Posts tagged embedded

Git basics

This is from a lunch-n-learn I hosted. Yet another intro to git is not necessary on the internet, but I wanted to store mine someplace easily accessible for when I need it again. This introduction is geared towards Software Engineers and touches on some of the inner workings/concepts git employs.

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Spying on a CANOpen bus

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.

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Defining CANBus messages with a DBC file

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.

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Unified Messaging Solution for Small UAS

A major challenge I’ve repeatedly encountered while working in embedded software is communication protocols in a heterogeneous and evolving system. The main difficulty lies in obtaining modern messaging system conveniences while supporting the lowest-common denominator in your system (ie: a tiny Cortex-M0 running in the system).

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Embedded Development Primer

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.

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