Embedded Development

Continuous Integration is the idea of running a full build every time someone on a team publishes new changes to source control (such as git).  The idea of setting it up allows for greater visibility into changes, by finding which build exhibits problems and which doesn't as every build happens immediately following a change in source.  This process allows QA to quickly and easily track the life of a bug. By marrying the CI server with other tasks such as Unit tests to check on the system, we get a higher level of confidence that the code under test is stable.  A competent CI system can run several tasks that are often viewed as a drudgery by developers to try and run at regular intervals.  Unit Tests, Integration Tests, code coverage reports, profiling, memory consumption reports, and quick / easy build deployment with automated publishing are just some of the common tasks a Jenkins server can be found doing. As we're embedded developers, we often will have to tar...

As I'm heading towards discussions about C++ and some cool practical knowledge things for use in Embedded software development, I feel it's important to highlight how we got here by looking at the history of this science.  Let's start by defining Computer Science.  Computer Science is not about coding, programming or software development.  Computer Science is the study of automating algorithmic processes that scale.  Algorithms occur in nature, as everything from how the stars gather together to form galaxies to the spots of a leopard or freckles on a child.  All obey natural laws that are defined within the confines of flow dynamics and were discoveries made possible by algorithmic interpretations made by Alan Turing.  A computer is merely a tool in the same way a microscope is, a tool to observe and work with the natural world by viewing and controlling algorithms. So how did we get to this modern world?  Let's look at where the term "Computer" come...

It is time to dive into some software knowledge.  We're going to start by talking further about the tools described earlier and then get into how to work on the software of our practical project "magic mirror."  So let's start: Very often programmers, project managers and industry vets will go on about how much cheaper it is to fix a bug earlier in the software development lifecycle.  The thinking goes that if you equate money with the amount of time it takes to fix something multiplied by the number of people required to fix it you arrive at a logarithmic increase of cost for each stage of the development lifecycle. Over and above the cost of fixing bugs argument, personally, it takes me longer to fix a bug if I have to do a mental context switch and relearn code that I wrote.  The longer the time frame between when I developed code and when I am faced with fixing a bug in it, the harder I feel it is to come to the same level of competence.  Also, maintainin...

A central theme to all embedded development has been getting better performance and thus increasing battery life.  This is entirely an exercise on how to get more out of the same hardware by doing things smarter with better design. To that end, let's talk about how to rate and compare your app with what others are doing in the wild.  On Android, this is a very easy process thanks to Qualcomm's App Tune-up Kit .  From an Android device, you can quickly grab details about any app currently installed on your device and learn about how costly it is to run that app.  Watch how when the CPU and GPU are working hard crunching numbers the battery life correlates and goes down.  Most importantly, take note of apps that run over the network.  Networking is very battery intensive, especially when not using wifi and going over the cell's 3g or 4g connection. One of the gravest sins an app can do is a process called sending heartbeats.  Heartbeats are short statu...

If you've never used git before; it's probably best to start with github , it's a free service so long as you are doing an open source project.  If you have the ability to run your own server and require keeping your project closed source and not in the hands of a third party, then it's perfectly reasonable to run a local git server. As the process for setting up github is very simple , it seems reasonable to do a quick blog post about how to use git in a day to day type of setting.  First let's cover a few things about the theory of git. Git is a versioning control system.  It works by allowing remote computers to work on the current version of everything in a project.  Git keeps the entire history and change logs inside a subfolder of the project hidden from normal view called ".git".  Git works by comparing the contents of the directory on the remote server with the directory locally to see what has changed and what needs to be added.  This local git ...

We're going to get into some fun and practical knowledge for this post.  As mentioned in my first blog post, this site will use C / C++.  To that end, we'll start with examining the tools we'll use and getting the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) setup.  In order to try and avoid confusion, I will present a survey of IDE choices and setups that are popular and give advantages and disadvantages of each along with when to use them.  If you feel confused anywhere within this post, just skip to the Android Studio at the end, using it and Gradle is not only the official way to do things, it's also what I'll use in all my projects that target Android on this blog. Choosing an IDE Up until recently, May of 2015 when Google announced Android Studio Native Development Kit support; the old official way of using the Native Development Kit involved using an IDE known as Eclipse.  While I'll be mentioning the official ways, but there are non-official IDEs that ar...

We're going to do something that is a little whimsical and timely given that it was recently Valentine's day.  First let's discuss the motivation.  Snow White had this evil relative that could call out to her magic mirror by saying "Magic Mirror on the wall" and then ask it any question.  Well ya know what, we can build our own magic mirror that will respond to questions with answers, display a face, or just display some relevant information sans the evil relative bent on feeding poison apples.  Ours will display everything from motivational statements to agenda for the day and news about commute; thus works quite well for a practical Internet Of Things (IOT) project. There's some really cool magic mirrors out there built with raspberry pis. The goal of those projects is to do something that displays a message of encouragement or displays an agenda. For our version, we're going to do a Magic Mirror that does something a little more advanced than just di...