Posts in Dev
Embedded Time Management
- 08 August 2025
As an embedded project matures, having methods to track timing and durations become necessary. In this post I’ll describe how I typically implement time in an embedded project so its cross platform while also not slowing down unit tests.
Release Versioning In C/C++ Projects
- 10 June 2025
How do you define semver in a large C/C++ project? For CMake-based projects the simplest solution is to rely on the version info passed to the CMake project directive. But what do you do when you have multiple languages/tools in a monorepo that need access to the project semver? In this situation, I’ve developed a somewhat simple solution for a single, easily accessible source of truth on project semver information.
Writing Embedded Device Drivers
- 27 May 2025
In this post I wanted to quickly describe some of the guiding principles I follow when writing device drivers in C++ for an embedded project. By “device driver” I mean the code that provides an interface between your application and some hardware device on an embedded system. For instance: an IMU, a temperature sensor, an ADC sensor, a motor controller, etc.
Docker for SW Development
- 01 February 2025
This is from a lunch-n-learn I hosted which aimed to showcase the features and advantages of using docker during the development process. It includes with a few tutorials on how to use it.
Spying on a CANOpen bus
- 13 December 2024
CANOpen is a protocol stack that sits on top of a normal CANBus. Recently I found myself needing to monitor the traffic between 2 devices on a CANOpen network. Monitoring a CANbus by itself is easy to do with a little Python. Where I ran into difficulty was interpreting the raw CANbus frames into CANOpen messages. Here’s how I solved that.
Defining CANBus messages with a DBC file
- 03 December 2024
DBC files are a standard way to define the messages that will be transmitted over a raw CANBus. While working with this format I found it easy to find tools that could interpret, use, and generate DBC files. However I had a hard time finding resources to describe the format and schema of these files. This post describes some of the schema details I found the most helpful, many of which I had to learn by digging through the source code of tools that work with DBC files. Personally, I find examples the easiest way to learn/understand schema basics, so I’ll use that here while also describing the schema itself.
Embedded Development Primer
- 05 January 2023
This post is meant to be an overview of some principles and practices I have found helpful for professional baremetal embedded development. This is meant for people who want to have total control over their embedded development environment and codebase.