Articles

You can try the ExecutionPlatform with our demo systems. Each demo consists of a VS Code instance that is connected to an ExecutionPlatform with a RP2040 microcontroller in it. You can view the schematics of the RP2040 integration. The integration …

The RP2040’s novel Programmable Input/Output (PIO) subsystem allows the execution of tiny ‘PIO-assembly’ programs parallel to the CPU. It has direct access to the chips DMA-controller and GPIO-pins and is thus a very powerful …

I²C is a 2-wire protocol where a controller is communicating with one or more targets. Most often the controller is the microcontroller. Targets are sensors, eeproms or other peripheries. This article shows our novel approach to write …

When working with the ExecutionPlatform, you have the possibility to debug different things. Depending on what we are searching for we need to check code that is running on MCU or to look whether test case is working correctly. When to choose which …

With our ExecutionPlatform, you can run unit tests directly on the target microcontroller (MCU). This is called on-target testing. Executing unit tests on the MCU is similar to running firmware. As a first step, the tests are compiled into a binary …

What makes unit tests great? They ensure that functions or components work as intended. Unit tests are also very simple to use. This is because you can focus on a single piece of code – and isolate all dependencies through Stubs and Mocks. This …

We made lot of progress in the past year. More about it below. But another thing really stands out for me: Through many long in-person discussions we gained a much better understanding of the very diverse problems our customers face. A few challenges …

This article describes how automatic tests for the SPI communication of a STM32 look in practice. The result are automatic hardware/software integration tests for this microcontroller. SPI is a widely used in embedded systems. For example a sensor …

Imagine the following scenario: You need to create a highly precise pulse on a microcontroller GPIO pin. The pulse needs to be within 1% of the desired value. This article shows you, how to compare two variations of a driver against these …

Open Loop Tests have the potential to revolutionise firmware development. This article describes a technical approach to implementing such tests. Curious readers can try out the results directly in your browser. Requirements Open Loop Tests are …

Testing of embedded firmware is too complicated. An enormous amount of resources are required for a system test that does not detect enough errors. Open loop testing is a new approach to hardware/software integration testing that saves development …

In my previous article, I described the most important factors for on and off-target execution. We will now take a closer look at one of the most important factors for such differences, namely the compiler. Most C and C++ developers are familiar with …

Embedded firmware is developed on a desktop computer. Code that is not directly dependent on hardware can be compiled with a conventional desktop compiler, and executed on the development computer (off target). In certain circumstances, the code …

For one of our smaller projects, we wanted to try ARM Mbed for the first time. Surprisingly, we found a bug, just by executing the existing unit tests on an actual embedded target. This post describes how we found the bug, details the technical …

In issue number 393 of his popular newsletter The Embedded Muse, Jack Ganssle took a look at the performance of trig functions. Trigonometric functions such as cos are often used in time critical calculations. In particular, he compared the C math …

As an embedded software engineer I want to encourage you to make more and better use of abstraction as a means of good programming. Here I will motivate my reasoning by referring to the current situation in embedded software development (as I see it) …