• How do breakpoints even work?

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article, we will discuss the basic types of breakpoints (hardware and software) and how they are utilized by the GNU Project Debugger, GDB. We will then explore how to configure hardware breakpoints on an ARM Cortex-M MCU using the Flash Patch and Breakpoint Unit (FPB) and examine a real-world configuration with an example application.

  • Building a Tiny CLI Shell for Tiny Firmware

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, we go over why an embedded firmware should include a command-line shell interface, common use cases for it, how to build and extend one, and cover common issues that developers run into while build and maintaining one. The shell we will build will work over a UART serial port, which should make it applicable to most embedded systems.

  • Profiling Firmware on Cortex-M

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, we explore different techniques that can be used to profile firmware applications running on ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. To profile our Mandelbrot application on STM32, we start with a naive debugger-based sampling method, and eventually discover ITM, DWT cycle counters, and more!

  • What we've been reading in May (2020)

    by François Baldassari

    Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this May.

  • Better Firmware with LLVM/Clang

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article, I hope I can convince you that adding a Clang build target to your project can be a relatively simple and useful endeavor. We will cover how to take advantage of some of the rich features shipped with the toolchain and identify some memory leaks and mutex deadlocks in an example project at compile time! We will also walk through a step-by-step example of updating a GCC based ARM Cortex-M project to cross-compile with LLVM/Clang.

  • Embedded C/C++ Unit Testing with Mocks

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this article, we do a deep-dive into unit testing with mocks. We’ll go over where they fit into your unit testing infrastructure, how to write them in C/C++, and finally run through some real-world examples. At the end, we’ll briefly talk about integration tests.

  • What we've been reading in April (2020)

    by Tyler Hoffman

    Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this April.

  • Hunting Bugs with Git Bisect

    by Shiva Rajagopal

    This article is a personal story of a time I had to run a bisect on a repository, and the thoughts that went through my mind as it happened. I touch on how to find a bug using git’s bisect feature and go over some easy strategies to narrow your search space as much as possible. Lastly, I detail some ways of speeding up that search through git bisect’s automation options.