Author Archives: Niall Cooling

About Niall Cooling

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.

Radio Silence

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Niall Cooling

I would like to apologise about the lack of posting in the last couple of months. Unfortunately due to an unprecedented workload both Glennan and myself have been pretty much maxed out, meaning we have neglected the blog. I’m hoping we can remedy this very soon; not due to a lower workloads but as we are recruiting to expand the Technical team here at Feabhas (if this may be of interest please feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or directly).

Thanks for all your great feedback […]

Posted in General | Leave a comment

enum ; past, present and future

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Niall Cooling

The enumerated type (enum) is probably one of the simplest and most underused  features of the C and C++ which can make code safer and more readable without compromising performance.

In this posting we shall look at the basic enum from C, how C++ improved on C’s enum, and how C++0X will make them a first class type.

Often I see headers filled with lists of #defines where an enum would be a much better choice. Here is a classic example:

/* adc.h […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

void main(void)–the argument continues…

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Niall Cooling

For, what must be, years now the perpetual argument among programmers in various forums  resurfaces about the legality, or not, of the use of void as the return type for the main function.

I generally try and ignore these arguments as it seems such a trivial point, but maybe it’s because yet another birthday has just passed it’s time to put my two-penneth in.

Before we start, hopefully we all agree that the following code is an abomination:

main() { }

You would […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged | 8 Comments

C++ Overheads

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Niall Cooling

Recently IAR have finally released full support for C++ (adding exceptions and RTTI) to their family of cross compilers. Initially the kickstart (free) version had not had exceptions and RTTI enabled, however with the release of version 6.10.2 this has now been rectified.

We currently use the IAR compilers on our training courses, targeting an NXP LPC2129 (ARM7TDMI) based systems. As part of verifying that the previous version’s (v5.41) projects still work with v6.10, I decided to investigate the potential overheads […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | 10 Comments

C-201x

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Niall Cooling

The last few years have been dominated by the development of the new C++ standard (still generally referred too as C++0x  but now expected in 2011). This will be the second edition of the C++ standard (ISO/IEC 14882) ignoring any TC’s and alike (useful C++0x FAQ here).

However, in parallel and generally under the radar, there has recently been publish a committee draft for the third edition of the C standard (ISO/IEC 9899). This should not really be a surprise, as […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | 2 Comments

Importing IAR EW 5.4 Projects into Parasoft C++test

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Niall Cooling

Background

Recently I have been experimenting with Parasoft’s C++test tool for static analysis of C and C++ code. As part of this I went through the process of importing an existing C project developed in IAR’s Embedded Workbench toolset. Even though importing a project and checking it against MISRA-C isn’t too taxing, I though I would share my notes for doing

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Testing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

EMBEDDED PROGRAMMERS’ GUIDE TO THE ARM CORTEX-M ARCHITECTURE

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Niall Cooling

At Embedded Live 2010 I shall be presenting a half-day tutorial entitled “EMBEDDED PROGRAMMERS’ GUIDE TO THE ARM CORTEX-M ARCHITECTURE”.

Feabhas have been training embedded software engineers in languages and architectures for the last 15 years. For the last decade we have been using ARM based target systems for all our programming based courses (C, C++ and testing – ARM7TDMI) and embedded Linux courses (ARM926). However with the development and release of the new generation Cortex micros we are moving our […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, General, RTOS, training | 1 Comment

Scope and Lifetime of Variables in C

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Niall Cooling

In a previous posting we looked at the principles (and peculiarities) of declarations and definitions. Here I would like to address the concepts of scope and lifetime of variables (program objects to be precise).

In the general case:

The placement of the declaration affects scope
The placement of the definition affects lifetime

Lifetime

The lifetime of an object is the time in which memory is reserved while the program is executing. There are three object lifetimes:

static
automatic
dynamic

Given the following piece of code:

int global_a;       /* tentative defn; […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Polymorphism in C++

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Niall Cooling

The term polymorphism is central to most discussions in and around object oriented design and programming. However I find that many people are still confused or don’t have a complete understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of using polymorphism.

I have heard many different simplified definitions of the root term for polymorphism, usually relating to chemistry or biology. Rather than trying to justify the name, I’ll give you my very simplistic definition from a software perspective.  Simply put polymorphism means:

Multiple functions […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

Posted on April 28, 2010 by Niall Cooling

This the headline to the central story in today’s New York Times. The story is about the overuse of PowerPoint by the US military, especially in Afghanistan. It centers around a particular PowerPoint slide (shown below) attempting to portray the complexity of US strategy in the region.

The article discusses that a Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraq city of Tal Afar.

Leading on from this,  […]

Posted in General, training | 3 Comments