Category Archives: training

Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra

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

BlackHat Europe 2022

During the first week of December, I had the pleasure of attending a training course at BlackHat Europe 2022 titled Assessing and Exploiting Control Systems and IIoT run by Justin Searle.

Part of the course involved Assessing and Exploiting Embedded Firmware by reading on-chip Flash using OpenOCD. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the last labs during the training (we ran 9 am-6 pm each day). So I decided to follow along with the very comprehensive notes […]

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Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata

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

Previously, we looked at some of the foundational C++ code kata – that is, elements of C++ coding that are absolutely key to master if you’re going to be programming in C++.
Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata
Practice makes perfect, part 2 – foundation kata

In this article I want to introduce what I call ‘idiomatic’ kata.  These exercises have a bit more latitude (and variation) in how they can be implemented.  In that respect they are closer to traditional […]

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Practice makes perfect, part 2 – foundation kata

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 previously article we looked at the need for repetitive practice – code kata.  In this article I want to  present some of my preferred foundational kata.

If you’re a beginner to C++ I recommend you fully internalize all these examples before having a look at the idiomatic kata.

If you’re a more experienced C++ programmer you may be looking at these kata and thinking “Jeez – these are so basic!  Who couldn’t do this!”.  Bear in mind though – we […]

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Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata

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

Imagine you’re at a Jazz club, enjoying a smooth jazz quartet.  It’s time for the sax player’s solo.  All of a sudden, he stops the band, rifles in a bag a pulls out a book of music theory.

“What the?!” you think.

The saxophonist looks to the audience, “I’ve just got to look up the notes for E-flat minor.  I can never remember them.”

It’s understandable you’re unlikely be too impressed with this particular musician.

If you’re a musician, a sportsperson, a dancer, martial […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, training | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Register for our webinar – ‘Introduction to Docker”Introduction to Docker’

Dec 5, 2018 at 10am BST & 4pm BST
The introduction to Docker series is proving popular with our Blog readers, so we have decided to make it the subject for our next webinar.

Docker is a relatively new technology, only appearing just over five years ago. It has become integral to modern continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery in an Agile world.

In this 45 minute webinar, presented by Niall Cooling, he will introduce Docker and how it can be used in an […]

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Agile for Embedded Conference announcement

Whilst there are a number of conferences dedicated to Agile and Scrum, content dedicated to looking at Agile from an embedded systems development perspective is much more scarce and a topic in which many of us are interested.

Although we don’t generally use the Blog to promote events, we think our conference is unique and definitely worth a mention.

3 May, Easthampstead Park, Berkshire

The day offers a pragmatic and practical approach to using Agile in the embedded development environment.

What’s on the agenda?

Using a mix of keynote […]

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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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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

Python – The everyman’s language

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

Python is a very nice language in many respects: enforced white-spacing promotes readability, extensibility and Python’s inbuilt Read-Eval-Print-Loop interpreter combined with its introspection capabilities provides a very easy way to learn and get to grips with the language.

But that can’t be all, can it? Why Python?

One of the reasons behind the success of our course has been customers wanting a good language for developing automated testing scripts and Python fits the bill brilliantly – it’s fast (enough), approachable and has great […]

Posted in General, training | Tagged | 8 Comments

I Dream of a Cheeky Missile Launcher

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

I read a blog post by Matthias Vallentin a while back about getting a USB missile launcher working and thought that a similar gadget would be a nice candidate for the 2012 refresh of our successful EL503 Developing for Embedded Linux course so ordered a nice looking piece of hardware from Amazon – the Thunder Missile Launcher from Dream Cheeky.

Sadly these guys don’t provide Linux drivers and the hardware wasn’t an exact match for the launcher used in Matthias’ article […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, General, Testing, training | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments