How-to Articles

CRCs are among the best checksums available to detect and/or correct errors in communications transmissions. This article shows how to implement an efficient CRC in C or C++.

Many common types of data transmission errors cannot be detected by additive checksums. This article describes a stronger type of checksum known as a CRC.

What if data is lost or corrupted in transit? Communication protocols usually attempt to detect such errors automatically. To do that they use checksums.

New standards are making the delivery of Web-based and enhanced content alongside television a reality. This article describes the ATVEF enhanced television standard and the requirements for designing ATVEF-compatible receivers.

As engineers design more and more products with embedded computer systems that require connections of one sort or another, short-range wireless protocols offer an attractive alternative to wired connections.

Bug fixes, patches, and third-party application programs are all possible in today’s more powerful embedded systems, but you need to plan for them at design time. This article shows you how.

One of the least used but potentially most useful features of the C preprocessor is the ANSI-specified #error directive. Here's a look at a couple of clever uses for #error that have proven invaluable in embedded software development.

Quite a few embedded systems include multiple processors. Sometimes these processors stand in isolation, but more often they're required to communicate over a multidrop bus such as EIA RS-485 or RS-422.

In recent years, the line between hardware and software has blurred. Hardware now engineers create the bulk of their new digital circuitry in programming languages such as VHDL and Verilog. This article will help you make sense of programmable logic.

Jump tables, also called branch tables, are an efficient means of handling similar events in software. Here's a look at the use of arrays of function pointers in C/C++ as jump tables.