article3 min read
NuttX First Impressions: A POSIX RTOS With Real Trade-offs
NuttX is the only embedded RTOS I know that takes POSIX seriously. That fidelity has a cost in footprint and build complexity.
Mar 8, 20240 views
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Embedded Systems
Microcontroller programming, real-time systems, IoT development, and firmware engineering
50 articles•Updated regularly•Curated by Manish
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MCU War Stories, Part 10: Clock Drift Between Two CAN Nodes at -40°C
Two CAN nodes with 1% crystal tolerance behaved fine at room temperature. At -40°C the bit timing diverged enough to produce intermittent frame errors. The diagnosis took a temperature chamber and a logic analyzer.
March 20, 2024
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article3 min read
Zephyr West Workspace: A Reproducible Dev Environment in 2024
West workspaces are powerful and under-documented. A setup that works across macOS, Linux, and a CI container with pinned tool versions.
Mar 5, 20240 views
article4 min read
Zigbee vs Thread vs Z-Wave for Smart Home IoT: A 2024 Comparison
Thread uses IPv6 over 802.15.4 and integrates cleanly with IP networks. Zigbee has a larger device ecosystem. Z-Wave's dedicated 915 MHz band avoids 2.4 GHz congestion. The trade-offs for a new deployment.
Feb 26, 20240 views
article3 min read
Zephyr vs FreeRTOS Scheduling: Notes From a Migration
We migrated a mid-complexity sensor hub from FreeRTOS 10 to Zephyr 3.4. The scheduler semantics differ more than the docs admit.
Jan 22, 20240 views
article4 min read
MCU War Stories, Part 9: The Analog Watchdog That Saved a Field Deployment
An out-of-range ADC reading from a damaged sensor was locking up our state machine every few days. The STM32 analog watchdog caught it before the next field visit.
Jan 15, 20240 views
article20 min read
Real-Time Operating Systems: FreeRTOS vs Zephyr Performance Analysis
Comprehensive comparison of FreeRTOS and Zephyr RTOS for embedded applications, including memory usage, real-time performance, and development ecosystem analysis.
Jan 10, 2024110 views
article30 min read
Designing Low-Power IoT Sensors with Ultra-Long Battery Life
Complete guide to designing IoT sensors that run for years on a single battery using advanced power management techniques and energy harvesting.
Jan 8, 2024246 views
article4 min read
Interrupt Latency on Zephyr: Measuring What the Docs Don't State
Zephyr's interrupt handling adds overhead over bare-metal. Measuring that overhead on nRF5340 with a GPIO toggle and a scope reveals the real numbers.
Jan 8, 20240 views
article38 min read
Custom ARM Cortex-M Bootloader Development for Secure OTA Updates
Learn to develop a secure bootloader for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers with encrypted firmware updates, rollback protection, and fail-safe recovery mechanisms.
Jan 5, 202470 views
article4 min read
CAN FD vs Classical CAN: A Practical Trade-off Table
CAN FD doubles the data phase bitrate and extends the payload to 64 bytes. The transceiver choice and EMC implications follow from those two facts in non-obvious ways.
Nov 28, 20230 views
article3 min read
Rust no_std DMA on Cortex-M: What the Tutorials Skip
Getting DMA transfers working in a no_std Rust environment on Cortex-M is straightforward until it isn't. Memory ownership and interrupt safety are the hard parts.
Nov 5, 20230 views