What we've been reading in November & December (2022)

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this November & December. It’s a long list…happy new year!

We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

Articles & Learning

• Memfault Panel - Building Firmware Teams in the Modern Era (Recording)
  Phillip Johnston from Embedded Artistry, Kerry Scharfglass, Director of Device Software at Span, and I chatted about our experience working on and building out growing firmware organizations. If you are finding yourself leading a firmware or hardware team and trying to hire a number of engineers, listen in.

• Memfault Webinar on Feb. 2nd - How to Monitor, Debug, and Update Infineon Devices with Memfault’s IoT Reliability Platform
  Danny Watson, the Director of Software Product Management, and I will be giving a webinar demonstrating Memfault with Infineon devices. Come join us!

• Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig ⚡ Zig Programming Language
  A very cool technique the Zig compiler uses when bootstrapping itself. - Noah

• Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040 - Stargirl (Thea) Flowers
  A very thorough write-up describing the author’s open source pick and place control board. Very cool project! - Noah

• How to make sure no Dynamic Memory is used - MCU on Eclipse
  A post about how to ensure that your embedded projects don’t use a dynamic allocation via a heap. Sometimes you want a heap, other times you don’t. - Tyler

• Welcome to Lord of the io_uring — Lord of the io_uring documentation
  This website + their intro to async programming under Linux is great - Fausto.

• When to hold ’em and when to fold ’em: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended
  An amazing and amazingly-documented Game Boy mod! - Noah

• Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
  A great bug investigation. Hop along for the ride!

• Quirks of C
  People love C. People hate C. At least we know it’s weird and fun in so many ways.

• C23 implications for C libraries
  C23 information in a nice and digestible format.

• Channel Sounding – Bluetooth® Technology Website
  From Mitch Johnson on the Interrupt Slack, a new Bluetooth LE standard extension for more accurate distance estimation vs. existing RSSI based approaches. Exciting work!

• Introduction to Embedded Systems Programming — learn.adacore.com
  Teaching the basics of embedded programming in Ada. If you find yourself programming an embedded device in Ada, please reach out! I’m very curious to hear your story.

• What is zchunk?
  An implementation of a delta-update system similar in application to zsync and casync but with some interesting design choices that seem quite nice! - Noah

• Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: How I Learned To Love Tail Calls in C
  Interesting article about using tail-calls for performance. - Noah

• Everything I wish I knew when learning C - Tom M
  A top post on Hackernews about some C tips the author wishes he knew earlier on in his career. Useful for us firmware engineers.

• Google Online Security Blog: Memory Safe Languages in Android 13
  Interesting write-up from Google on the change in languages used with Android. - Eric

• Callbacks and Lambdas in Embedded C++ - Stratify Labs
  The author goes over best practices using callbacks in C/C++.

• How the 8086 processor’s microcode engine works
  Article about 8086 microcode.

• cpq/bare-metal-programming-guide: A bare metal programming guide (ARM microcontrollers)
  A nicely thorough guide to programming an stm32, with a cool web server example at the end. - Noah

• LoRa: Field Testing Antennas - News - SparkFun Electronics
  SparkFun wrote about how to test LoRa antennas.

• A Beginner’s Guide to Embedded Systems - Manasi Rajan
  Great article for all embedded systems beginners.

• vChavezB/puncover_html: Script to create a local html copy of the local puncover report. Intended for CI/CD purposes
  A long time ago, an engineer at Pebble wrote puncover to help developers visualize code space usage for Pebble applications and the Pebble firmware itself. This project adds a little feature to it so that it can generate a bundle of static HTML, which can then be hosted anywhere!

• EAStdC/EABitTricks.h at master · electronicarts/EAStdC
  A header file on the EA public GitHub repo with common and optimized bitfield operations for C++.

• radare2 online
  Very nifty online radare2 console, for reversing / poking around binaries - Noah

• WasmEdge
  A WASM runtime targeting edge application and IoT - François

• Arm CMSIS csolution - Visual Studio Marketplace
  Didn’t realize Arm had published a few packages for VSCode. Looks like they’ll be slowly recommending people move from Keil to VSCode!

• Stargirl🌠 on Twitter: The schematic viewer
  Some neat looking PCB tools from the always excellent Stargirl Flowers. - Noah

• wntrblm/Gingerbread: Web-based tool for creating artistic PCBs
  “Gingerbread is a tool for converting vector artwork to KiCAD PCB files that live in your browser.”

• ciniml/WireGuard-ESP32-Arduino: WireGuard implementation for ESP32 Arduino
  Title says it all.

• 128Mb Ox64 SBC - PINE STORE
  An interesting $8 Linux/RTOS RISC-V development board from the Pine team (in stock at the time of posting!) - Noah

• espressif/esp-wdf: Espressif WASM Development Framework.
  Espressif released a WASM framework for their chips, allowing more languages to run on their platform. - François

News & Updates

• GDB News - Release 13 branch cut
  The GDB version 13 branch has been cut! It’s much, much faster at loading and processing symbol files. I can’t wait for the final release!

• Clang 15.0.0 Release Notes — Clang 15.0.0 documentation
  Clang 15 added support for randomizing struct layout at compile time - Noah

• MicroPython officially becomes part of the Arduino ecosystem - Arduino Blog
  Arduino has made support for MicroPython official!

• Virtual Hardware – Software Development Without Hardware – Arm®
  Arm released some support for playing with their CPU’s virtually and in the cloud. Very cool! It’s primarily designed for server CPUs, but I hope to see this for microcontrollers soon. -Tyler

• Arduino Unveils the Opta, Its First Micro PLC for the Industrial Internet of Things - Hackster.io
  Arduino continues to release professional products, this time a new device targeted at the PLC market.

• Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project is Complete, Now Open and Widely Available to Members - z-wavealliance
  Z-Wave published their source code!

Random

• Catherine on Twitter: Example of cc1 auto-fixing compilation errors
  Clang cc1 has support for auto-fixing some classes of compilation errors by running with clang -Xclang -fixit, as shown here 😮. - Noah

• Optimization Tools — Zephyr Project Documentation
  We learned recently that Zephyr has a way to generate a RAM and a ROM report for a given firmware build. Awesome!

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