This third in a series of five articles exploring getting started with development on the Microchip PIC 8-bit family of processors focuses on basic GPIO (General Purpose Input Output). The initial post looked at some of the Microchip hardware options for getting started with the PIC 8-bit development, discussed Microchip development tools, and wrapped up with setting up a basic ..read more

With the Embedded Online Conference just around the corner, we are very excited to announce an opportunity for you to win one of many amazing prizes, thanks to the generous contributions of DigiKey, Jetperch and Saleae! For a chance to win one of the following prizes, all you have to do is help us with spreading the word about the ..read more

Previously in this EmbeddedRelated article, we saw how to use Buttons Subsystem on NuttX using a RaspberryPi Pico board. Now we will change from user input device (buttons) for something more generic: I2C protocol. NuttX supports a lot of I2C devices (sensors, displays, EEPROMs, I/O Expanders, I2C multiplexers, and many more). And most important: because NuttX is a Linux-like RTOS you ..read more

The Amiga 1000 computer had a little red light, right next to the power switch, but it wasn't just a power indicator. Whenever I – back then, a clueless 12-year-old – tried to run a pirated, cracked game from a worn-out 3.5" floppy, I kept a nervous eye on that light. If it started blinking, it meant that something's gone terribly wrong, the computer is restarting, and I won't be playing ..read more

At least, probably not as often as you think you do. Using a preemptive RTOS ("real-time operating system") can help make a system schedulable (i.e. help all of its tasks meet their deadlines) but it comes at a cost: "concurrently" running tasks can interact in unforeseen ways that cause system failures, that dreaded class of errors known as "race conditions". In part, this is because ..read more

I have often talked and written about my thoughts on programming languages. In particular, the fact that there really is no language that was designed with embedded programming specifically in mind. Historically, there was assembly language, but that is rarely used for large scale coding nowadays. Intel promoted PL/M many years ago, but that has long since fallen by the wayside. C and C++ are ..read more

Mongooses and very small pythons can coexist, and even be friends. This is more a framework than an actual application, with it you can integrate MicroPython and Cesanta's Mongoose. Mongoose runs when called by MicroPython and is able to run Python functions as callbacks for the events you decide in your event handler. The code is completely written in C, except for the example Python ..read more

Overview In the previous blog post (Getting Started With CUDA C on Jetson Nvidia: Hello CUDA World!) I showed how to develop applications targeted at a GPU on a Nvidia Jetson Nano. As we observed in that blog post, performing a calculation on a 1-D array on a GPU had no performance benefit compared to a traditional CPU implementation, even on an array with many elements. In this blog post ..read more

Understaning PIC Configuration This second in a series of five blog posts continues exploring getting started with Microchip’s 8-bit PIC family of microcontrollers by delving into basic processor memory organization and how this family of microcontrollers initialize, specifically: PIC Memory & Registers PIC Configuration Sources Revisiting MPLAB X Project ..read more

While beneficial to embedded developers, the C programming language can be inflexible. For example, have you ever had a function that had to manage multiple types? How did you solve that problem? I bet you either duplicated that function, which led to confusing code or used a complex series of macros. Neither of those is terribly helpful because it creates code that is difficult to maintain ..read more