Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis

"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"

Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."

*Get transferred*

"Hello this is the supervisor"

Me: "fml"

"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"

Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"

"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"

Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"

I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol

Random tip:

A Decrementing loop that compares against a zero is faster (even though insignificant on current hardwares)
than an Incrementing loop that compares against a constant/variable.

For example:

for( i = num; i != 0; i -- )

is faster than

for( i = 0; i != num; i ++ )

The difference shows up significantly on resource constrained hardwares such as 8-bit microcontrollers.

More details in comment.

At the beginning of an interview...

HR girl: You know, that position you applied is already taken but I found some similar in our company.
Me: Uhm, ok?
HRG: What about this one? It's some programming... *pointing at some IT position regarding db maintenance* Do you want to try that?
Me: Sure, why not.

I was applying to student position at embedded firmware development at the time. I did some school project with MySQL but it was few years back and I happily forgot most about it.
Anyway, story continues.

IT manager: Hi, I heard you want to join our lines.
Me: That is what I heard as well.
IT: Eh?
Me: I came for completely different position actually.
IT: Uhm, ok. We have standardised test, let's see what you can do.

It was some basic stuff for db guys but I was totally lost. I was done after 3 minutes returning nearly blank paper.
We shaked hands, both agreed this is not well fit for me and I went away.

After this botched attempt HR girl remembered that there is another team looking for embedded developer students. I was accepted.

Corporates are marvelous.

!rant
Worked all day and got my embedded systems project working the first time! Bluetooth as well! 😁

It's a Fitbit clone that keeps track of steps that I did from scratch and writing the companion app from scratch as well in flutter/dart. Ask any questions if you're curious!

This is why my embedded system keeps crashing

Beauty (crazyflie) and the beast (me).
A continuation of the vision based control for nano-drones project I posted a while ago.
I am super grateful for my advisors for investing in me more than I thought I deserve.

At a friend's party, I met one of the guys I've known from High school, and talk about what we've become:

Him: ...so yeah, now I study CS, I code some C, I dislike Java, blablablablabla I'm coding some OS and embedded software, blablablabla, and you, what do you code in?

Me: Oh, I learned everything I know by myself, still learning, and I'm mostly doing some PHP and Javascript. Doing websites and apps is cool.

Him: but those aren't programming languages? I mean, you can't manage memory, and blablablabla-

Me: Ó_Õ * Quickly dashed my ass off to talk with some ladies and boozed myself to forget what I just heard *

I seriously just got invited to a second interview 😂

"Europe to make it illegal to change the OS on radio devices like smartphones, routers and embedded devices."

I don't know what to say anymore

Recruiter logic

"We see you have JS experience, how about a job as a Senior C Embedded systems engineer, we can only pay 30$ an hour "

My mother used to code a good 30 years ago (embedded development for plane engines), but nowadays always fear doing something wrong on her computer/smartphone.

It's a bit depressing to see how someone who used to be a developer is now so fearful of computers.

On the plus side, she is very respective of my time, and will wait 2/3 weeks for me to come home to fix a simple thing, and generally don't bother me with things she can do herself, once I explain to her how to do it.

Last time was cleaning laptop fans. Seeing how you need to disassemble half of it to clean that, I can understand anyone not wanting to do it.

This was my day at work today
-Be me at work
-Use git terminal on WORK PROVIDED MacBook
-Decide to clone into a repo into another repo as it was one project inside another project
-Makes changes to code
-Attempts to add .
- warning: adding embedded git repo ...
-Apparently needs submodules
-Shit doesn't get added
-During this get asked to create 2 new branches and modify some code
-Do that specifying files to add as add . breaks everything
-Has 3 branches now detached from master
-Super confused where anything is and what's going on
-Go back to branch for other repo to get added to
-Spends 30 minutes trying to understand submodules
-Gives up and deletes folder moving it elsewhere
-Commits begin failing everywhere. Super confused.
-Get everything figured out and commiting
-Goto merge all branches to master
-Merge conflict with .DS_Store
-FML

I think I'm done guys

That's another semester completed!

Hai devRant! Working on the privacy app and want opinions on the page for details on specific apps (as in, applications so web/app/mobile or even embedded?!).

Yeah I know that the aligning is deffo not perfect but hey, gotta start somewhere :). Detail: everything you see here (the content and actually also the icon path) is rendered from the database already.

Tips/opinions?

"So what do you study?"
"uhm.. Embedded Systems."
*confused look*
*sigh* "Programming"
"Oh, OK!"

Client: "I cannot understand why the page loads so slowly"
Me: "Maybe it's because of the 68 YouTube videos you just embedded"

Someday in an embedded course:

Lecturer: "You'll want the following drivers and SDK for this lecrure. With some tweaks it'll also work on Windows."

Guy with shiny Mac infront: "What about Mac?"

Lecturer: "WTF? You don't use Mac for embedded systems." o.O

Me: lol 😁

So I got a call from a recruiter this morning, about a job for a C++ developer what experience developing for embedded systems.

He sent my resume off to the company and they actually want an in person interview the same day.

I'm going to this interview in 2 hours, I'm really nervous, I haven't had an interview in years...

Wish me luck!

Lost a bet and switched from Vim to VS Code for a day. Ten minutes into, I found myself editing gitignore in the embedded terminal. Something went wrong.

All embedded and design engineers can relate

it’s hard, it’s brutal, it’s merciless !!!

Give me a 10 year old application with no comments, layers of spaghetti code, global variables, embedded SQL, and a text editor with no debugging; just don’t make me write Excel formulas.

I’m on the bus going to my first day at a new internship as a embedded C developer. Feeling very excited abou it .

Hackathon: being a C and embedded dev and everybody like: let's do webz! Or appz!

Didn't it take us years to stop writing javascript and html embedded? Is it just me or are we going back where we started? It's all a mix now!

Got an offer.
Should I just accept my fate as a code hamster?

LED! Please, embedded programmers: STOP blinking LEDs, if you don't require immediate attention!!

That phone that would blink through the night charging, I had to put a blanket on it D:<<

I *hate* how being a hacker nowadays gets you so much bad cred. I do things like exploits against embedded devices to be able to understand them and repair them, physical hacks to repair a broken device (like cutting a notch in something to make a replacement part fit), and things like that. Being a hacker does NOT mean I'm part of some government takeover bullsh*t set out to hack the pentagon or rig the election. It also does NOT include mindless banging on a keyboard. And no, I cannot hack someone's facebook for you, track someone's device, etc. Just..no.

I should add to my list of skills "managing to keep the interviewers entertained for 90 minutes, even though I couldn't answer like 90% of their questions".

When working in embedded, you basically write your program, compile it and flash it on some hardware.
Compiling and flashing usually require some black magic commands with lots of parameters so i set up two shortcuts in my terminal
yolo to compile
swag to flash

Understandably i keep it to myself

The guy where I can only shake my head when I see his code, and he is really proud of if implementations, while he

- doesn't care about warnings

- breaks builds and doesn't care

- doesn't care about code styles and indents in a very column based way

- adds tons of comments to his code, mostly hard to understand, and sometimes that much you can hardly find the code

- implements a tokenizer where you have to inherit from its interface (Why would I wanna implement whole functions for a tokenizer and not just use it in place where needed? How do I use two of those in one class?)

