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Category Archives: General
Embedded System Conference – India
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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)
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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?
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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 […]
Radio Silence
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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
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What is Configuration Management? And why is it important to me?
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.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
What is Configuration Management?
Configuration Management has its roots in the US Department of Defence in the 1950’s. It started as a technical management discipline and has been widely adopted by many other engineering disciplines, including Systems Engineering and Software Engineering. Configuration Management focuses on establishing, and maintaining, the consistency of a system or product throughout its lifetime. CM is a collection of competencies, techniques and tools whose purpose is to ensure the consistency of the system’s requirements, functional attributes and […]
Posted in General
3 Comments
The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases
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.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
RULE 8: Don’t describe the user interface
For many users the user interface is the system. Prototypes and mock-ups of the man-machine interface (MMI) are a fantastic way of eliciting requirements and use case behaviours from your stakeholders. And when defining use case descriptions adding MMI ‘screenshots’ and images can help illuminate the behaviour of the system to your customers.
It is very tempting to describe use case transactions in terms of MMI elements, in an attempt to make them more understandable […]
Posted in Design Issues, General
3 Comments
The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases
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.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
RULE 4 : The “Famous Five” of requirements modelling
As I discussed in Rule 1, a common misunderstanding of use cases is that they are the software requirements. Unfortunately, this isn’t the situation. Use cases are merely an analysis tool – albeit a very powerful tool (when used in the right situation).
Use cases are just one technique for understanding and analysing the requirements. In order to fully understand the requirements our use cases are going to need some […]
Posted in Design Issues, General, UML
Tagged Behaviour, Context, Context Model, Domain, Domain model, Modes model, State Machine, SysML, UML, Use Case
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EMBEDDED PROGRAMMERS’ GUIDE TO THE ARM CORTEX-M ARCHITECTURE
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Navigating Memory in C++: A Guide to Using std::uintptr_t for Address Handling - February 22, 2024
- Embedded Expertise: Beyond Fixed-Size Integers; Exploring Fast and Least Types - January 15, 2024
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
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