article27 min read
SPI Bus Debugging: When CPOL/CPHA Gets You at 3 AM
Clock polarity and phase mismatches are boring until your sensor returns all-zeros at midnight during bring-up. A systematic approach to sorting it out fast.
Sep 17, 202150 views
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Embedded Systems
Microcontroller programming, real-time systems, IoT development, and firmware engineering
33 articles•Updated regularly•Curated by Manish
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ADC Noise Floor on STM32: Decoupling, Layout, and Oversampling Strategy
The 12-bit ADC on an STM32 rarely achieves 12 ENOB in practice. The gap between datasheet and bench is explained by supply noise, layout, and the reference — and fixable.
October 11, 2021
26 min read
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article30 min read
Flash Write Endurance: Counting Cycles in Production Firmware
Writing to the same flash page on every sensor sample will kill the MCU before the product's warranty expires. Wear leveling strategies for internal flash.
Jul 19, 202144 views
article27 min read
Oscilloscope Trigger Cheat Sheet for Embedded Work
Edge, pulse-width, serial decode, runt — a practical reference for the triggers I actually use when debugging firmware on real hardware.
Jun 10, 202144 views
article29 min read
Heap Fragmentation in Long-Running Embedded Systems: Diagnosis and Mitigation
A product that runs for months will fragment its heap in ways that 24-hour QA testing never reveals. Static allocation, pool allocators, and when to give up on dynamic memory.
Feb 14, 202142 views
article26 min read
PID Controller Tuning on a Thermal System: Manual vs Ziegler-Nichols vs Autotuner
Thermal systems have large time constants and pure dead time that make Ziegler-Nichols overshoot badly. What actually worked and how I validated it without an industrial process tool.
Dec 7, 202046 views
article28 min read
UART at 4 MHz: When Baud Rate Tolerance Actually Matters
Most UART tutorials show 115200 baud where framing errors are rare. At 4 Mbaud the 3% tolerance in the spec becomes a real engineering constraint.
Sep 14, 202050 views
article25 min read
JTAG Debugging Without a Hardware Debugger: OpenOCD + Black Magic Probe
A Black Magic Probe built from a $4 STM32F103 board gives you a GDB server directly over USB. Setup, SWD pinout, and the one gotcha on multi-core targets.
Jun 15, 202048 views
article27 min read
SWD vs JTAG: When the Choice Actually Matters
SWD uses two wires vs JTAG's four and works fine for single-core flashing and debugging. The cases where JTAG's daisy-chain and boundary scan capabilities are worth the extra pins.
Nov 25, 201950 views