- implement a "generic" state machine base class with fixed lengths array of 3 events and 3 strings (Why would I need events and strings hardcoded in a "generic" state machine? Why a maximum of 3?)

- once delivered a software without the needed runtime components, so the whole system (embedded device) wasn't working properly and only by chance missed the point of disabling update mechanisms

- make your ears bleed about his big inventions whenever he sees you, no matter how often he already told you about that blazing new feature

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

Been reading devRant for a while now and I have to say I'm sad about the way the future of the software engineering looks like. Everyone seems to have a lot of hatred towards certain techniques and/or platforms and sad to say, but you are missing a lot.

I have been in the biz for around 15 years and have worked on Win, Linux, Mac, Unix, Symbian, Embedded etc. using all sorts of tools and languages and I must say it has taught me a lot and given diversity on my career and I hope you could also open your mind and start educating yourselves. Theres a world behind your bubble!

Peace and love!

I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.

I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.

All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.

For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.

Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.

To my fellow 🐍 charmers:
You should see in C to understand C, else you'll never see what's in C. It's a big sea, you better start C. 😍

Is it just me or is everyone on here basically a web dev?

Where I work we develop drivers and command-line software for embedded systems. The contracts we have with our customers tend to be in the £100k-£500k range and are usually completed in 6 - 9 months; our team is made up of 20 developers. You would think that it would be worthwhile investing in the department. But no, instead we have to deal with >10 year old build servers on their last legs; limited numbers of development boards with wires soldered on so that we can keep up with new board revisions; no room for R&D into new products; and to top it all off, not one of the executives has a laptop on par with the placement students in the next department. It's like the company is trying to kill the department, we've seen our staffing dwindle with no new graduate (or higher) positions being made available in the last 3 years while we've lost at least 5 people to other places. I just don't get it!

I am having fun building a captured wifi portal. It shows up as "Virus Distribution Point" as an open AP. If you connect to the AP it brings up a page that looks like the picture.

It does nothing except show the page. The page will eventually do some limited javascript animation to make it look like it is doing something.

Right now it is an embedded webpage. Strings in a source file. Eventually I would like to turn this into a product of sorts that would make it easy for someone to use for advertising/pranks. So I expect I will need to create some sort of simple toolset for updating the pages and changing the SSID and the passcode (if any).

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

Last night I compiled my first kernel module!

I'm not talking about a ./configure; make; sudo make install kind of thing...

I wrote, compiled, loaded the module and saw my silly "Hello World!" message on dmesg!

Using some previous experience on embedded I fired up qemu with a fresh buildroot image and the kernel image I just made, thus I can now test and debug without doing kernel changes to my workstation!

So yeah, I'm a little excited :-D

Well, sh*t.

There is special hell for people using GOTO in C and even more special hell for people using it in *this* context.

1 friend who is currently studying in Canada.
I am not aware if he uses devrant or not.

Met him in a national robotic competition 3 years back.
Somehow, we exchanged numbers and nowadays we talk often whenever we get time (considering our busy life and timezone difference)

He is studying robotics and frequently sends me his designs and output with 3D printer.

About me, I left robotics(to be specific embedded) and got a job and working on backend these days.

Though, it's great talking to him and getting to know how the education goes there and his new works.

He also has a beautiful love story(not yet completed) which is another fun part to listen from him.

Our team is currently working with an Excel document that uses visual basic to talk to an embedded system. We're talking reading memory locations in Excel.

Got a new eval board. It came in with a stock firmware, had its own IP and naturally its own webGUI. I wanted to check what was under the hood. So I SSH'd in to the device, and was prompted to enter the username. There weren't any specs or documentation.

*Hmm, let's try root*
User: root
Password: *Eh? Well, what the heck* admin
.
.
.
root@evalboard#

Muhahaha!!! Meet your hacker, eval board!

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

I once saw this comment inside two embedded empty loop :

// WHY, OH GOD WHY!

Turns out somebody deleted the content but not the loop. The next dev added the comment but kept the loop.

I just noticed... a lot of people who are into tech also like anime. Is the love for anime just embedded into our technological souls?

Arduino is like Javascript for Microcontrollers

Hey, hey, if THE SJWs made GitHub rename it's 'master', then what's gonna happen to all the embedded systems people?
I mean, MISO, MOSI?

Blessed be the person whose comments/documentation is embedded with tiny pieces of code.

Recently for a project I needed to read/write ID3 tags from MP3 files. And after a long search, I found this bloated, monolithic but quite stable library, "getID3".

So, I was looking through the code-base and I found this. This guy literally storing the key value based data embedded as comments within the class file. Then wrote a method to parse the data and even used caching to ensure maximum speed! And such usage is repeated all over the code-base.

So, this is what people used do before arrays were invented :3

We are developing a single page APPLICATION which will be embeded into another single page APPLICATION using iframes (!?!?!?!). The embedded SINGLE PAGE application has POPUPS (browser instances, not UI popups) opened. Every app contains at least 75% of the other apps and they do not share common code. Everything in IE11 and ng4.

Well done, T-Mobile!

They have an iOS app to handle contract stuff. That app integrates their shop system via an internal browser.
The shop notifies me, that the used browser is not supported by the shop...

Oh and the browser is an embedded safari on iOS 12.

Sales guy calls up from overseas and complains website we got developed from another vendor is not working.
Being just the middle man who project managed the website development with the offshore vendor, I had no clue what was wrong as the site was working fine and "worksforme" was not going to be acceptable answer for the costumer demo.
Being an embedded drivers guy, had no idea to debug this, except one:
Me: Which browser are you using?
Him: I.E
Me: try any browser other than I.E
Him: it works. Thanks
Boo yeah

Pushed code remotely and told a teammate to run it on the target hardware. He then told me he might of blown up $6000 worth of equipment. Then he says "Never mind everything works."

World record for biggest heart attack?

UI Is the bane of my existence. I'm an embedded programmer i mainly deal with drivers daemons low level stuff no UI involved. why do they keep assigning mobile apps to me man ! #FML

!rant

Today, my true developer saga begins. First job as an embedded developer and I am prepared with my flaming dark themed rubber duck debugger. What could go wrong? :D

Why do clients send everything embedded in a word document. Can you send me the jpeg? I receive a word document. (It's always word 2003 for some reason).

I'm a bit weary of devRant being almost software-exclusive. I want to see more about hardware development here (and not just people playing with Arduinos)!

Electronics guys of devRant: Do you exist? What are you working on? Or is really everyone here a web developer?

(GIF related: My soldering irons heating up, the third one being my weekend project from last weekend. Seeing it coming in last, I'll probably have to tune its control parameters a bit more…)

Second coolest project that I have worked was optimizing an algorithm that used images to speedup by 2000x by parallel processing. While the cpu took 7.34 seconds to process just one image and source, the parallel embedded code did it just in 0.0034 :) The coolest one is still in progress where I am building an Ai for my mac control ;)

Silently rebooting device every night cause of memory leaks in CEF.

