Illustrated Blog on Embedded Software Architecture
Object-orientation Object-orientation is about classes and objects. A class is an abstract data type: data type: because it defines a new type to work with by providing data and operations on this data, but also abstract: because it encapsulates this data and hides implementation details behind an hopefully nice and clean interface. An object then […]
Introduction Most (real :-)) embedded software is written in C. Although C is a general-purpose procedural programming language, it is perfectly possible and useful to write object-oriented code in it. Object-orientation – well, GOOD object-orientation – allows for better code maintenance by managing code complexity. Actually, there are two ways to manage software complexity: abstractions, […]
We cannot take credit for any of the code – which is public domain – but we found it to be so valuable that we dedicate this blog post to it. A CRC or cyclic redundancy check algorithm is used to detect errors or changes in raw data. It is good at detecting unintentional changes […]
Eventually an embedded device’s micro controller or processor is expected to execute the designed-for-the-purpose software. But before that happens, some vendor specific voodoo is required. Only then, it understands it should run your code, which is located at the place where you put it. First-level boot-loader Most modern micro-controllers nowadays have first-level boot-loaders. They initialize […]
Embedded Systems have reached such a complexity that it has become impossible to design them “from scratch”. That above statement [Seminar “Embedded Systems”, Hardware/Software Partitioning, Frederick Dufour – 2006, July 3rd] is maybe the proverbial bridge too far. Since every problem can be decomposed into smaller problems, it IS possible to design a system from […]
This post is Part 2 of the series. Part1, which explains Programs and Processes, can be found here. Thread A thread is a single path of execution and schedulable by the CPU. It has its own stack, program counter and set of registers. A process (living program and container of all resources — see Part1) has one […]
Introduction Especially process and thread are terms which have many different definitions and implementations. And therefor, it is easy to get confused, and hard to get the concepts crystallized in your mind. Just do some googling and you will find plenty of sources which more or less contradict each other. We will add another source […]
Understanding memory management is a very important aspect of embedded software development. With a broad and simplified generalization, we will divide memory allocation schemes into 2 categories: allocation on the stack, and allocation on the heap. For the purpose of this discussion, the current subject will refer to embedded systems with RAM (either SRAM or […]
Let us start with an interesting quote from the FreeRTOS web site: Binary semaphores are used for both mutual exclusion and synchronisation purposes. The quote clearly makes a distinction between the two use cases we saw in part 1: mutual exclusion: how to serialize access to shared data, and synchronization: how does a producer notify […]
This article was written – quite a few years ago – but recent activities made it worthwhile to take another look at it, revise the content and give it an overhaul to alleviate and clear up some of the inaccuracies. It starts with a quote and excerpt from the book Inside Microsoft Windows 2000, Third […]
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Kris Bellemans is a software engineer employed at Sioux Embedded Systems, Belgium. He is passionate about low-level programming, embedded Linux and technology and science in general and has 4 years of experience in the field of software engineering. For more information, check his LinkedIn profile.
Patrice's professional tag cloud: anything mobile, software design, explorer, Enterprise Architecture, Agile Coach.
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Luc has more than twenty years of experience in embedded systems and real-time behavior. He is specialized in Operating Systems and interactions between hardware an software. Besides owning his company Luperco, he performs research on real-time scheduling at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
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