At the beginning of an interview...

HR girl: You know, that position you applied is already taken but I found some similar in our company.
Me: Uhm, ok?
HRG: What about this one? It's some programming... *pointing at some IT position regarding db maintenance* Do you want to try that?
Me: Sure, why not.

I was applying to student position at embedded firmware development at the time. I did some school project with MySQL but it was few years back and I happily forgot most about it.
Anyway, story continues.

IT manager: Hi, I heard you want to join our lines.
Me: That is what I heard as well.
IT: Eh?
Me: I came for completely different position actually.
IT: Uhm, ok. We have standardised test, let's see what you can do.

It was some basic stuff for db guys but I was totally lost. I was done after 3 minutes returning nearly blank paper.
We shaked hands, both agreed this is not well fit for me and I went away.

After this botched attempt HR girl remembered that there is another team looking for embedded developer students. I was accepted.

Corporates are marvelous.

!rant
Worked all day and got my embedded systems project working the first time! Bluetooth as well! 😁

It's a Fitbit clone that keeps track of steps that I did from scratch and writing the companion app from scratch as well in flutter/dart. Ask any questions if you're curious!

This is why my embedded system keeps crashing

At a friend's party, I met one of the guys I've known from High school, and talk about what we've become:

Him: ...so yeah, now I study CS, I code some C, I dislike Java, blablablablabla I'm coding some OS and embedded software, blablablabla, and you, what do you code in?

Me: Oh, I learned everything I know by myself, still learning, and I'm mostly doing some PHP and Javascript. Doing websites and apps is cool.

Him: but those aren't programming languages? I mean, you can't manage memory, and blablablabla-

Me: Ó_Õ * Quickly dashed my ass off to talk with some ladies and boozed myself to forget what I just heard *

"Europe to make it illegal to change the OS on radio devices like smartphones, routers and embedded devices."

I don't know what to say anymore

Recruiter logic

"We see you have JS experience, how about a job as a Senior C Embedded systems engineer, we can only pay 30$ an hour "

That's another semester completed!

Recruiter: hi, I have an iOS Developer role. Would you be interested?

Me: sure, send me on the spec.

Recruiter: ok great so for this Full stack app developer role we are looking for someone with:

- 5+ years embedded C/C++ experience
- 5+ years of working with Windows and Linux
- Native Android development
- As well as Native iOS experience

Interested?

Me: ......... ok buddy, you and me are going to have a little chat about what “iOS Developer” means

Hai devRant! Working on the privacy app and want opinions on the page for details on specific apps (as in, applications so web/app/mobile or even embedded?!).

Yeah I know that the aligning is deffo not perfect but hey, gotta start somewhere :). Detail: everything you see here (the content and actually also the icon path) is rendered from the database already.

Tips/opinions?

Heck yes!

I implement a stack trace in my embedded systems!

Whenever a device crashes, it makes a stack dump in an unused part of ram.
After it has rebooted and is connected to the server again, it uploads the stack dump.

The server then opens the correct firmware elf file, walks the stack and associates the debug info from the elf.

The result? A beautiful stack trace with file names, function names and line numbers.

No more guessing where random crashes come from.

"So what do you study?"
"uhm.. Embedded Systems."
*confused look*
*sigh* "Programming"
"Oh, OK!"

Someday in an embedded course:

Lecturer: "You'll want the following drivers and SDK for this lecrure. With some tweaks it'll also work on Windows."

Guy with shiny Mac infront: "What about Mac?"

Lecturer: "WTF? You don't use Mac for embedded systems." o.O

Me: lol 😁

So I got a call from a recruiter this morning, about a job for a C++ developer what experience developing for embedded systems.

He sent my resume off to the company and they actually want an in person interview the same day.

I'm going to this interview in 2 hours, I'm really nervous, I haven't had an interview in years...

Wish me luck!

Client: "I cannot understand why the page loads so slowly"
Me: "Maybe it's because of the 68 YouTube videos you just embedded"

Lost a bet and switched from Vim to VS Code for a day. Ten minutes into, I found myself editing gitignore in the embedded terminal. Something went wrong.

Give me a 10 year old application with no comments, layers of spaghetti code, global variables, embedded SQL, and a text editor with no debugging; just don’t make me write Excel formulas.