Why do websites have to make their html so fucking hard and complicated to read with something like beautifulsoup. Like I just want to scrape your data. Fuck your embedded iframes and div lists. Why must you do this I JUST WANT YOUR DATA

Why is pointers... bit shifting.. malloc.. anything that is regarding embedded development is so hard to grasp...

Okay, first rant here.
Spend most of my morning searching for a js file that was supposed to build some graphs in a report page in this legacy system (still in active development) just to find it embedded inside a random .php file being included inside a wall of if-elses (that shit has around 100 lines) on the index.php (that somehow manages to route all the nonsense that's going on there).. was it really that difficult to make it a proper .js file? and actually import it on the page that is using it? c'mon...

What is the point of disabling the fullscreen button on a youtube video embed?

And funnily enough, I seem to find this on a lot of sites for software, that have a demo video embedded the page or some shit, like a screen recording in this tiny little frame where I can't read anything because it's in this 400 pixel wide box, that I can't fullscreen. I don't understand it at all! What purpose does it serve? You're actually encouraging me to leave your stupid site to view the damn video on youtube.com so I can actually read the text in your stupid ass video.

Why does youtube even give you the option to remove the fullscreen button in your embeds in the first place? They even recently removed some of the "modest branding" features, like hiding the title, or removing the recommended videos at the end, but they thought that this feature was valuable enough to keep?

This may seem irrational to complain about, but I'm confused and befuddled more than anything else? If I'm embedding a video on a website, the last thought I have in my mind is "Oh, I really don't want people to see my video fullscreen. Better make sure I disable that!"

Next month I'm starting my master studies in embedded systems. Currently I have not any knowledge in this topic (made my bachelor in an other part of IT). Any tips or tricks?
Currently I'm starting learning C++ 😅

Created a batch file to modify some system files on our embedded system.

Accidentally double clicked it in my development main machine :(

Man, fm fucking l

First year: intro to programming, basic data structures and algos, parallel programming, databases and a project to finish it. Homework should be kept track of via some version control. Should also be some calculus and linear algebra.

Second year:
Introduce more complex subjects such as programming paradigms, compilers and language theory, low level programming + logic design + basic processor design, logic for system verification, statistics and graph theory. Should also be a project with a company.

Year three:
Advanced algos, datastructures and algorithm analysis. Intro to Computer and data security. Optional courses in graphics programming, machine learning, compilers and automata, embedded systems etc. ends with a big project that goes in depth into a CS subject, not a regular software project in java basically.

What kind of developer are you and what is your opinion on other development areas?

Me: Junior dev, oriented towards full stack and Android(with a sysadmin background):

-Low-level(kernel development, embedded, drivers, operating systems, reverse engineers)- Badass, I wish I could do that.

-Mobile apps- awesome but too high level sometimes.

-Full stack/Backend- awesome.

-Web Frontend- fuck HTML+CSS. JS is cool I guess.

-Enterprise applications(e.g SAP) Pajeet, my son.

-Malware development- Holy shit that is awesome.

-Video Game development- was my dream since childhood.

-Desktop apps- No opinion.

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

While coding in C, I once forgot to add a semicolon at the end of a while loop polling a register value.
The logic required me to make it zero as soon as it read non-zero and continue the rest of the process. Hence the 'while' that missed the semicolon ended up being a single instruction assignment to the same volatile register that I kept polling. This caused synchronisation issue with the FPGA, and my code got stuck in an uncertain infinite loop.
Took me 2 days and a silly, yet valid question from my teammate to figure out the cause of this stupid bug.

I'm convinced this is going to be wildly unpopular, but hey...

Please stop writing stuff in C! Aside from a few niche areas (performance-critical, embedded, legacy etc. workloads) there's really no reason to other than some fumbled reason about "having full control over the hardware" and "not trusting these modern frameworks." I get it, it's what we all grew up with being the de-facto standard, but times have moved on, and the number of massive memory leaks & security holes that keep coming to light in *popular*, well-tested software is a great reason why you shouldn't think you're smart enough to avoid all those issues by taking full control yourself.

Especially, if like most C developers I've come across, you also shun things like unit tests as "something the QA department should worry about" 😬

This Book....

Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.

Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.

Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.

I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.

Long live the embedded developer

Yeah! Have one week to write from scratch a standalone app with an embedded db that I've never worked with in an area that I have close to no knowledge and it's all my fault , wish me luck 🙏

I am going to be interviewed for an embedded programmer position next week. What topics should I review? Can you share your experience from such interviews?
(I still hope to get a phd position, but no harm in checking other options).

Very few general embedded systems books exist, most are specific to chip, or architecture. Very few cover overall ideas, and concepts that are common across ALL embedded systems regardless of architecture and things you must keep in mind while designing software for them.

I think this a a good book. As a primer for deep diving into embedded systems design philosophy

From 1978 comes the original, go to C programming language book. About 200 pages, packed full of the details of the C language. It’s a book that sits on your desk. No matter how many times I’ve read this book I always find something new in it.

Great book written.

Only recently purchased the physical books edition 1 and 2.. in the past I only ever read it on pdf or someone else’s hardcopy.

Being a embedded engineer, shame on me for not having this book at a desk ornament sooner lol.

I'd never imagine that my interests would shift from webapps and servers to embedded devices and measuring 500volts with an arduino....

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

First it was the "set up WampServer so the client can use our database", to which I told her we should use an embedded database, to which she told me to do.

Then the "Just give the client a .jar file and install the JRE in his laptop" to wich I told her we can make a native installer, to which she fucking assigned to me.

Then the whole fucked up management thing with no design whatsoever and the "we don't need version control".

To just a few hours earlier, when she got mad because I set up a Slack for us to exchange information easily, she told me she was already mad because I shared the project by Google Drive and that she worked in security and knows the risk... AND AT THE SAME TIME, she uses Gmail to share the project.. BRILLIANT !

Got an assignment in school to make an easy project in c for embedded real time processors with a free complexity level (it was really early in the course and many had never been programming before).

Since I've been working a few years in development I decided to create an own transmitter and receiver for an own protocol between processors (we had just spent a week to understand how to use existing protocols, but I made my own).

The protocol used only 1 line to communicate with half-duplex and we're self adjusting the syncing frequency during the transmission. I managed to transmit data up to 1 kbps after tweaking it a bit (the only holdback was the processors clock frequency).

Then I got the feedback from our teacher, which basically said:
"Your protocol looks like any other protocol out there. Have you considered using an UART?"

Like yeah, I see the car you built there looks like any other car out there, have you considered using a Volvo instead?

I felt like being the cause for “that dreaded legacy code“ and wrote 250 lines of C preprocessor macros for generating bitfields in a large header file automatically, with the goal of simplifying and clarifying register access for all peripherals in the end. Then, I found out that SDCC's optimisation for bitfields is absolutely awful (if existent at all), and I don't really want to use these abstractions if they have a performance impact.

Did I deserve that?

I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...

well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.

I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.

