Why you didn’t get the RTOS business and other embedded software stories
Series of blogs related to embedded software development and power management, written by Colin Walls, Software Technologist at Mentor, a Siemens business
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Power Saving Modes for Embedded Systems
Power management's importance is largely driven by the requirements to extend battery life for handheld devices, but environmental hazards, heat dissipation, etc., are raising concerns.
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How safe is your car?
Although I focus on embedded software in this blog, an understanding of how such sensors are organized is useful.
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Device: Test Thyself
Self-testing is different for every embedded device. The only constant is the likelihood of failure.
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What is endianness?
Lessons learned from experience – commonly from solving a problem – are often so much more effective than any amount of reading in books (or blogs!) – and this is how I learned about endianness.
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Blinking good
User interaction with an embedded system might be something very slick - touch screen LCDs seem to be fitted to everything nowadays. But sometimes a simple LED indicator is enough.
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A brief history of embedded software development
Open source plays a big role here. And it's free, right?
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The power pyramid
Power consumption of embedded systems continues to be a hot topic (no pun intended). And there’s one aspect of designing for low power that should be placed under the spotlight—the Power Pyramid.
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Taking a nap: Low power design now falls to software developers
Low power design, until only recently, would have been considered purely a hardware issue, but it is now very much on the agenda for software developers.
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A powerful phone
Smart phones are ubiquitous and it is worth considering how their design has been influenced by consideration of power.
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How many rubber trees are owned by the Ford Motor Company?
There is a good, albeit rather general, rule that applies to the management of a successful business: focus on what you do well, then do it better than everybody else.
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Keep smiling with the iBrush
Today, for a change, instead of discussing some embedded software technology, I would like to put forward a concept for a new product.
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Simulation: Is it better than the real thing?
If a hardware design flaw is located late in the development process, it may be too late to fix it economically, so the only option is to accommodate the problem in software.
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Learn from your past: Commercial RTOS or roll your own
Should you purchase a commercial RTOS or write your own?
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Understand why you got (or didn’t get) the RTOS business
Anyone working with embedded systems software is likely to be somewhat familiar with RTOSs. I’d like to give you some insight into the business of buying and selling such software products.
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Back to the Future with the Millennium Bug
Everyone over 30 or so can remember the “Y2K problem,” also known as the “Millennium bug.” As the end of the century and millennium loomed, there was widespread concern that chaos would ensue.
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A language fit for embedded
There are a great many programming languages in use today and many more that have fallen into disuse over the years. A challenge has always been standardization. Just about everyone would concur...
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Hey bud! Want to buy some cheap networking?
Up front, I am not an expert on networking. If I see a list of all the protocols supported by a real-time operating system, I might recognize them. I...
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Doing Binary
When thinking about this blog, I was reminded of an old joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who do not. Sorry, but it still makes me smile Now to...
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Give me a human programmer over an automated compiler
Traditionally, embedded software was always written in assembly language. This is no longer the case and C and C++ are the dominant languages favored by most embedded developers. However, if code...
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