All embedded and design engineers can relate

it’s hard, it’s brutal, it’s merciless !!!

Hackathon: being a C and embedded dev and everybody like: let's do webz! Or appz!

LED! Please, embedded programmers: STOP blinking LEDs, if you don't require immediate attention!!

That phone that would blink through the night charging, I had to put a blanket on it D:<<

Didn't it take us years to stop writing javascript and html embedded? Is it just me or are we going back where we started? It's all a mix now!

I’m on the bus going to my first day at a new internship as a embedded C developer. Feeling very excited abou it .

When working in embedded, you basically write your program, compile it and flash it on some hardware.
Compiling and flashing usually require some black magic commands with lots of parameters so i set up two shortcuts in my terminal
yolo to compile
swag to flash

Understandably i keep it to myself

A recruiter's call woke me up today around noon. I'm a professional embedded developer.

Sector: embedded software

So I don't have to mess with front end fuckery

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

do you have a GREAT eye for design?!

can you write a bubble sort algorithm in binary?!

do you know native, desktop, embedded, AND web programming languages?!

do you know you can go fuck yourselves?!

good luck unicorn searching 🤡 companies. there is no human that can do all of those on a level that you want. but, go ahead and set yourself up for failure. i'll remain firmly grounded on planet earth 🌎

To my fellow 🐍 charmers:
You should see in C to understand C, else you'll never see what's in C. It's a big sea, you better start C. 😍

Is it just me or is everyone on here basically a web dev?

Well, sh*t.

There is special hell for people using GOTO in C and even more special hell for people using it in *this* context.

I enjoy being an embedded software engineer that is allowed to use C for most projects and doesn't have to program JavaScript or PHP nor has to use dozens of foreign libraries.

!rant

Progress on the ESP32 studio equalizer project! It looks much better and has less stupid silly cables everywhere.

Got a new eval board. It came in with a stock firmware, had its own IP and naturally its own webGUI. I wanted to check what was under the hood. So I SSH'd in to the device, and was prompted to enter the username. There weren't any specs or documentation.

*Hmm, let's try root*
User: root
Password: *Eh? Well, what the heck* admin
.
.
.
root@evalboard#

Muhahaha!!! Meet your hacker, eval board!

Our team is currently working with an Excel document that uses visual basic to talk to an embedded system. We're talking reading memory locations in Excel.

Last night I compiled my first kernel module!

I'm not talking about a ./configure; make; sudo make install kind of thing...

I wrote, compiled, loaded the module and saw my silly "Hello World!" message on dmesg!

Using some previous experience on embedded I fired up qemu with a fresh buildroot image and the kernel image I just made, thus I can now test and debug without doing kernel changes to my workstation!

So yeah, I'm a little excited :-D

I'm struggling with a bug. It's not my bug, it's in a lib - in an assembly function commented as "this is where the magic happens". After 27 hours of trying to determine what triggers said bug my best guess is it's a relationship between the position of Mimas and the mood of my neighbour's chonker. If it's not triggered by the Saturn's moon and a pet animal... I'm out of ideas.

Now how do I break it to my PM that we have to kill a cat?

Arduino is like Javascript for Microcontrollers

Great choice of design.
Now can you guess where the embedded fingerprint reader is on this screen ?
Yep, right between the unlock button and the "wipe everything with a long press" button

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

Blessed be the person whose comments/documentation is embedded with tiny pieces of code.

I once saw this comment inside two embedded empty loop :

// WHY, OH GOD WHY!

Turns out somebody deleted the content but not the loop. The next dev added the comment but kept the loop.

UI Is the bane of my existence. I'm an embedded programmer i mainly deal with drivers daemons low level stuff no UI involved. why do they keep assigning mobile apps to me man ! #FML

Well done, T-Mobile!

They have an iOS app to handle contract stuff. That app integrates their shop system via an internal browser.
The shop notifies me, that the used browser is not supported by the shop...

Oh and the browser is an embedded safari on iOS 12.

