.7.

• Beginning of Rust support in Zephyr by d3zd3z | zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr
  This package implements the bare minimum support needed to build a simple Zephyr application written in Rust.

News & Announcements

• The end of Mbed marks a new beginning for Arduino | Arduino Blog
  Big deal: Arduino moving from Mbed to Zephyr. — François

• 2024 Developer Survey | Stack Overflow
  Biased towards web, but there are still some interesting statistics for embedded developers. — IzidorM

• Olympics Officials Work to Prevent Motor Doping in Cycling | IEEE Spectrum
  At the Paris games, cyclists have their bikes tested for hidden motors.

• LinkedIn Discussion — “What resources would you recommend for embedded software?”
  Check out the community’s recommendations for embedded software resources and add your own.

Gillian Minnehan is a firmware solutions architect at Memfault. Gillian previously worked on embedded software teams in space and defense.