issue 13 - Embedded systems newsletter

Embedded systems #13

Welcome! This is the 13th embedded systems weekly issue. To start this issue I have a question for you: How do you see the future of Android in the embedded systems? React on Facebook or on Twitter .

Hardware

8 Free eBooks On Microcontrollers
A collection of microcontrollers PDF on usual suspects, pic microcontrollers and 8051 microcontrollers. If you are a student or a beginner and you plan a project, this page can be one of your programming microcontroller resource.

AVR half-duplex software UART supporting single pin operation
Ralph Doncaster share a very clever trick to get an half-duplex UART by using only one pin of your microcontroller. With an external circuit very small, just one transistor, one resistor and one diode, and the code written in assembly, the TTL serial interface supports the classic 115200 baud rate.

I2C Protocol (2-Wire Interface) in a nutshell
I2C protocol is used so often in embedded systems that I can’t remember one custom board that I have work on, without it. This article is a clear and quick introduction to the bare minimum needed to start programming communication over I2C.

Software

Do Not Re-Enable Interrupts In An ISR
A very interesting article by Phil Koopman on the potential problems you can have if you re-enable interrupts in your interrupt service routines. Even if it should not be taken as a mandatory rule the question makes us aware of the potential problems.

rusEFI An attempt to build an Engine Control Unit based on stm32
Many electronic control units (ECU) are embedded in cars and among them there is the specialized engine control unit (ECU too) also called powertrain control module (PCM this time). rusEFI is a project that aimed to create an open source, open hardware engine control unit. rusEFI is already functional.

Bare Metal Programming in C
This is exactly bare metal programming in C on the the Raspberry-Pi. The author immediately leaves aside the Linux distributed with the Rpi to guide us step by step through a tutorial to make blink a led without any kernel at all.

Implementing a JIT Compiled Language with Haskell and LLVM
In the LLVM official documentation you can go through tutorial to create a toy language called Kaleidoscope. Stephen Diehl ports this tutorial to Haskell. It’s very interesting to complete our knowledge on compilers.

Vedis An Embeddable Datastore Engine
Vedis defines itself like Redis for embedded systems. Vedis does not have any dependencies, can be installed without any setup and use a database file format truly cross-platform. (no endianness dependency)

Misc

Android OS, The Future Of Embedded Systems
A well done infographic that describes why Android is becoming a good choice for embedded systems.

Intel® Edison Development Board The SD* card-sized computer
Intel releases an amazing development board that is as small as an SD card. This is a step towards the microscopic embedded system.