So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.

client "it's ok we have a logo"

2 days later... receive a Word doc in an email with clients pixelated logo embedded

Arguing with a co worker.... he is writing a serial data plotter, and wants me to send the data as text. I’m like ugh no I’m not wasting bandwidth for text data, you are getting it as binary, as my embedded system has a lot of other stuff todo than send debug info, so the quicker I get the data to you the better... plus his program is running on a pc there is no issue regarding resources handling binary data.

He tells me I’m am wrong, and is trying to defend his stance, then all the electrical engineers and other software engineers all stand up and said why in the hell would it be faster to send text than binary? He has no response.

I'm an embedded devices dev. As part of my job I take off the shelf devices and write libraries so that our JavaScript team can interface with them. If I have to deal with one more custom implementation of a standard protocol I'm going to freak the fuck out. Like fuck there are only 5 or so major communication protocols at the hardware level there is no fucking reason to reinvent some shittier protocol over a well documented, widely used protocol that has been around for 30 years. (Modbus for anyone who cares)

Many people here rant about the dependency hell (rightly so). I'm doing systems programming for quite some time now and it changed my view on what I consider a dependency.
When you build an application you usually have a system you target and some libraries you use that you consider dependencies.
So the system is basically also a dependency (which is abstracted away in the best case by a framework).
What many people forget are standard libraries and runtimes. Things like strlen, memcpy and so on are not available on many smaller systems but you can provide implementations of them easily. Things like malloc are much harder to provide. On some system there is no heap where you could dynamically allocate from so you have to add some static memory to your application and mimic malloc allocating chunks from this static memory. Sometimes you have a heap but you need to acquire the rights to use it first. malloc doesn't provide an interface for this. It just takes it. So you have to acquire the rights and bring them magically to malloc without the actual application code noticing. So even using only the C standard library or the POSIX API can be a hard to satisfy dependency on some systems. Things like the C++ standard library or the Go runtime are often completely unavailable or only rudimentary.
For those of you aiming to write highly portable embedded applications please keep in mind:
- anything except the bare language features is a dependency
- require small and highly abstracted interfaces, e.g. instead of malloc require a pointer and a size to be given to you application instead of your application taking it
- document your ABI well because that's what many people are porting against (and it makes it easier to interface with other languages)

Do you guys think it’s time “Hackers” gets its 2020 remake? I know it was cheesy for its time (1995) but 8 year old me was INTO that music video montage direction and that movie inspired was what inspired me to get into tinkering with electronics/embedded systems.

Rewatching it tonight and the casting is so on point, too.

Ye, so after studying for an eternity and doing some odd jobs here and there, all I can show for are following traits:

* Super knowledgeable in arm/Intel assembly language
* C-Veteran with knowledge of some sick and nasty C-hacks/tricks which would even sour the mood of your grandma
* Acquired disdain of any and all scripting languages (how dare you write something in one line for which I need a whole library for!)
* All-in-all low-level programmer type of guy (gimme those juicy registers to write into!)

After completing the mandatory part of my computer science studies, all I did was immerse myself into low-level stuff. Even started to hold lectures and all.

Now I'm at the cusp of being let free into the open market.
The thing is: I'm pretty sure that no company is really interested in my knowledge, as no one really writes assembly anymore.

Sure, embedded programming is still a thing, but even that is becoming increasingly more abstract, with God knows how many layers of software between the hardware and the dev, just to hide all the scary bits underneath.

So, are there people in here who're actually exposed to assembly or any hands-on hardware-programming?
Like, on a "which bit in which register/addr do I need to set" - kind of way.

And if so, what would you say someone like me should lookout for in a company to match my interest to theirs?
Or is it just a pipe dream, so I'd need to brace myself to a mundane software engineer career where I have to process a ticket at a time?

(Just to give a reference: even the most hardware-inclined companies I found "near" me are developing UIs with HTML5 to be used in some such environment ....)

So I work on Embedded System. While working on my project I was drinking water from bottle.

And kept it near my laptop.

Just there all my circuits were open. Connected via USB with my laptop.
And while working I tried grab the bottle and guess what?
Yeah, It fell. But thankfully it didn't touch any of my circuits. If it did!!!!

I was frozen on spot.
Phew!!

So pumped!! I just signed for my apartment for my first dev job starting this summer!

This MOTHERFUCKER was hiding from me for three FUCKING DAYS now! All the damn time I had corrupt display memory cause of it!

Context: CS and DC were accidentally swapped on the PCB! Not a hardware issue thou. The pins can be remapped in software.

Company is about to get certified to ISO 9001:

Kick-off meeting with consultant announced weeks ago, mandatory for all employees.
Everyone is kind of joking about it, but also looking forward to certain workflows maybe changing to the better.

Two hours before meeting, told by CTO not to attend.

Some code I hadn't touched for half a year needs urgent patching to make the equipment pass EMC test (doing so within a few hours would help us save the lab cost for another day of testing).

When they applied RF noise to the bus lines, the CAN peripheral would glitch and need reset, this should happen covertly the first few times without raising any error to the user, so they could just finish the testing without being disturbed by the error - and the EMC lab will not test the functionality of the device after all.

The irony when you were actually supposed to learn about quality that day...

My wife often listen my rants about stupid clients, she thinks that I hope to much from them. Like image as actual image not fucking embedded in word document.
Today she agreed to help her friend and make name cards for tables. Got list of names ;) one photo of paper with hand written names on it :D

So I'm taking embedded systems subject in my masters course. They have mixed this subject's content with electrical engineering and I'm a computer science graduate. Everything was perfect until I reached to GPIO board.
Wtf is this shit?
Why it has so many holes and what are they for?
What I'm supposed to do with it?
What is ground? Transistor?
Why I'm connecting to two pins only instead of the 4 pins of a button?

Thanks to pi4j i think i will pass the subject!

it was my first job as an embedded engineer i was hired to write firmware for arm microcontroller that has ble radio. But the microcontroller we used didn't have FLASH it had a SRAM and an otp ( one time programmable) memory. In ble you can make a proximity beacon and When a phone passes by this beacon it will get a notification '<device_name> nearby'
. I thought it is funny if i keep device name 'MILF' (original name of device is FLIP ) so when somebody's phone is in proximity it will have a notification 'MILF nearby'. joke didn't work as nobody has their bluetooth switched on by default ,but i forgot to change it before programming otp memory.

i just buried that device and told everyone it is not working properly

bool firstRant = true;

Hey all,
I've been lurking for a few weeks. I just got my first ever full time position as an embedded systems programmer for a small-ish company. For context, my background is with application devlopment, not embedded systems, so I am surprised I even got the position.

Regardless, I am kind of pissed off because the pay is only like $13.50 an hour (I live in California, the minimum wage here is $11.00 an hour.) I think it is bullshit but this job is my best option. Im still fucking salty and I know people woth internships that pay $20 an hour.

So our new hardware guy who is being managed by our lead embedded developer had the task of designing me an expansion board for my Linux board. The Linux board uses the 40 pin expansion like the raspberry, bananna and orange pi family and as you all know there are many different types of expansion boards for this.
I said at the start come to me and tell me what you want to connect to before deciding which pin you connect to so it is less work for me with Linux board configs and drivers.............
No no no we will sort it all... erm.....
So today they come ask me if they can use an SPI port for GPIO and I am like erm... why there is plenty of GPIO...
It turns out they have been designing the board based on the pin outs of an expansion board and not the actual connector of the Linux board.. I mean seriously WTF!

