• Firmware Testing with Renode and GitHub Actions

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, I cover what it takes to build a simple firmware for use with Renode, how to build and administer tests with Robot Framework, and how to run these tests within GitHub’s continuous integration system.

  • What we've been reading in June (2020)

    by Tyler Hoffman

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

  • Device Firmware Update Cookbook

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, I share the device firmware update architecture I would implement knowing everything I know now. I also highlight a few design patterns that are particularly useful. The example comes with a fully functional example of a multi-stage bootloader with DFU functionality.

  • How do breakpoints even work?

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article, we will discuss the basic types of breakpoints (hardware and software) and how they are utilized by the GNU Project Debugger, GDB. We will then explore how to configure hardware breakpoints on an ARM Cortex-M MCU using the Flash Patch and Breakpoint Unit (FPB) and examine a real-world configuration with an example application.

  • Building a Tiny CLI Shell for Tiny Firmware

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, we go over why an embedded firmware should include a command-line shell interface, common use cases for it, how to build and extend one, and cover common issues that developers run into while build and maintaining one. The shell we will build will work over a UART serial port, which should make it applicable to most embedded systems.

  • Profiling Firmware on Cortex-M

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, we explore different techniques that can be used to profile firmware applications running on ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. To profile our Mandelbrot application on STM32, we start with a naive debugger-based sampling method, and eventually discover ITM, DWT cycle counters, and more!

  • What we've been reading in May (2020)

    by François Baldassari

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

  • Better Firmware with LLVM/Clang

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article, I hope I can convince you that adding a Clang build target to your project can be a relatively simple and useful endeavor. We will cover how to take advantage of some of the rich features shipped with the toolchain and identify some memory leaks and mutex deadlocks in an example project at compile time! We will also walk through a step-by-step example of updating a GCC based ARM Cortex-M project to cross-compile with LLVM/Clang.