Sales guy calls up from overseas and complains website we got developed from another vendor is not working.
Being just the middle man who project managed the website development with the offshore vendor, I had no clue what was wrong as the site was working fine and "worksforme" was not going to be acceptable answer for the costumer demo.
Being an embedded drivers guy, had no idea to debug this, except one:
Me: Which browser are you using?
Him: I.E
Me: try any browser other than I.E
Him: it works. Thanks
Boo yeah

Prototype

Hey, hey, if THE SJWs made GitHub rename it's 'master', then what's gonna happen to all the embedded systems people?
I mean, MISO, MOSI?

My second prototype of the studio equalizer. It’s not even close to being done. It’s barely even started.

Why do clients send everything embedded in a word document. Can you send me the jpeg? I receive a word document. (It's always word 2003 for some reason).

Pushed code remotely and told a teammate to run it on the target hardware. He then told me he might of blown up $6000 worth of equipment. Then he says "Never mind everything works."

World record for biggest heart attack?

We are developing a single page APPLICATION which will be embeded into another single page APPLICATION using iframes (!?!?!?!). The embedded SINGLE PAGE application has POPUPS (browser instances, not UI popups) opened. Every app contains at least 75% of the other apps and they do not share common code. Everything in IE11 and ng4.

Recently for a project I needed to read/write ID3 tags from MP3 files. And after a long search, I found this bloated, monolithic but quite stable library, "getID3".

So, I was looking through the code-base and I found this. This guy literally storing the key value based data embedded as comments within the class file. Then wrote a method to parse the data and even used caching to ensure maximum speed! And such usage is repeated all over the code-base.

So, this is what people used do before arrays were invented :3

- Fuck mobile apps that open links in embedded browser windows
- Fuck Wordpress page builders that use the single content field as an embedded IDrag&DropE.
- Fuck unindented HTML markup
- Fuck plugins with "pro" versions that provide more than 50% of the advertised features.
- Fuck building an app with a SPA framework and then adding SSR cuz ur SEO is fucked.
- Fuck Javascript transitions that are meant to make a site look fancy but slow it the fuck down.

Fuck it.

Vent your frustrations

Okay, first rant here.
Spend most of my morning searching for a js file that was supposed to build some graphs in a report page in this legacy system (still in active development) just to find it embedded inside a random .php file being included inside a wall of if-elses (that shit has around 100 lines) on the index.php (that somehow manages to route all the nonsense that's going on there).. was it really that difficult to make it a proper .js file? and actually import it on the page that is using it? c'mon...

Do some cool shit that I’ve always wanted to do.

- learn more about machine learning and computer vision
- learn C / C++ / rust
- learn embedded systems / programming
- learn more EE centered stuff

Silently rebooting device every night cause of memory leaks in CEF.

Created a batch file to modify some system files on our embedded system.

Accidentally double clicked it in my development main machine :(

Man, fm fucking l

Next month I'm starting my master studies in embedded systems. Currently I have not any knowledge in this topic (made my bachelor in an other part of IT). Any tips or tricks?
Currently I'm starting learning C++ 😅

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

Second coolest project that I have worked was optimizing an algorithm that used images to speedup by 2000x by parallel processing. While the cpu took 7.34 seconds to process just one image and source, the parallel embedded code did it just in 0.0034 :) The coolest one is still in progress where I am building an Ai for my mac control ;)

Pomodoro timers work only when the task at hand is boring. Yesterday, I worked non-stop on some task I greatly enjoyed(Rust embedded) and I would get distracted if there was some disruption because some overrated technique.

HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.

For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.

They just are content with wasting my time lol

!rant

Today, my true developer saga begins. First job as an embedded developer and I am prepared with my flaming dark themed rubber duck debugger. What could go wrong? :D

What kind of developer are you and what is your opinion on other development areas?

Me: Junior dev, oriented towards full stack and Android(with a sysadmin background):

-Low-level(kernel development, embedded, drivers, operating systems, reverse engineers)- Badass, I wish I could do that.

-Mobile apps- awesome but too high level sometimes.

-Full stack/Backend- awesome.

-Web Frontend- fuck HTML+CSS. JS is cool I guess.

-Enterprise applications(e.g SAP) Pajeet, my son.

-Malware development- Holy shit that is awesome.

-Video Game development- was my dream since childhood.

-Desktop apps- No opinion.

Why is pointers... bit shifting.. malloc.. anything that is regarding embedded development is so hard to grasp...

