issue 80 27 July 2018





This is already the issue #80! I hope you’ll learn interesting things with this week newsletter. Have a good summer embedded systems people!

If you go through a nice article, organize en event or have a job offer that needs applications, please, send me an email to embedsys@embedsysweekly.com.





Hardware





Design of Digital Circuits - ETH Zürich - Spring 2018

The Zurich institute of Technology put online all the videos of its spring 2018 Design of Digital Circuits course. It’s more then 24 hours of course from the basics to the details of the virtual memory going through the nowadays famous out-of-order execution feature.





Software





Off-Target Testing And TDD For Embedded Systems

Steve Branam shares his feedback on his journey from a “common” way of doing embedded software development to an off-target TDD embedded software development. Through three of his experiences, it makes clear what could be the advantages to do in one hand, off-target tests, and in the other hand, TDD. The off-target side let you make your code context deterministic and the TDD dimension let you demonstrate the correctness of your code.





Arduino Ethernet Library 2.0.0

This week Arduino Ethernet Library update is a huge jump forward in terms of performance. It comes, as well, with a hardware auto-detection feature that make easier the integration of the library whatever is the supported chip your board come with.





IR decoding with BPF

Merged in 4.18 version, developers have now a new way to add a specific IR decoder without cluttering the kernel. This article describes step by step how to use this new Linux kernel feature.





Final C17 draft

The C language working group just released the final draft of the next C evolution standard. The C17 version of the standard is focused on fixing the issues of the C11 standard. The only acual change is the deprecation of the ATOMIC_VAR_INIT macro.





Safe C Library

The Safe C library is an implementation of the ISO TR 24731 standard. The goal of this standard is to improve the C standard library interface by adding safer version of the most vulnerable functions. It mainly adds bounds checking to avoid buffer overflow vulnerabilities.





Performance of std::string_view vs std::string from C++17

string_view has been added to C++ to facilitate string manipulations and make them more efficient. Here it is a factual test of how much more efficient is string_view .





C compiler quirks I have encountered

Martin is maintaining a unit testing C library named Snow. In this article he describes which strange compiler behaviors he discovered while he was developing his library.





Misc





Flippy Bit And The Attack Of The Hexadecimals From Base 16

I’m really sure that you were looking for a pixel art game to improve your binary to hexadecimal conversion skills, weren’t you?





Dawn of the Microcomputer: The Altair 8800

A great retrospective of 1974, the year of the Intel 8080 release.



