Category Archives: General

Making things do stuff – Part 4

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

In the last article we explored the design of a class to encapsulate a physical hardware device.  In that article I deliberately ignored how the class would actually interact with the hardware.

In this article we explore the options available to us for accessing hardware and the consequences of those

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, Cortex, General | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Making things do stuff – Part 2

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Last time we looked at the basics of hardware manipulation in C++.   This time we’ll apply this to some real hardware and have a look at the code

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Cortex, General | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Agile for Embedded Conference – Early Bird registration ends this week

Our early bird offer ends on 31 March, so book now and join us on 3 May for a day dedicated to Agile for Embedded.

The agenda pronises an exciting event and included talks from industry guest speakers Ericsson Television, Altran, and Dyson, all sharing their experiences.

Click here to find out more about the speakers, presentation abstracts or to book your place.

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2016 – The Year of the Hack

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.
Andy McCormick

IoT security has been headline news for at least the past 12 months, and we’ve also had an unprecedented number of incidents affecting consumers in more traditional areas: online banking account thefts, online fraud, OS vulnerabilities, you name it, it’s probably happened. In researching this blog, I found over 400 hack-related stories in The Register alone.

With increasing numbers of embedded devices becoming connected, we are going to hear more and more about security breaches, and guaranteeing security in increasingly sophisticated […]

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An Introduction to Hypervisors

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.
Andy McCormick

Hypervisors are becoming commonplace in the embedded world, especially in high-end multi-core systems. If you’d asked me about virtualisation or hypervisors 2 years ago, like most people I didn’t know much about them. A hypervisor, that’s a super-supervisor, right? Virtualisation, you mean Virtual Machines, right? Running Linux on Windows using VMware, right? Not any more!

Here at Feabhas we’ve noticed a lot of our clients and contacts are starting to look at designs using hypervisors in embedded systems for a number of […]

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Off to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open IoT Summit, Berlin 11th-13th October 2016

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.
Andy McCormick

It’s hard to believe another year has passed and it’s time once again for the Embedded Linux Conference, and next week I’ll be off to Berlin to join a couple thousand other Linux enthusiasts for our annual bash.

A lot has happened in the past 12 months especially in the fields of security and the Internet of Things (IoT). A lot of people were talking about the IoT a year ago, we’re now seeing a lot more projects being completed, especially […]

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Memory consistency made simple(ish)

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

The C++11 memory consistency model is probably one of the most significant aspects of Modern C++; and yet probably one of the least well-understood.  I think the reason is simple:  it’s really difficult to understand what the problem actually is.

The memory consistency problem is a concurrency problem.  That is, it’s a problem that occurs when we start writing multi-threaded code.  More specifically, it’s a parallelism problem – the real subtleties occur when you have two or more processors executing code.

In the first […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, General | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Using your Feabhas USB stick on a Mac

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.
Andy McCormick

Nearly all our Feabhas courses now have their tools/lab exercises on a bootable Linux USB stick, either Fedora or Ubuntu. These USB sticks were designed to boot laptop PCs, but Macbook Pros are becoming increasingly popular in the laptop market, with 10% of the market in 2015.

Our USB sticks won’t boot a Macbook Pro, but we can run them in a virtual machine on a Mac.

Here I’ll talk you through what needs to be done in nine easy steps to […]

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My Top 5 Podcasts

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

For the final blog post of the year I’ve decided to do something a little different; I hope that’s okay?

Due to the nature of the job, the technical team at Feabhas spend a lot of time travelling. This means many an hour spent in the car driving to and from client sites; often involving navigating the wonderful M25 London orbital [car park!]. We all while away this time in different ways, some prefer music, others radio (which, being in the […]

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Security and Connected Devices

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
I provide expertise and training for Embedded Linux courses.

I have over 20 years of experience in the embedded sector, gained at companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semiconductor Europe.

I've led work on numerous projects at all stages in the design cycle with comprehensive expertise in software engineering design, support and integration.
Andy McCormick

With the Internet of Things, we are seeing more and more devices that were traditionally “deep embedded” and isolated from the outside world becoming connected devices. Security needs to be designed into connected products from the outset as the risk of outside attacks is very real. This is especially true if you’re migrating from embedded RTOS systems to Linux and encountering a smorgasbord of “free” connectivity functionality for the first time.

Here we list 10 top tips to help make your […]

Posted in General, Industry Analysis, Linux, RTOS, training | Tagged | 1 Comment