For obvious reasons, I usually write about things that are widely applicable. Today I’m going to deviate from this slightly and talk about the real time clock registers / RAM that are available on some (many?) ARM processors as well as I suspect a number of other architectures. An excerpt from the NXP data sheet […]
Category: Hardware
An embedded systems hardware test – a collaborative effort
Regular readers will probably be aware that back in 2000 I wrote an article for Embedded Systems Programming magazine entitled A ‘C’ Test: The 0×10 Best Questions for Would-be Embedded Programmers. In the intervening years I have often thought that it would be entertaining / useful to come up with a similar test—except this time I […]
Configuring hardware – part 3
This is the final part in a series on configuring the hardware peripherals in a microcontroller. In the first part I talked about how to set / clear bits in a configuration register, and in the second part I talked about putting together the basic framework for the driver. When I finished part 2, we had got […]
Configuring hardware – part 2.
This is the second in a series on configuring the hardware peripherals in a microcontroller. In the first part I talked about how to set / clear bits in a configuration register. Now while setting bits is an essential part of the problem, it is by no means the most difficult task. Instead the real problem is […]
Configuring hardware – part 1.
One of the more challenging tasks in embedded systems programming is configuring the hardware peripherals in a microcontroller. This task is challenging because: Some peripherals are stunningly complex. If you have ever configured the ATM controller on a PowerQUICC processor then you know what I mean! The documentation is often poor. See for example just […]
DigiView Logic Analyzer
Today is one of those rare days on which I recommend a product. I only do this when I find a product that has genuinely made my life easier, and which by extension I think will also make your life easier. The product in question is a DigiView logic analyzer. Now the fact that logic analyzers […]
Hardware vs. firmware naming conventions
Today’s post is motivated in part by Gary Stringham. Gary is the newest member of EmbeddedGurus and he consults and blogs on what he calls the bridge between hardware and firmware. Since I work on both hardware and firmware, I’m looking forward to what Gary has to say in the coming months. Anyway, I’d recently read his […]
Voltage gradients in embedded systems
Today’s’ post was prompted by an excellent comment from Phil Ouellette in a recent newsletter from Jack Ganssle. In a nutshell Phil was advocating strobing switches with an alternating voltage waveform, rather than a direct voltage in order to minimize corrosion and premature switch failure. This happens to be an area in which I have some experience […]
Hardware costs versus development costs
Earlier this year I posted about how to solve the problem of PIC stack overflow. As part of that article I asked the question as to why does anybody use a PIC anyway when there are superior architectures such as the AVR available? Well, various people have linked to the posting and so I get a […]
Lowering power consumption tip #2 – modulate LEDs
This is the second in a series of tips on lowering power consumption in embedded systems. LEDs are found on a huge percentage of embedded systems. Furthermore their current consumption can often be a very large percentage of the overall power budget for a system. As such reducing the power consumption of LEDs can have a dramatic […]