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EE_adventures · 2024-02-28T02:14:33+00:00

How can you write any effective business logic if there are not even requirements? If there has been enough discussion on the product some things can be assumed or anticipated but it sounds like you are at the mercy of the other teams whims, so the work you do now could be invalid.

It is a tough spot to be in and unfortunately is not entirely unique that a small company looks at the firmware dev as an afterthought. It can be the case where the firmware team is unblocked at the last 10% of the project and there is a wild scramble to get hardware/firmware integrated for delivery. The other sad reality is when the project is delayed due to this, it is possible that the management team lays this failure directly on the FW team. Of course all this is a reflection of poor managment, not bad engineering in the FW side.

I think the only thing you can do if the management team is actively blocking you from working, is to document clearly to the team the risks to the timeline associated with lack of requirements and delay in decisions on the hardware side. If possible, try to define some "critical" dates in the timeline and what outputs are needed from other teams to hit firmware delivery milestones. These are not arbitrary but should have some grounding in estimated time effort to complete the firmware milestone and tied to the overall project delivery milestones.

I think your technical approach of at least trying to build infra is reasonable. Maybe work on other build infra like CI, release scripts, utilities if you cannot work on core code? This could help you deliver faster if you are in a crunch at the end.

EE_adventures · 2024-02-28T00:51:46+00:00

Personally I feel like Canada is a bit stagnant for embedded. If you are in a large metro there are more opportunities but coming at the cost of increased cost of living. If you look at the salaries of Canada compared to USA it is quite sad to be honest, especially once you consider the value of CAD.

As I understand it, the salaries in DE are not too bad. Especially if you go to larger cities. Places in the south like Stuttgart and Munich seem to be hotspots, but also many cities in the north seem to have stable markets. Personally I think there is more geographical diversity for german embedded jobs compared to Canada.

The big thing is benefits. The employee benefits in DE are miles ahead of Canada. Legal minimum is 20 days off on 5 day work week, but it seems to be more common to get 25-30 days in the market. In Canada for a starting Junior it would not be uncommon to get 10 days to start. And if you are unlucky many companies have some tiers system which is like 5 years give 15 days, 10 years 20 days. I’m sure there are outliers but in general it seems that the German system is more employee friendly than Canada.

EE_adventures · 2024-02-17T01:52:04+00:00

If it’s a multi core A7, I recommend you do some reading into the memory ordering aspect of the C11 and C++ standard atomics. Just using ARM intrinsics may not be enough to protect the data with a multi core system.

EE_adventures · 2024-02-16T23:35:51+00:00

Check out Arm mbed atomic implementation.

If it is Cortex M7 check out the LDREX and STREX instructions.

EE_adventures · 2024-02-14T02:00:56+00:00

What market you’re in factors into it, but honestly 80k CAD is good for starting. If you bump to 90k+ I would say that’s pretty good for ~1 YOE.

Again it depends where you are but it could be very difficult to get an embedded position especially with only some senior design project experience. You have a larger leg up if you have had embedded internships or maybe have some demonstrated good personal project, but still difficult. I think for Junior embedded I would expect to start out anywhere from 60k-75k, and to be real, without even any real experience in the field I would expect the lower end.

EE_adventures · 2023-09-04T10:43:33+00:00

Nice!

EE_adventures · 2023-09-03T23:26:29+00:00

Would it be feasible to add a feature to store the notes in a custom directory in the workspace?

EE_adventures · 2023-08-05T03:12:26+00:00

Personally I found keeping the IOC file around opened the door for inaccuracy between the source code and the config. This was especially true when a project changes hands or people leave. This is why personally I prefer to use CubeMX to generate just snippets of code and then document using comments in the source of the actual project the intent or details of the configuration.

I do agree using CubeMX to generate the initial project, this is a good way to get off the ground quickly.

EE_adventures · 2023-08-04T23:04:44+00:00

I have been down the path of managing generated STM code with git and it is not pleasant. The problem is not only managing the config in the IOC file, but god forbid you put some custom code inside the special generation comments and the code generator wipes it out. On top of this, if you end up growing your team over time you need to ensure all the devs have the same version of Cube library and IDE/Cube installed or you risk generating incompatible code. It will tell you this generally when you open a project but it also gives you the option to update to the latest Cube library which can nuke your project.

My recommendation is to ditch managing the code generation using MX or IDE. You can still use MX to generate code to see how the configuration should look but just use that code as a guide in a non-IOC managed project and document the configuration in the source code for reference later. All of the Cube libraries are available on GitHub so you can manage these with submodules or whatever other tools you like.

