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Author Archives: Niall Cooling
Capturing the Stripe-d Flag
In the first half of this year, the online payment company Stripe held a Capture the Flag competition as a way to draw attention to online security.
They state that:
“The hardest part of writing secure code is learning to think like an attacker. For example, every programmer is told to watch out for SQL injections, but it’s hard to appreciate just how exploitable they are until you’ve written a SQL injection of your own.” – Stripe
It was a fascinating challenge and […]
Embedded System Conference – India
This year I have honour of being invited to present at the Embedded Systems Conference in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India. Based on previous visits these classes are very well attended and always generate a lot of post-class discussions.
This year I’ve extended my previous 1/2 day class to a full day titled “Programming in C for the ARM Cortex-M Microcontroller”. Having a full day allows me to delve in too much greater detail. The class is broken down in to four subsections:
Cortex-M Architecture
C […]
Creating a Linux Live USB Thumbstick (The Hard Way)
Introduction
So recently I needed to create a live system and I had a spare 8 GB USB drive on which to do it.
Looking around the net there’s a lot of solutions to doing this but I needed something that would be independent of the host distribution – I used Fedora 17 in this instance but it might not be in the future – and would work quickly and easily.
This article seeks to document what I did in order to accomplish […]
Can existing embedded applications benefit from Multicore Technology?
It feels that not a day goes by without a new announcement regarding a major development in multicore technology. With so much press surrounding multicore, you have to ask the question “Is it for me?” i.e. can I utilise multicore technology in my embedded application?
However, from a software developer’s perspective, all the code examples seem to demonstrate the (same) massive performance improvements to “rendering fractals” or “ray tracing programs”. The examples always refer to Amdahl’s Law, showing […]
Posted in ARM, Cortex, Design Issues, General, Industry Analysis
Tagged OpenCL, OpenMP, SMP, TBB
6 Comments
Raspberry Pi – First Impressions and Raspbmc
The Pi Has Landed
It arrived. After quite some delay my Model B Raspberry Pi has arrived.
The Raspberry Pi is powered by the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC which includes an ARM1176JZF-S core running at 700Mhz, 256MB SDRAM and a Videocore 4 GPU which is capable of BluRay quality playback (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC at 40MBits/s) which puts it roughly on par with a 1st generation Xbox with slightly better graphics.
There are two models of Pi. The Model B which is ‘available’ at […]
Posted in General, Uncategorized
5 Comments
CMSIS-RTOS Presentation
I have finally finished and sent off my presentation for next weeks Hitex one-day ARM User Conferences titled “ARM – the new standard across the board?” at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull.
Back in February, at the embeddedworld exhibition and conference in Nuremberg, Germany, ARM announced the latest version (version 3) of the Cortex(tm) Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS). The major addition is the introduction of an abstraction layer for Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS).
The presentation I’m giving explains; what […]
IoT – MQTT Publish and Subscriber C Code
With the buzz around the Internet-of-Things (IoT), I felt I needed to get in on the act. For those that follow my twitter feed (@feabhas) you may be aware of the “home project” I’ve been working on. This project is based around the mbed platform to which I have connected a DS18B20 temperature sensor. The overall goal is to record the water temperature of my son’s fish tank, however due to water quality issues, it is currently sampling the air […]
Setting up googlemock with Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition
Following on from my last post about setting up googletest to use with Visual Studio 2010 express edition, this post builds on that by showing how to build, setup and test the googlemock libraries.
If you have read the previous post, then the basic steps are very similar.
First, download the googlemock zip file and unzip it to known location. As before, I suggest something easy, either C:\gmock-1.6.0, or as in my case C:\src\gmock-1.6.0. One useful fact is that all the gtest […]
Setting up googletest with Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition
So on an Embedded, Real-Time blog why am I taking about Visual C++ and googletest?
With the growth and acceptance of agile techniques, such as Test Driven Design (TDD), which is very well explained in James Grenning’s book Test Driven Development for Embedded C, we now have a set of tools and techniques that are:
Natural to use (as they use the native language)
Easy to use (to varying degrees)
Free
that allow the quality of embedded software to be significantly improved prior to target […]
Overcoming Name Clashes in Multiple C++ Interfaces
Interfaces
One of our key design goals is to reduce coupling between objects and classes. By keeping coupling to a minimum a design is more resilient to change imposed by new feature requests or missing requirements[1].
An Interface represents an abstract service. That is, it is the specification of a set of behaviours (operations) that represent a problem that needs to be solved.
An Interface is more than a set of cohesive operations. The Interface can be thought of as a contract […]