Selecting a build system is an essential decision when creating a project. Changing is always painful, especially in a mature repository. Therefore the choice should be made carefully. With this article, I will try to describe a few advantages of what Bazel can provide in the context of an embedded repository and show how to set up a build environment with a cross compiler from scratch.
Tracealyzer version 4.8 will be released in the first week of June, with major optimizations and improvements for Zephyr RTOS, and support for 64-bit target processors (FreeRTOS, Zephyr and SafeRTOS only). In addition, the ESP32 support is upgraded to use the latest TraceRecorder library, supporting all recent versions of ESP-IDF up to v5.2 dev. Snapshot tracing is now primarily supported by the implementation for streaming mode, using the RingBuffer stream port.
Zephyr includes many built-in features like stacks for networking and BLE, Flash storage APIs, and many kernel services. These components allow you to quickly get up and running with a project and maintain less code! Taking advantage of these is a huge win for small firmware teams and was a huge motivation in bringing Zephyr to my teams. This post covers Zephyr’s built-in ring buffer API, a component commonly used in producer-consumer scenarios.
The Docker project was initiated by dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company that created Docker to run their internal infrastructure. Slowly, Docker became more successful than any of their other products, so dotCloud rebranded as Docker Inc. Docker provides easy-to-use tooling and grew into an entire ecosystem for container management.
Recently, our team at Meteksan Defense is upgrading its development environment to use newer versions of many tools and programming languages. One of the more difficult transitions has been the upgrade of our C++11 code base to C++17 for our embedded applications. In this article, I will be showing some features of C++17 that can also be helpful in the embedded world. Note that the migration from C++11 to C++17 covers C++14 also, hence I will touch upon some aspects of it as well.
A core belief of Memfault is that we can ship faster when we have good infrastructure in place. An essential piece of this infrastructure is tools to send firmware updates over the air. It enables the team to ship more often and spend more time building features. In this article, we look specifically at what is required to ship over-the-air firmware updates for Linux systems. A good OTA setup should allow you to quickly prepare updates and ship them with confidence.
A look at the main things you need to consider when planning your IoT project with links to tutorials and source code. There’s a lot of stuff written about the Internet of Things (IoT) at a conceptual level that doesn’t really cover anything concrete. If you’ve ever wanted to get started on a real IoT project but didn’t know where to start, you are in the right place.
This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. Selecting the tools that best fit your IoT data and workloads at the outset will make your job easier and faster in the long run. Today, Internet of Things (IoT) data or sensor data is all around us. Industry analysts project the number of connected devices worldwide to be a total of 30.9 billion units by 2025, up from 12.7 billion units in 2021.