Currently i am working as a student at a teaching chair for embedded systems, so my boss is the professor there and the subject of this weeks story 😄

He is very passionate about his field and keeps close contact to the students and their representatives.
He invests a lot of resources into getting students to learn and make projects and pays us to supervise a hands on course for students to build IoT projects.
As employees we get to work on interesting projects and he listens to us and our concerns if we feel a project is having certain problems.

When a Field Tech emails you about a problem and the screenshot is embedded in a Word Document. WTF, why can't they send it as a f'ing jpeg, gif, or IDK a png?

BAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

One of my interviews....
Interviewer: Do you know the welknown hack that increases the speed of embedded tomcat two times than default??
Me: what?? it even exists???
interviewer: yes... it exists... I know it... normally I share the answers with the interviewees... are you interested to hear the hack???
Me: Hell yeah...
Interviewer: ohh no... I will not share with you...
me: whyyy???
interviewer: I don't like your current boss...
Me: Fuck my life(inaudible)... facepalm..

Not too long ago, I was looking over my friend’s HTML with embedded CSS code. He had two separate style tags. I looked at him and asked: “Why do you have two style tags?”

He responds: “Because I’m a lazy boi”

Today I'm beginning my third year of Bachelor in embedded computing. And just as last year, I'm bored as fck. "Learning" the same stuff over and over, and wasting my time when I could be at work as a PHP developer ... FML

There are several categories of software development that I know of: front-end, back-end, full-stack, game, mobile, embedded etc., but what is the term for developing libraries and/or CLI utilities in languages like C++, Python, Go etc. that are not related with any of the above? System development doesn't seem wrong but I was wondering what's the correct term for it in the industry because I need to mention it in my resume and on LinkedIn.

Also, if there's a lesser-known category that you work on then do tell us all about it 🙂

Today's GDPR-Bullshittery.

So we are using an open source remote update system for updating our embedded devices.
And today we learned that, that system logs ip-adress'. And low and behold mr.GDPR says that is a no no.

So either we completely drops it, finds a new update system and implements it..
Sift through all the source code of the update system "fix" it and recompile it.
Or we setup a Man in the middle attack on ourselves. To mask the ip-adress'.

GDPR encouraging hacking ourselves I fucking love it!

!rant

I love the first weeks after a job change. It's just like falling in love, everything seems to be perfect until you take off the pink glasses.

Have to wait until I'm assigned a burning project to have a full picture.

Actually I am in a burning project. Deadline in 2 weeks. Doing Bugfixes which do not require in-depth project knowledge, and... It's fine. All a matter of perspective. I also think that project based work suits me more than usual 15y old legacy enterprise shit. And I'm able to switch. From embedded C++ over hardware dev to fullstack .NET (I consider myself as a full-fullstack dev, able to do everything from hardware to frontend).

Topics such as IOT, medical, device engineering, machine learning. Wow.

It's my first company having >50 employees and multiple offices in multiple countries. I used to jump every 2 years from one shitty garage company to another.

Wish me good luck ✌️

Anyone else enjoy "uncropping" images embedded in MS Office documents? People cropping out other windows/tabs from full screenshots... I've seen some weird stuff!

It's not unusual to be sent documentation / screenshots saved as MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint etc.). Kinda annoying but whatever.

Development tools for embedded projects shouldn't need fucking internet to operate. Every fucking app needing internet to even startup is getting more and more stupid. I do a LOT of development offline. I usually have my dev machine away from internet for weeks at a time. It very nice to not have to deal with update issues and the like during this time. So naturally I choose tools to do offline programming for both desktop and embedded. So I decided that for my embedded work I wanted to have better environment than Arduino IDE. Now enters VSCode with Platform IO. I download all the target platforms for my boards. I get it all working and installed. Then I take my computer to my non internet location. I fire up VSCode, select the platform, create a test project, and compile the code. Everything is working great. Then I go to upload the code to my board:
"Blah blah blah you need internet first time talking to a board blah blah blah." Seriously? WTF? Who does stupid shit like this? Once you install your dev tools they should be fucking installed! Now I have to drag my fucking dev boards to another location and do a test install just to do fucking offline programming.

FUCK YOU PLATFORM IO!

Notice I don't blame VSCode for this. I know this IDE is very internet dependent, but it works once you get your plugins installed regardless of internet. Unless of course you are doing internet based programming.

Saying Java is good because it runs on 3 billion devices is the same like saying mass public transport is good because it carry billions of people.

In highschool, I was looking around for schools and universities at which I would start my student career. I went to a grad school one day, to see what it was like to be a student there. The first class I visited was programming for embedded systems. We got the assignment to write Java code to control a boom barrier. The teacher had written the template. And I kid you not, the template had a method of around 20 lines of code - without comments - with the purpose of carrying out a logical OR operation. An operation that literally can be done using an operator in Java: |

Why oh why do they let these people teach, with the result that the students will get used to these bad practises...

Who need arrays anyway...

Testers in my team have been told like 1000 times to follow the style guides that we all follow. That's not that big a deal. The big deal is that they were put on this project without having any mathematics background when the project is all about geometric stuff. So after me as a developer having to put so many hours to explain to them why the tests are not covering the requirements or why the tests are red because they are initializing the data completely wrong, I ask them pretty please to do the checks for the coding style and I have already been 4 hours reviewing code because not only I have to go through the maths and really obscure testing code to ensure that the tests are correct, but every line I have to write at least 4 or 5 style corrections. And some are not even about the code being clean, but about using wrong namespaces or not sticking to the internal data types. For fuck shake, this is embedded software and has to obey to certain security standards...

I’ve been trying to implement an alarm clock as an example for my physical computing lecture but the merge of my existing low power clock with my existing state machine based timer is driving me nuts. And I’m the lecturer of this course!

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

Just read a job posting for a junior .Net software dev. 2 years experience in C#, Visual Studio, .Net. Usual suspects right, though two years experience for a junior seems off. But they also want embedded systems experience. wat?

Customer: URGENT, we are not receiving any email. (that's actually a really urgent issue)

Turns out that customer had an invalid base64 embedded image in is signature which was causing our system to crash.

Made invalid images move to oblivion and told the customer the issue was solved :D

Master linux
Master vim
Quit frontend
Get a job in embedded development

You want to change the wifi network to which is your embedded device connected?
It's easy:
- The native process is broken
- ESP is in the correct state, but refuse to communicate with anything
- Restore to default doesn't work
- Flashing default firmware doesn't help
- download the whole NodeJS/NPM
- compile two perl binaries
- bump into 2 year old bug, that your Intel wifi won't connect to the ESP SoftAP
- reinstall the Intel driver, just to find out it's still not fixed
- connect the external Atheros wifi adapter
- connect that shit back to the cloud

And just after little under 4 days of fiddling with GPIO pins it finally works and communicates.

