How-to articles about designing safe, reliable, and secure embedded systems.
For embedded software developers, the most significant improvements to the C programming language made in the ISO C99 standard update are in the new <stdint.h> header file. Learn the typedef names for the new fixed width integer data types, to make hardware interfacing in C easier.
Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most widely-used automotive bus architecture. Here are some reasons why.
At peak, some automobiles contained up to three miles of cabling. To reduce the cost and weight of wiring and still allow ECUs to become more intelligent, new methods had to be found to reduce the amount of wiring. The CAN bus has since found application in other industries as well.
Distributed systems require protocols for communication between microcontrollers. Controller Area Networks (CAN) and Serial Peripheral Interfaces (SPI) are two of the most common such protocols.
The beauty of using multiple processors in a single system is that the timing requirements of one processor can be divorced from the timing requirements of the other. In a real-time system, this quality can make the programming a lot easier and reduce the potential for race conditions. The price you pay is that you then have to get information from one processor to the other.
Most real-time operating systems employ preemptive schedulers. This primer on preemption also looks at the kind of multitasking it enables
Motorola's Background Debug Mode is one of a variety of on-chip debug technologies. Collectively, they offer some of the best features of debug monitors and in-circuit emulators—with far less headache and cost.
Should you integrate a GUI into an embedded system by adding a dedicated processor or upgrading the existing one? Here are some options and trade-offs.
In the market for a real-time operating system (RTOS)? This article provides an overview of RTOSes and how you can select the best one for your project.
Finite impulse response (FIR) filters are the most popular type of filters implemented in software. This introduction will help you understand them both on a theoretical and a practical level.
The limitations of an 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) can sometimes make conventional C constructs produce suboptimal code. In this article we look at common problems on the 8051 family and discuss workarounds in C.
Counter units (aka, timer units) are crucial components of most embedded systems and included in many microcontrollers. Here's a primer on the hardware.
Barr Group's engineers wrote these resources for working developers. When firmware and electronics end up in litigation, we also serve as software expert witnesses.