Long live the embedded developer

Prototyping a new operating system for Smart Mini Displays (Embedded Linux System) that can run even on low-end ARM motherboards.

With C3D your embedded systems code themselves!!!

I'd never imagine that my interests would shift from webapps and servers to embedded devices and measuring 500volts with an arduino....

Yeah! Have one week to write from scratch a standalone app with an embedded db that I've never worked with in an area that I have close to no knowledge and it's all my fault , wish me luck 🙏

While coding in C, I once forgot to add a semicolon at the end of a while loop polling a register value.
The logic required me to make it zero as soon as it read non-zero and continue the rest of the process. Hence the 'while' that missed the semicolon ended up being a single instruction assignment to the same volatile register that I kept polling. This caused synchronisation issue with the FPGA, and my code got stuck in an uncertain infinite loop.
Took me 2 days and a silly, yet valid question from my teammate to figure out the cause of this stupid bug.

From 1978 comes the original, go to C programming language book. About 200 pages, packed full of the details of the C language. It’s a book that sits on your desk. No matter how many times I’ve read this book I always find something new in it.

Great book written.

Only recently purchased the physical books edition 1 and 2.. in the past I only ever read it on pdf or someone else’s hardcopy.

Being a embedded engineer, shame on me for not having this book at a desk ornament sooner lol.

Why do websites have to make their html so fucking hard and complicated to read with something like beautifulsoup. Like I just want to scrape your data. Fuck your embedded iframes and div lists. Why must you do this I JUST WANT YOUR DATA

Do you guys think it’s time “Hackers” gets its 2020 remake? I know it was cheesy for its time (1995) but 8 year old me was INTO that music video montage direction and that movie inspired was what inspired me to get into tinkering with electronics/embedded systems.

Rewatching it tonight and the casting is so on point, too.

I'm an embedded devices dev. As part of my job I take off the shelf devices and write libraries so that our JavaScript team can interface with them. If I have to deal with one more custom implementation of a standard protocol I'm going to freak the fuck out. Like fuck there are only 5 or so major communication protocols at the hardware level there is no fucking reason to reinvent some shittier protocol over a well documented, widely used protocol that has been around for 30 years. (Modbus for anyone who cares)

I felt like being the cause for “that dreaded legacy code“ and wrote 250 lines of C preprocessor macros for generating bitfields in a large header file automatically, with the goal of simplifying and clarifying register access for all peripherals in the end. Then, I found out that SDCC's optimisation for bitfields is absolutely awful (if existent at all), and I don't really want to use these abstractions if they have a performance impact.

Did I deserve that?

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Many people here rant about the dependency hell (rightly so). I'm doing systems programming for quite some time now and it changed my view on what I consider a dependency.
When you build an application you usually have a system you target and some libraries you use that you consider dependencies.
So the system is basically also a dependency (which is abstracted away in the best case by a framework).
What many people forget are standard libraries and runtimes. Things like strlen, memcpy and so on are not available on many smaller systems but you can provide implementations of them easily. Things like malloc are much harder to provide. On some system there is no heap where you could dynamically allocate from so you have to add some static memory to your application and mimic malloc allocating chunks from this static memory. Sometimes you have a heap but you need to acquire the rights to use it first. malloc doesn't provide an interface for this. It just takes it. So you have to acquire the rights and bring them magically to malloc without the actual application code noticing. So even using only the C standard library or the POSIX API can be a hard to satisfy dependency on some systems. Things like the C++ standard library or the Go runtime are often completely unavailable or only rudimentary.
For those of you aiming to write highly portable embedded applications please keep in mind:
- anything except the bare language features is a dependency
- require small and highly abstracted interfaces, e.g. instead of malloc require a pointer and a size to be given to you application instead of your application taking it
- document your ABI well because that's what many people are porting against (and it makes it easier to interface with other languages)

So I work on Embedded System. While working on my project I was drinking water from bottle.

And kept it near my laptop.

Just there all my circuits were open. Connected via USB with my laptop.
And while working I tried grab the bottle and guess what?
Yeah, It fell. But thankfully it didn't touch any of my circuits. If it did!!!!

I was frozen on spot.
Phew!!