Architect: I've been using this architecture for 20 years now and this works nice since pascal, that's why we are using it in this J2EE app.

This was the justification that I received after hearing that I shouldn't use exceptions, just make the function return a false and add the error message to a embedded message list and make the caller capture it.

So excited about this beast... wish I had a model f... but this will suffice for now.. definitely going to start collecting older stuff. As an embedded software engineer working on AI projects and such give you a good reference point of what was possible in the day with less

It was in old days when I was working in java and windows systems.

Java and different log4j versions across dependencies caused system not working only on production server.

Turned out some of libraries got log4j embedded and conflicted with other log4j.

It worked in all computers except production one.

Actually that was my main reason to switch my career to python after that dependency hell.

Another one was windows server 2008 tcp connection limit set to 200 or something.
We needed to change registry to get our servers working. After this case we finally managed to convince people to switch to linux.

Anyway any non standard error when you got multiple layers communicate with each other is hard, practice make it easier to solve those problems as your success moment comes faster.

Developer vs non developer interview:

Non developer:
How well do you know excel ?

Developer:
How would you write spreadsheet app, what if it was cross platforms mobile application but also desktop app ?

Non developer:
Do you know how to use windows?

Developer:
Do you know kubernetes, distributed systems, lambdas, cloud services and how to deploy to server farm ?

Non developer:
You know how to use printer / fax and coffee machine ?

Developer:
Do you have experience in writing code for embedded devices ?

Non developer:
Do you know powerpoint ?

Developer:
How well do you know javascript / html / css, are you comfortable with writing backend node.js code or electron applications ?
React native and native apps maybe ?

Now everyone were sharing their worksetup I thought I would want too to.
So here it is.
I have two laptops (one belongs to startup I work at) I use same keyboard mouse for both using synergy.
I have my editor and node server in one laptop and I check them out on other laptop (both are medium range laptop hence they are not exactly powerful). I am running Linux mint in both.

Then I have some embedded stuff on desk which is my hobby(currently working on esp8266 dev board that I built).

You can also see a projector clock I built projecting current time on left beside my bigger laptop. (Projection is on wall beside it)

I am about to try TDD for embedded C. Does anyone around here tried that? What are your experiences with it? Thanks!

Cycle counters. Because having a fucking clock is a privilege.

*embedded rant*
Boss finds new chinese supplier for the lcds we use and tells me to make one work so we can see the new quality. All is good.. the lcd works. But at some point I start seeing some defects. Pretty annoying defects.
Boss tells me to explain the defects to the chinese engineers so that they can either fix it or tell us if we did something wrong. So I do it. I explain everything in detail as one engineer to another.
An hour after I submit the email I get called. The boss is furious that the email is bs. His reasons .. " We are working with cheap-ass chinese. None of their engineers know english. How do you expect anyone to understand all that stuff you said?!"
ffs.. i had to dumb it down to 5th grade english..

I was working with my embedded systems friend a few days ago on a website, and since we work with electronics, it was something new.

I then went home and started learning web development.

Holy shit I love it

I will continue to until it’s time to know about JavaScript

Windows Embedded in a bus stop, ok

After working with so many platforms and languages i think OpenSuse and QT5 is the best option for developing desktop/mobile/embedded solutions

NODE CRYPTO YOU PUSS RIDDEN CANCEROUS CYST ON THE SWEATY BALLSACK OF THE INTERNET... fucking explain to me how every mother fucking module in node with require(‘crypto’) in it throws a hissy fit at runtime when I call only 1 file with it in it?! These packages that I’m not fucking using by the way but are nonetheless included by default in node are the ones having a meltdown.. and nodes answer?! Use the embedded functions. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!! If I didn’t need it Node could go and get gang raped by an angry pack of silverback gorillas. Fuuuuuuucccckkkkk yoouuuuu

> Be me
> Programming for an embedded system
> It's not interruptable
> Got ISR Fault (Interrupt Service Register)
> WTF
> Breakpoints are useless
> WTF
> Comment out some lines
> Turns out it goes ISRF Infinite Loop because of the multi dimensional array of strings
> WTF
> Use pointer intead of defining actual size
> Works
> WTF

WTF?

Joomla 1.5 with a custom PHP CMS embedded using Iframes 😥

The application that was working fine on local host failed to do one task which is to read users data from excel and save it on mongo db, in some collection document's embedded document. My last night and today morning was tensed due to this. So I decided to re deploy the same application on another instance that I have. Worked completely fine
😐😐😐

Project Manager: "C++ has become much better for embedded now so we're gonna use it in the new project."

Me: "I didn't C that coming."

I know it's silly but I'm proud of it 🤓

So today (as of 5 min ago) marks a great day for my personal projects! I just got my embedded systems Flash memory driver debugging on my PC in Visual Studio, talking directly to the REAL flash chip, WITHOUT being tied to a embedded target! It's glorious. I can finally debug and write tons of tests without having to worry about the constraints of my embedded system. Ahhh. All the pieces I've needed to build this have slowly come together over weekends, and it feels so good to have this tool in my arsenal now! Great day indeed.

Today we had a cryptolocker running through our file servers. The locker came from a mailicious e-mail from a strange address. The email contained a strange pdf file with an embedded docm file. 6 people out of a workplace of 80 opened that file. These people...

Fuck windows!

Now that I have your attention. My problem is with "IAR embedded workbench", not so much with windows but I'll get to that.
I've used that IDE for a few years.. 2 years ago. Since then I apparently forgot how to even create a project from scratch with adding all the necessary libraries and all that.

My initial deal with a client was to give them a solution using whatever tools I deem necessary. As I recently moved to linux and IAR is not available for that os.. and I also enjoyed working with CLion and PyCharm which Are available I decide to use CLion to write my C project.
A problem was that to compile code for microcontrollers I need tools unsupported by CLion.. oh well. I can do all the compilation and uploading of the code through terminal .. so I make a bash script that does it all. Super convenient. Development is going well and all.. until they ask me for the project.

I sent them the project so that they can see my progress. They can't do shit with what I gave them because they don't even have make on their machines let alone the compiler. All they have is IAR. But the guy that wants to see the code is not really a programmer.. he is a hardware specialist so I can't expect him to do anything more than use what he knows. He doesn't need or want to learn more right now.

So I go to windows and start porting my code to an IAR project and 2 days later I am still stuck with it. FUCK. Not only was the installation process horrible but the tools I wanted to install additionally did not work as promised either.

I know it took me about 2 days to setup all I needed on linux but I was enjoying it every step of the way. While this garbage is frustrating me so much. The fact that I used to do it before adds to the pain.

I am this close to telling them to just look at my code in notepad and I can setup a vm for them in which they can compile it if they really really need to.

If they just told me from the very start that they want me to work with IAR that would have been fine. I would have never seen the easier way and would have gladly figure it out then. Not now.

Is there any hope of getting a job that isn't web related? Every embedded job I've seen requires years of experience. I just want to write C dammit.

Good News: WordPress has decided to update its embedded jQuery version to the latest as of Version 5.0

Bad News: Decided to look up what else to expect with that update, find out the Gutenberg editor is on its way to replace the TinyMCE editor, and will be sweeping meta boxes away along with it...

