Embedded Development

All projects must start somewhere, and most of the time when working with electronics or embedded programming, you're going to have to deal with a controller board of some kind.  Controller boards can range in capabilities, so we usually look for a balance in capacity of processing and cost requirement in terms of resources.  If you want to work with the Internet of Things (IOT), then you're probably looking at making some object that needs logic.  Just as most projects need something to control them with logic and a Central Processing Unit (CPU), it's probably good to establish how to use one of the better controller boards available for the money. The  DragonBoard 410c comes with Android installed.  As cool as that is, it's not so useful for an IOT (Internet Of Things) object that doesn't use touch to interact. Android does not support running a server on it that can be controlled from other computers.  Android is a very "user facing" operati...

The natural place to go next in our journey in embedded programming is to delve into some theory.  This week, we'll focus on hardware and show exactly how easy it all can be.  As I firmly believe that if you understand the history as a story explaining how something came to be, you'll understand the why behind it.   We'll start by talking about a late 18th century German Mathematician and Physicist named Georg Simon Ohm . Ohm was a high school teacher who was interested in experimenting with an at the time recently invented, by an Italian,   Conte Volta , electric cell .  Volta's cell is a battery, same as the AA, or AAA variety we use in common modern life.  Volta's cell wasn't something one could buy from the local store, so Ohm created the tools he used to further his own research. The first thing Ohm noticed is the further you try to get electricity to flow through a wire, the less current you have.  He also very early recognized that the thic...

I thought about what would make a good starting point for my first blog post.  I have several projects that I will be doing and a series of blog entries I'm eager to share.  However, this is the beginning; thus, it's probably best to start at the beginning. So let's talk about what it takes to do Development, and more specifically gear our discussion towards Embedded Dev.  My plan is to use this blog as a teaching and learning platform for myself.  Many things I will be learning for the first time and will then draw on my experience to try and teach others. Thus things I know really well, such as high level programming, development, and embedded programming will get a lot of focus with everything from game dev tutorials, to memory management best practices and testing / qa methodologies.  I'll try to refrain from rehashing things covered elsewhere to my satisfaction, while I will be picking topics that work well for new and seasoned developers. For things I d...