This Book....

Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.

Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.

Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.

I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.

So pumped!! I just signed for my apartment for my first dev job starting this summer!

Ye, so after studying for an eternity and doing some odd jobs here and there, all I can show for are following traits:

* Super knowledgeable in arm/Intel assembly language
* C-Veteran with knowledge of some sick and nasty C-hacks/tricks which would even sour the mood of your grandma
* Acquired disdain of any and all scripting languages (how dare you write something in one line for which I need a whole library for!)
* All-in-all low-level programmer type of guy (gimme those juicy registers to write into!)

After completing the mandatory part of my computer science studies, all I did was immerse myself into low-level stuff. Even started to hold lectures and all.

Now I'm at the cusp of being let free into the open market.
The thing is: I'm pretty sure that no company is really interested in my knowledge, as no one really writes assembly anymore.

Sure, embedded programming is still a thing, but even that is becoming increasingly more abstract, with God knows how many layers of software between the hardware and the dev, just to hide all the scary bits underneath.

So, are there people in here who're actually exposed to assembly or any hands-on hardware-programming?
Like, on a "which bit in which register/addr do I need to set" - kind of way.

And if so, what would you say someone like me should lookout for in a company to match my interest to theirs?
Or is it just a pipe dream, so I'd need to brace myself to a mundane software engineer career where I have to process a ticket at a time?

(Just to give a reference: even the most hardware-inclined companies I found "near" me are developing UIs with HTML5 to be used in some such environment ....)

client "it's ok we have a logo"

2 days later... receive a Word doc in an email with clients pixelated logo embedded

Very few general embedded systems books exist, most are specific to chip, or architecture. Very few cover overall ideas, and concepts that are common across ALL embedded systems regardless of architecture and things you must keep in mind while designing software for them.

I think this a a good book. As a primer for deep diving into embedded systems design philosophy

Seriously what's wrong with the market right now, this is basically what some job ads said. They were even from the same company

Frontend job ad: are you a rainbow rockstar developer who just loves to code OwO(unpaid overtime) [buzzwords...]

Embedded systems job ad:
Serious job description
Required experience in c/c++
Other non bs stuff

My wife often listen my rants about stupid clients, she thinks that I hope to much from them. Like image as actual image not fucking embedded in word document.
Today she agreed to help her friend and make name cards for tables. Got list of names ;) one photo of paper with hand written names on it :D

When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...

and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...

because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.

Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.

None, actually.

Tho I should thank Mr. S, calculus teacher in my last year of highschool, and most of my physics teachers, and that one lady in first year of highschool teaching maths. I think those were way more important in teaching me logic than the folks who pretended to teach me stuff later in uni.

Oh, and that dude, Sir O.D., who was my professor of embedded microcontrollers in uni. Didn't teach me much programming, rather taught a memorable lesson on VHDL and how hardware really works.

One of my interviews....
Interviewer: Do you know the welknown hack that increases the speed of embedded tomcat two times than default??
Me: what?? it even exists???
interviewer: yes... it exists... I know it... normally I share the answers with the interviewees... are you interested to hear the hack???
Me: Hell yeah...
Interviewer: ohh no... I will not share with you...
me: whyyy???
interviewer: I don't like your current boss...
Me: Fuck my life(inaudible)... facepalm..

Today's GDPR-Bullshittery.

So we are using an open source remote update system for updating our embedded devices.
And today we learned that, that system logs ip-adress'. And low and behold mr.GDPR says that is a no no.

So either we completely drops it, finds a new update system and implements it..
Sift through all the source code of the update system "fix" it and recompile it.
Or we setup a Man in the middle attack on ourselves. To mask the ip-adress'.

GDPR encouraging hacking ourselves I fucking love it!

Today I'm beginning my third year of Bachelor in embedded computing. And just as last year, I'm bored as fck. "Learning" the same stuff over and over, and wasting my time when I could be at work as a PHP developer ... FML

I started writing code at a young age, nodding games, building websites, modifying hex files, hacking etc... I started my career off tho in highschool writing embedded code for a local medical robotics company, and also got tasked with building the mobile app to control these robots and use them for diagnostics, etc.... this was before the App bubble, before there was app degree and that bullshit.. anyway graduated highschool, went to college to get a comp sci degree.
Wanted to teach for the university and research AI...

well I dropped out of college after 3 years, cuz I spent more time at work than in class. (I was a software consultant) in the auto industry in Detroit. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know or could learn from books or a quick google search.
I also didn’t like the approach professors and the department taught software... way none of the kids had a good foundation of what the fuck they were doing... and everyone relied on the god damn IDEs... so I said fuck it and dropped out after getting in plenty of arguments with the professors and department leads.

