Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this July.

We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments.

Articles & Learning

• Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers (book) by Brian Amos
  A new (relatively) book for the embedded ecosystem. The table of contents looks thorough and uses modern software and tools such as an STM32, FreeRTOS, and a JLink.
• Build PineTime Firmware in the Cloud with GitHub Actions by LEE Lup Yuen
  Step-by-step post documenting the process to build the PineTime firmware using Github Actions, complete with screenshots, code snippets, and configuration files. Applicable to any firmware project.
• Boost your beautiful log messages with instant crash analysis by Cyril Fougeray
  Using just an nRF52 a UART, and CrashCatcher, Cyril writes a script using the Python serial library, pySerial, to automatically generate a stack trace whenever a device crashes.
• Espressif ESP32: Bypassing Secure Boot using EMFI by Realize
  A post (and soon-to-be-series of posts) on how the team at Realize was able to bypass the ESP32 Secure Boot and Flash Decryption on earlier revisions of the boards.
• Exploiting the Preprocessor for Fun and Profit by Klemens Morgenstern
  A standard but complete “preprocessor fun” post.
• Why I prefer C++: “RAII All The Things!” by Matthew Eshleman
  A post about C++ and its ability to follow the RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) idiom. Don’t forget that you can do this in C with GCC’s cleanup attribute.
• Debugging Arm-based microcontrollers in (Neo)vim with gdb by Christian Maniewski
  I personally love tools, and I know everyone has questions about how to set up their VSCode/Vim/IDE editor with GCC/Clang and GDB/Jlink/Openocd. A straight-forward post on setting up NeoVim with GDB for embedded development.
• Concurrency Patterns in Embedded Rust by Ferrous Systems
  A post detailing how to handle concurrency in a Rust no_std application. Covers threads, interrupts, and async/await.
• A tale of Ghosts’n Goblins’n Crocodiles by Fabian Sanglard
  Old video game systems are like embedded systems, right? A story about the game Ghosts’n Goblins (Capcom, 1985) and its history on the Amstrad CPC, an 8-bit French computer system.
• The tiniest C sort function?
  The title should pique your interest enough.
• The Anatomy of a Race Condition by Matthew Eshleman
  A walk-through how to code review and debug a race condition.
• CAN Priority Inversion by Dr. Ken Tindell
  An in-depth article on how the common “Priority Inversion” problem using CAN and Zephyr to demonstrate the problem.
• Apple Lightning - Not quite the normal Interrupt material, but a fascinating repository of everything a few individuals could gather about Apple’s Lightning cables.

Neat Open Source Projects

• Nest Labs Embedded Libraries
  We found some great C/C++ libraries in the Nest Labs Github organization, including an assert library, unit testing library, FSM generator, and a custom RTOS.
• adamgreen/CrashCatcher
  A library that is inserted into the fault handlers of an ARM Cortex-M firmware. Will generate crash dumps (or core dumps) for post-mortem debugging. Similar to what Memfault provides, but the repo dates back to 2014! A gem of a project.
• adamgreen/mri - Monitor for Remote Inspection
  Enables GDB to debug Cortex-M devices over a UART connection using the Debug Monitor. Wondering how it works? Check out our recent post on the topic.
• ZMK Firmware
  A Zephyr-based firmware for keyboards. This project is in its early days, but if you are looking to learn more about Zephyr, this is a great reference point.
• ficl - Forth Inspired Command Language
  Ficl is a programming language interpreter designed to be embedded into other systems as a command, macro, and development prototyping language. We stumbled across this because you can actually compile it into NuttX!
• cjhdev/wic - WebSockets in C
  A fresh project that implements WebSockets in C99 C code with embedded systems in mind (it doesn’t use malloc!).
• ESP-Hosted by Espressif
  This project allows you to hook up an ESP32 to a host machine, such as a Linux device, and use TCP/IP and Bluetooth HCI protocol as normal but all communications are passed through to the ESP32.
• M2OS
  M2OS is an RTOS written in Ada and released this March 1st, 2020. It can run on an Arduino Uno and an STM32F4. Ada is a language I did not expect to see in a modern RTOS.
• TinyGo
  We’ve linked TinyGo before, but their recent changelogs are impressive. RISC-V, Teensy 3.6, Particle boards, and Go Module support. I also just realized they support WebAssembly as a target. Neat.

News

• Nvidia in Advanced Talks to Buy SoftBank’s Chip Company Arm
  I’m sure you’ve heard the news, but it has to be included here. What will happen if Arm is purchased, made public, or goes down with Softbank? No one knows.
• Project Connected Home over IP (December 2019) - We missed this news, but this is a large project between Amazon, Apple, Google, and Zigbee (and more) to develop a standard for smart home device connectivity. Follow along in the Github Repo at project-chip/connectedhomeip.