Anyone here worked a whole lot with low level programming?

I have always worked with high level languages like Python and C++, but I’ve also had an interest in working with embedded systems, real close to the metal.

Any directions on where I should go to start learning low level programming? Sites, languages, etc?

Appreciated devRant fam!😊

Website for a gallery that wanted a 10k website for just 1k ... Must haz super CMS so that they could send me word documents each week so I could manuallly copy paste that shit into the CMS, and somehow extract and restore the lowres embedded images in full resolution ...

I guess it was safe to say this was my first client from hell 😅😂😂😂

The second was a website for some ballroom dude that got my referral from gallery X ... Yup, same shitty type of client

I have a pretty successful project on github

Which I don't think is necessarily my best achievement but all the stuff I do at work is not open

I used the project as a way to learn bash scripting and it kinda caught on.
Sadly I'm not a sys admin or anything I'm more of hardware/embedded engineer but it's still cool to have one of my projects being so used. And I got to learn a little of bash along the way 😁 I now feel super comfortable in a terminal and reading man pages to figure things our which was a skill i lacked previously. I definitely learn better by doing and fixing mistakes along the way

Did I really go to university, have object oriented programming taught to me from scratch and embedded in me as best practice, work with OO frameworks for 3 years and become a damn good web dev just to use Drupal?

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

I have a random question. Does it make me a less of a developer if I say no to a embedded side project proposed by a friend?
I mean I'm all into side projects n building something cool but hardware and embedded stuff isn't something I like or feel passionate about.

Today is just me and my friend, two embedded systems geeks making a website.

It’s going awful but it’s fun as hell😂

I really hate when I have to work on something wrong. I mean, the client wants to embedded a third party service on their website, using iframe. Then, they want us to change the layout and behavior of the embedded page. And well, no matter what, I have to do what they want. Great job.

First patch for buildroot submitted and added applied to master!! 😁

I had the impression that git (like, more than "git add ." was just too complicated and that making patches was some sort of dark magic using some obscure unix tools.

Well, it turns out that is actually pretty easy, fun and exhilarating!!

Looking forward to build up until I'm making contributions to the kernel! 🤓

ESNext (next version of JavaScript) — because no matter what I do, as long as I'm working with web technologies, JavaScript is king. My career has evolved from UI-focused work, primarily working with JavaScript, yet I've also worked on embedded platforms and even operating systems! JavaScript is my foundation and you must always remember your roots!

What do I say to a friend who asks "when there is embedded c, why not embedded python" ?

Reminder, include legal language in next project that says if we're using JIRA then we're using JIRA and not a thousand emails with requirements embedded in spreadsheets and PowerPoints.

You may soon have a new operating system from Google to run on your Raspberry Pi. Details are still extremely sparse, the only description on the GitHub page is “Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)”. But, here’s what we do know:

The new OS, called Fuchsia, will be based on Magenta, which is in turn built on LittleKernel. That means that, surprisingly, Google will not be using a Linux kernel for the new OS but something more like an embedded RTOS. Although Google is targeting embedded systems, the possibility of being able to run it on a desktop has been mentioned, so it may not be too minimalistic.

Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht has named the Raspberry Pi 3 specifically as one system it will run on, and said that it’ll be available soon. But, it seems Google is aiming to make it run on a variety of ARM devices (both 32 bit and 64 bit), as well as 64 bit PCs. This is a direct effort to compete against other commercial embedded operating systems that are currently available, and especially on IoT devices.

Dear Santa,

My name is Steve.

My age is none of your business.

I've been a very good boy this year.

If I could have any present in the world, it would be an embedded, serverless PostgreSQL.

Love,
Steve.

Hello ratnters,
I'm new around here and I'm part of the niche of embedded software developer.
Is there any fellow MCU programmer around here?

Have a great night everyone!

I set up an issue tracker for a software I'm developing for a company. Sent them an invitation to that tracker, stating that I hope to keep discussions more concise and clear that way (they're all HW/Embedded Devs)

The good news is: they've taken to the tracker quite well and are happily reporting issues and discussing them.

The bad news is: they're all sharing a single account.

It's been up for a day now and already no one knows anymore who reported/commented what.

WHY, JUST WHY would you think it's a good idea to share an account between 5 people, maybe more, who knows? Creating one takes less than a minute and it's free ffs.

e = mc²

embedded = more code²

Holy shit! I have not programmed a Teensy micro in a while. So I was looking at what they offer and saw they now have a 600Mhz version that is the same size/pinout as their 72MHz version. I am just amazed by how much micros have changed. I love the embedded wifi chips that are out there too. I guess I am going to be playing with the Teensy the next few weeks. I love playing around with embedded audio processing. Lately I have been playing with bluetooth wireless audio. So this will fit nicely. The chip has 2 AD and assorted digital audio inputs/outputs.

I dunno, I was excited and this seems like a nice new years present.

Html5 vs Adobe flash. Html5 won
Html5 vs java Web embedded app. Html5 won
Therefore Html5 vs java 3 billion devices. Ans=?

Any embedded C programers out there
Rant:I really strugling for work

>Working on code
>Shit works as intended first try, nice
>Goes to play strange bootleg Gameboy Color ROM sent by a friend
>ROM immediately fucking dies
wtf.svg
>Pop emulator's debugger
we're executing from VRAM, stack's firmly embedded in ROM
>why
>Add execution breakpoint to entrypoint of game, restart emulated system (because i'm actually using the legit bios i hacked so it allows null/corrupted games to run)
>Step through everything, everything goes well until all of a sudden we call a function and shit hits the goddamn fan
well we have the culprit
>step through subroutine
if <unused_byte_in_HRAM> != 0 then stackPointer+=32;tryAgain();else return
>***y***
>Realize this is using a bootleg Memory Bank Controller with hard-backed encryption so none of the bytes executed or read as data are the right byte
>Find emulator that'll handle the jank MBC
>read code to try and figure out how it works
if checksumExtendedLogoBlob == some_number then set MBC_Bootleg1 else if checksumExtendedLogoBlob == some_other_number then set MBC_Bootleg2 else if...
>of course
>Spend 10 minutes finding the right bootleg MBC
>code shows 8 possible tables for real bit order based on some value in the cart header
>look for code that gets this value
>not in the header
>not in ANY header in this 1000+ file emulator
>not in any related cpp files???
>get desperate
>email author
>"Delivery failed: email doesn't exist"

fuck me i guess

Now that I've spent a few ineffectual hours too many trying to get it working, I'm starting to think VS Code wasn't built for the purposes I wanted to use it for. I still can't get breakpoints working anywhere close to reliably. And I'd say breakpoints are pretty important.

On a related note, if anyone here has used VS Code together with arm-none-eabi-gdb, I'd love some pointers. I've yet to find any traces on the web of people doing that…

I've been noticing that without any specialization development can become repetitive, as in, a bunch of fancy ways of doing the same CURD operations.

Something that just calls me is low level development, wether it is embedded development (microcontrollers and such) or Linux Kernel and device drivers. I've been polishing my C skills for a while now and started to look into kernel development and uff, is it overwhelming!

