Lua is one of the many great interpreters that can be run on embedded devices. It’s fast, uses little memory, is written in ANSI C, and is known by plenty of developers. These are a few of the many reasons why the team at Panic chose to include a Lua interpreter on their Playdate device and allow games to be written in it. You can think of Lua as an alternative to the MicroPython (Python) or JerryScript (Javascript) interpreters. However, there’s a problem.

This article provides a few tips and tricks for diagnosing ccache misses, to keep your C/C++ build nice and snappy!

I’m Donatien, co-founder of Blecon, where we provide device connectivity to the Internet using only Bluetooth. In my previous lives working in the IoT division at Arm and my previous start-up, our teams constantly wrestled with debugging firmware bugs on remote devices.

Firmware update capability has become a must-have for most devices. Whether to add new features after launch, fix bugs, or urgently patch a security hole, firmware updates gives modern teams the flexibility they need to move fast and react to a changing environment. I’ve written at length about firmware updates in the past, including on Interrupt with a Firmware Update Cookbook and a post about code signing, and even recorded a webinar on the topic.

There are too few C/C++ testing libraries designed for embedded devices. The traditional libraries are not designed for constrained resources and rely on host functionality like a filesystem or standard output. In this post, I detail why I’ve decided to design a new testing library for microcontrollers and cover the rationale, design choices, and thoughts on the prototype. Like Interrupt? Subscribe to get our latest posts straight to your mailbox.

Selecting the best chip can be tedious work but the best chip can save you a lot of time and money, and might even be faster! So should you spend time finding the best? I have some words on the topic. If a primary goal of your next project is to learn a new MCU, you want to create something easily reproducible, or if there will be only one machine building the project, then I recommend you to go with the chip you want to learn, the chip most readily available, or the easiest one to work with.

Large applications can produce very large symbol files when debug information is enabled (especially at the higher, more verbose levels of debug info!). This article describes some techniques for reducing debug symbol file sizes! Like Interrupt? Subscribe to get our latest posts straight to your mailbox.

This article takes a look at a few different aspects of C structure initialization. In particular, we’ll look at when it matters, the current state of things in Clang and GCC, recommendations, and the ✨ future ✨. Time to dive into this very niche, but occasionally hazardous corner of the C language!

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this January. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

As much as I enjoy writing firmware, I am, at heart, a hardware engineer. I love hunting for minutia in chip datasheets. I love fiddling with eval boards, tacking on wires, and reworking nets together. I love flipping through The Art of Electronics, finding a new circuit, and piecing through its operation. This is why, when invited to write for Interrupt, I jumped at the chance to write about a hardware-related topic that’s near and dear to my heart: debug tools.