Dear Reader,
The Embedded Online Conference 2024 took place last month. For the price of $295, all the videos and live Q&A sessions are now available. In this newsletter, I want to give you a taste of the conference: I summarised the talks by Jacob Beningo, Steve Branam and Kate Stewart for you. I learned a lot by watching them and even more by summarising them.
I am pleased that I contributed a talk to the conference as well: The Ports-and-Adapters Architecture for Embedded HMIs. The live Q&A session moderated by Jacob Beningo was fun. My blog post Ports-and-Adapters Architecture: The Pattern from last summer covers large parts of my talk for free.
The conference features many more great talks. My watchlist includes the following talks:
- James Grenning, SOLID Design for Embedded C. James explains how to write better C code by following the Single Responsibility, Open-Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation and Dependency Inversion Principle.
- Andreas Jarosch, Build your Own Embedded Middleware. Learning about design patterns for (automotive) middleware is just my cup of tea and should be a good complement to my talk about the ports-and-adapters architecture.
- Ben Saks, Modern C++ Interface Design. Ben improves a C++ interface predating the modern era with modern C++ features like scope enumerations, attributes, structured bindings, std::optional and std::expected.
- Sergio Prado, Power Management on Linux: From the Hardware to the Kernel and User Space Interfaces. Sergio takes on a tour of how to reduce the power consumption of embedded linux devices with frequency scaling, idle states, wake-up sources, sleep states, suspend-to-RAM, hibernation and other features.
- Marian Petre, Beyond Coding: Toward Software Development Expertise. Marian lets us in on her research what distinguishes expert developers from the rest and which practices lead to better software.
- And more…
My OTA update project came to an end last month. I implemented the last puzzle piece: OTA updates of u-boot. I wrote about the fundamentals in the post Updating U-Boot with an A/B Strategy. This update method should work for all SoCs that implement their NAND flash with version 4.1 or newer of the eMMC specification. As version 4.1 is from 2007, most SoCs released over the last five years should have two eMMC boot partitions. But I can’t quantify it yet.
Happy reading,
Burkhard