What we've been reading in November (2024)

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

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

Articles & Learning

• Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo | Gary’s hacking stuff
  A fascinating walk-through on getting custom firmware running on the Nintendo Alarmo — a quirky alarm clock that wakes you up with sounds from your favorite Nintendo games. — Marc

• pahole: Analysing Memory Layout of Complex Data Structures With Ease | Performance Engineering
  A nice walkthrough of using pahole!

• Good Comments Read Well and Are to the Point | Martin Tournoij
  A fantastic reminder to keep comments clear and succinct — even if it takes a few tries to distill the message.

• TLS/DTLS 1.3 Profiles for the Internet of Things | Datatracker
  Interesting RFC related to TLS 1.3 on embedded devices. — Noah

• An Introduction to Armv8-M Architecture in Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 | Hiroki Akaboshi, IAR
  IAR published the first post of a short series on the Armv8-M architecture, which includes the Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 MCU’s. This article covers MPU protection improvements and C11 support. — Tyler

• Exploring C++20 Coroutines for Embedded and Bare-metal Development on RISC-V platforms | Phil Mulholland
  Can C++20 coroutines build efficient, real-time embedded applications on bare-metal RISC-V platforms — no RTOS required? This is something I’ve been playing around with for a while… — Phil M.

• Lab Life Hack - Displaying Messages with SCPI | M0AGX / LB9MG
  Don’t be afraid to experiment with your lab instruments! Learn how to build automated setups where multiple instruments work together seamlessly under one script.

• Why systemd is a Problem for Embedded Linux | Kevin Boone
  This article is generating a lot of discussion on Hacker News. What’s your take?

• ESP32 bootstrapping in Zephyr | Espressif Developer Blog
  Nice article by Espressif on the boot process for ESP32 + Zephyr — Noah

• AES Encryption: Encrypt and Decrypt Online | cryptii
  Stumbled across this while looking for online AES tools. It’s pretty handy! — Andrew

• CyberChef
  The Cyber Swiss Army Knife is a web app for encryption, encoding, compression, and data analysis. — Dave

News & Announcements

• Zephyr 4.0 is Generally Available | Zephyr Blog
  Zephyr 4.0 was released on November 16th 🥳 We are especially excited to see all the new boards (60 of them!) and the hard work done on new NXP and Espressif ESP32 chip support. — Noah

• Empowering Developers. Driving Innovation. Everywhere.
  QNX is now free for non-commercial use. (Maybe too little, too late?) — François

• FCC Authorizes Unlicensed Operations of 6 GHz Band
  Surprisingly, there’s not much buzz about this. In March, the FCC greenlit seven new systems to manage spectrum in the 6 GHz band. Here’s why it matters.

Upcoming Events

• January 7-10, 2025 | Las Vegas, NV | CES 202
  Heading to CES 2025 next month? Meet up with Memfault and the Interrupt team in Exhibit Suite 29-223 (Venetian Tower). Schedule a demo to see how Memfault can help you build better IoT products, faster.

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