Illustrated Blog on Embedded Software Architecture
The energy harvester application needs to be able to determine current flows and volt charges in order to take the right decisions about charging and dumping. The micro-controller’s ADC unit is able to translate the analogue signal from the sensor into a quantified entity, a number if you wish. Internally, the device current is limited […]
Prototype building block While working on our energy harvester design, we have identified a couple of relatively independent building blocks that could also be interesting for other people doing projects and building prototypes. One building block is the switch: In its most basic form, it closes an electrical circuit after which a load can get […]
Iteration 2 overview Wind power to dump load switching has been the main topic of iteration 2. In our system design we also call this Power Management Decision 1 (PMD1). PMD1 should realize several system requirements and, because we have an energy harvester model in Enterprise Architect, this list of requirements can easily be generated […]
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 […]
An alternative relay we have not looked at, until now, is the latching or bistable relay. This kind of relay will only use power when changing state from open to close or from close to open. Also, it keeps its last state. Those properties could be interesting, because one of the problems we face in […]
In this article we are going to give a short overview of mosfets and more specifically power mosfets. Surfing the web, we found this great YouTube video (Developed under Teaching Innovation Project 10-170 of Universidad de Granada in Spain) covering the basics of mosfets: Definition “The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, or MOS FET) is […]
In part 1, we talked about the ‘contactor’. Relays also use power, and in this particular case, the relay coil could draw up to 2 watts according to its specification. In order to save power, there are a couple of things we can do. Using PWM is one of them. Every relay coil has a […]
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 […]
The (most obvious?) switching solution would be a high-power relay. In a previous article, we already did an experiment with a Solid State relay (and we will continue to do so). Now we will look further into the ‘contactor’. The ‘kit’ we ordered from www.iacs.co.uk (via Ebay) is a relay board with optical isolation (to […]
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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