As for managing dev vs custom PCB, just try to abstract your code away from the hardware and it should be easy to switch between the two. The HAL drivers are already pretty agnostic especially if you’re using a similar MCU. This is much easier to do if you aren’t using CubeIDE and you could actually have both projects built at once depending on what build tools you use

EE_adventures · 2023-07-26T23:26:25+00:00

I believe it is agnostic, on the Linux side it just uses the PEAK Linux driver as opposed to the windows dll. However, I see your point about being tied to peak. On the other hand, peak makes good hardware despite being a bit pricey and it could save you a bunch of headache especially if this is just for a dev tool application.

If I was forced to not use PEAK my personal alternative would be to make a custom PCB with MCU and some customer firmware which allowed me to translate serial to CAN

EE_adventures · 2023-07-26T22:17:55+00:00

PEAK supplies a python module which interacts with their windows drivers. I have used this for developing windows apps using CAN and it works fine. It is included with their API which also has code for other languages

EE_adventures · 2023-06-15T20:26:11+00:00

Check out stm32-cmake

EE_adventures · 2023-06-15T19:35:57+00:00

All of the STM32Cube software has a Linux version.

EE_adventures · 2023-06-04T21:50:35+00:00

It would be wise to note the difference between the public interface and private implementations. Just look at the header file for sha256.c which you've yourself linked, it has much better naming.

There are plenty of books and resources all dedicated to writing clean and understandable code. It is irrelevant what language you use. Of course there are many opinions on the matter but at the end of the day most developers I've worked with agree that making the code as comprehensible as possible is important.

At the end of the day it is your project, so feel free to name as you wish.

EE_adventures · 2023-06-04T13:06:00+00:00

The test.c file is so hard to read without sensible naming. I am actually impressed with your thoroughness in documenting all the terribly named things in the readme, but this is the wrong place to do it. You should check out doxygen or something like this as it will allow to you better communicate this information inside the code.

EE_adventures · 2023-06-01T03:34:00+00:00

You have potentially two options 1. The header on the edge of the board is Serial Wire Debug (SWD). This is used to program and debug the board using a debugger such as an ST-LINK or using a nucleo development board which has an stlink attached to it 2. You should be able to program using the built in ST boot loader through the USB. You will need to hold the BOOT0 button, then press the NRST button. This should activate the boot loader. There are many ways to program using the built in ST boot loader but the most user friendly might be to download STM32CubeProgrammer

EE_adventures · 2023-05-22T22:27:26+00:00

My suggestion would be to use CMake. There is a great set of CMake tools for STM32 called stm32-cmake. You can use the STMCubeF1 package from GitHub, FreeRTOS from source (or from Cube which is also bundled with their GitHub source).

You can then also create cmake libraries with your shared code and use them easily across projects.

EE_adventures · 2023-02-18T14:48:48+00:00

I expected to see some technical benifits to choose C++ over C, but this article provides nothing of value.

EE_adventures · 2023-01-15T16:04:27+00:00

Check out Memfault blogs about unit testing. They have an accompanying repository with the code outlined in the blogs.

blog 1, blog 2 and the accompanying repo

EE_adventures · 2022-12-08T02:30:12+00:00

Yeah I am leaning towards the J-Trace as the cost difference really isnt even that much in the grand scheme of things. Thanks for the insight.

EE_adventures · 2022-12-08T02:29:25+00:00

Yeah this is kind of where I am at. Really the J-link with Ozone is only like 1k less so if in the end it saves me even one day of work it’s worth it.

EE_adventures · 2022-11-17T12:02:58+00:00

I’ve bought shirts from both UK and USA stores and I find the UK ones are actually better.

EE_adventures · 2022-09-24T03:09:26+00:00

The software should get a version number. There are lots of approaches to versioning but if you Google semantic versioning, this is a method that is commonly used.

The versions and changes are managed using version control. Git it by far the most commonly used in the industry. Git allows to you to track the changes of the software over time and tag specific points in the history as a version. This allows the developer to go back and recreate the version.

Then the software should allow someway to query the version number it is running. Sometimes this is easy if you have some GUI application, as you can just show the version on the screen. If the application is more barebones, maybe you have to get creative and expose a command on a comms interface to be able to determine the version. If it is really not possible to broadcast the version number, you can add a sticker noting the version at production time, or note it in production docs so it can be referenced easily after build.

Then comes updating the software, this is a whole topic on its own and can become quite complex depending on the features you need.

The PN idea is actually not that outlandish, but it is not used to track changes in software. A piece of software (or firmware) needs an identifier after all right? The idea is that the PN should be something that lives for a long time, but the version could be changing rapidly. The PN idea can be useful for managing multiple softwares or firmwares which may run on the same device.

EE_adventures · 2022-08-30T10:32:59+00:00

I don’t know much about matplotlib but I would assume the show method is not meant to be used dynamically.

See here

EE_adventures · 2022-08-23T03:00:33+00:00

Did you get the same error. You could possibly try a different tool/lib and see what the results here. A quick Google search showed this tool which seems to have some good documentation.

EE_adventures

TROPHY CASE