I just wanted to see if some of you guys are or had experience in system development and how you got there. Thx!

Today at work I started doing 1 month old task with production problem.

First of all why now ?
Because I already fixed all the other urgent production problems I had during last month, done about 4 deployments of those super urgent errors.
Now I can start with not trivial one that are pending for quite time.
I am the only backend developer in this project ...

This is a dtp application and the problem is that we are not verifying if we got all fonts embedded in customer provided pdf files.

We are generating high quality images of those pdf for printing just fine from the beginning but now we need valid PDF with all fonts embedded in it. ( don’t ask me why I am only a hammer in this process )

After running simple test using python script against database it turned out we have over 500 broken PDF files without fonts.

So I guess I have just one sentence to say about it.

Fuck you PDF format for not being strict and allowing this shit.

Much like traditional engineering I can see software engineering suddenly becoming very very regulated around the world. Different systems safety bodies will open up for things like embedded systems development where their is a risk of harm, mandatory security standards will be put in place etc.

Enjoy the cowboy days ladies/gents/others regulatory bodies are on their way!

The worst technology i had to deal with was probably a piece of hardware. It was a mini-pc combined with sensors and digital IOs and thus, it should have been able to do process control all by itself.

At that time, there was hardware that did that, but this one had an intel cpu, windows embedded and some powerful libraries pre-installed.

Sounds good, didn't work. The thing was so unstable and buggy and crashed on everything. The sensor part had lots of parameters and the right order was trial and error, documentation didn't match behavior, fixes promised but never delivered.

Lucky for us: it was just a demokit, no real project.

I still remember it with a smile. We got in contact to that company at a trade fair and they had most impressive booth. I also remember their companies image movie from their homepage with developers in dark labs with holographic monitors and the boss in his shiny bright office as he looked out of the window and quoted a famous german author.

Hilarious and sad. :-)

Does everyone here either is a web related developer? It seems like embedded software developers are a rare kind in this place.

Soo question for the few embedded engineers on here. Do you guys use microchip’s, or NXP’s SDK for the hardware drivers? Or do you read the ref manual and build the HAL and PAL drivers per the need of the project for less code bloat and saving code space.

I and my coworkers always end up writing the drivers ourselves , so we have a better understanding of the specific hardware of the chip. Just trying to see if We’re the majority or the minority of embedded engineers.

Not really sure how many embedded folks are even on here.

And no not talking about RasPie, and arduino folks (no offense)

I'm thinking of designing a programming language.

I want it to have easy to read syntax like python. Inheritance and interfaces like java. More advanced concepts like pointers and memory management like c++.

I was originally going to write my own compiler but I figured it's not worth reinventing the wheel. So the current plan is to basically just create a parser that turns a source file into c++ code and then that is compiled with g++. The only problem I can think of with that is catching runtime errors.

How does this language sound?

My purpose is to have a language that is as easy to read as python but with the speed of a compiled program and the ability to use it for embedded projects. I feel like reading larger C++ projects can be quite time consuming. So I figure the trade off of taking a little longer to write the code to make it more obvious what is going on is better than having a lot of syntax that can be tough to walk though the logic of (I find this often with c and c++, not like I don't figure it out but It definitely takes longer than it does to read and understand python)

Whenever i get bored at work i try to motivate myself, because i notice that as soon as i am less interested, i loose focus and make mistakes.

Therefore i try to keep motivation up. One thing that helps is actually TDD, because you are able to have several small subgoals, which each leave you with a feeling of achievement, when a test you wrote passed, kinda like achievements in games.

When the task itself is so boring that even TDD doesn‘t help, i try to have fun while painfully working through it. Like have a coffee break every now and then or rant with a coworker about the task.

One time a coworker and me had to create a demo in Unity and we hated the task, because it was exactly this brainless and cumbersome clicking in the Unity3D UI which felt awful to us (we are embedded developers and we find comfort in the terminal 😄)
The only thing that got us through the task was ranting at Unity and periodically goofing around in the engine and adding weird behavior to objects.

How fitting because that just happened today: MOTHERF*CKING Tomcat.

TL;DR:
Tomcat sucks with client side routing (e.g. in angular2).

How hard can it be to provide a web/application server which is properly configurable?
I lost a whole day by trying to get an angular2 project deployed in Tomcat.
It's not that I could not manage to deploy it. But that you need to put all the files in the ROOT folder if Tomcat so that your JavaScript files can be found is the first dumb part.
But that's not enough.

There seems to be no way in Tomcat, short of writing to XML config files and including one jar library, to disable routing go a webapp. And you need to do this when you have a single page application with client side routing.

But yeah, dear boss, I get the part where Tomcat is lightweight, easy to use and does most of the work for you: when you do not use it.

As a side note, so that nobody thinks I have a grudge against the Apache guys: I see the advantages of a Tomcat if you have multiple webapplications written in Java which you need to manage our if you use it as an embedded application server.
But there are just some occasions where a plain old Apache Webserver is better suited.

Another side note: if I just embarrassed myself because those are settings which can be easily applied feel free to tell me 😉

I started early making money with programming, but currently I'm still studying to get into embedded development. My dad is very jealous of me being a programmer. He's biting his ass for not learning programming himself in the early years of c64 and so. He was just fascinated by using a PC, his friends wrote little games. He mainly believes, that he would earn a lot more. (Haha, …)
My mom tho, she doesn't ask about my subject or what I do or will do in future. I think, she doesn't really care but knows I'm doing computer stuff.

Definitely landing the first real gig.

I've been writing software since I was 12 (full disclosure: early code consisted of C=64 BASIC). I learned C in high school. Contributed to a MUD in my 20's. But I never got a CS degree and didn't really understand how hiring works, so I limped along doing technical support for years. Years turned into decades.

About 2 years ago, I became an embedded support person inside a development team. I got to show off my skills, and the year effectively became a live interview. Last October I finally got the title.

On the positive side, by taking the long way around I missed out on some of the insanity of the software world in the 90s/00s.

So I went to a car repair center and asked if they could fix my bike. They said they could but they won't. This is outrageous, obviously a bike is less complicated than a car and they can actually fix it, they just won't because it's "not their job". Unbelievable!

//This didn't really happen of course
//people don't think this is acceptable, but if I won't fix their laptop they are surprised and act the same way. I study ICT (embedded software engineering and cyber security, but they don't understand that so ICT it is) so I HAVE to fix their laptop....
//Non-techies should really learn that just because we can do something, we don't have to do what they ask of us

I’ve been on devRant for a very short period of time and I’ve seen too many posts about PHP fucking people in the ass.

Is it really that bad?(I’m an embedded systems geek so don’t ask me why I don’t know anything about PHP)

I'm worried that this question will probably get downvoted on SO and I cannot post from my account as well, so here it is..

How to play youtube embedded video in mobile over a custom button / svg / image ?

One idea I'm currently working on is to trigger &autoplay=1 onclick but it is only appending that parameter to existing URL?

Please let me know if you have any thoughts, and I'm doing this for only mobile devices only

P.S I cannot use YouTube API