I probably should have choose CE .. but whatever CS imo still needs a solid CE/EE foundation without it, 30 years from now I fear what will become of the industry of electronics... when all current gen folks are retired and nobody to write the embedded code, that literally ALLLLL consumer electronics runs on. Newer generations don’t understand pointers, proper memory management etc.

So I combined both passion AI and knowledge of software in general and embedded software, and been working on my career in the auto industry without a degree, never looked back.

When a Field Tech emails you about a problem and the screenshot is embedded in a Word Document. WTF, why can't they send it as a f'ing jpeg, gif, or IDK a png?

BAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Development tools for embedded projects shouldn't need fucking internet to operate. Every fucking app needing internet to even startup is getting more and more stupid. I do a LOT of development offline. I usually have my dev machine away from internet for weeks at a time. It very nice to not have to deal with update issues and the like during this time. So naturally I choose tools to do offline programming for both desktop and embedded. So I decided that for my embedded work I wanted to have better environment than Arduino IDE. Now enters VSCode with Platform IO. I download all the target platforms for my boards. I get it all working and installed. Then I take my computer to my non internet location. I fire up VSCode, select the platform, create a test project, and compile the code. Everything is working great. Then I go to upload the code to my board:
"Blah blah blah you need internet first time talking to a board blah blah blah." Seriously? WTF? Who does stupid shit like this? Once you install your dev tools they should be fucking installed! Now I have to drag my fucking dev boards to another location and do a test install just to do fucking offline programming.

FUCK YOU PLATFORM IO!

Notice I don't blame VSCode for this. I know this IDE is very internet dependent, but it works once you get your plugins installed regardless of internet. Unless of course you are doing internet based programming.

Not too long ago, I was looking over my friend’s HTML with embedded CSS code. He had two separate style tags. I looked at him and asked: “Why do you have two style tags?”

He responds: “Because I’m a lazy boi”

Just had an argument with someone who thinks (micro)python is the way to go for embedded projects. Cause a lot of engineers are terrible at using C/C++. And their argumets for optimisation and granular controll over what the processor does is not necessary.
Its utterly wrong to push technologies into areas for which they werent originally designed for. We've seen it alot with websites lately and I dont like that embedded is heading the same way!

Embedded app design resources?

We have a device that is currently controlled through buttons and knobs. We are rethinking this design. We want to have a mix of buttons and knobs and in addition have a touchscreen. The controls must be redundant. So if we turn off the touch screen it must be able to control everything.

Does anyone know of any design resources for non-touchscreen embedded control?

I have been looking into how gaming console controls work. I like how they have the idea of controlling the game vs breaking the 4th wall. We have a similar constraint as we want the operator focused on what they are controlling and not the controls or even sometimes the screen. So immersion is definitely a concept for us. I have been toying with the idea of adding a d-pad for some controls. We have not solidified the hardware controls yet. That is still up to me to come up with some ideas to make it more intuitive.

YouTube is trying hard to shove their video suggestions into my face.

Video suggestions are on the watch page, inside the video player after playback, and even inside the embedded video player when paused.

Sorry, YouTube, I am not interested in your suggestions before I have even finished watching the current video!

So I'm taking embedded systems subject in my masters course. They have mixed this subject's content with electrical engineering and I'm a computer science graduate. Everything was perfect until I reached to GPIO board.
Wtf is this shit?
Why it has so many holes and what are they for?
What I'm supposed to do with it?
What is ground? Transistor?
Why I'm connecting to two pins only instead of the 4 pins of a button?

Thanks to pi4j i think i will pass the subject!

Currently i am working as a student at a teaching chair for embedded systems, so my boss is the professor there and the subject of this weeks story 😄

He is very passionate about his field and keeps close contact to the students and their representatives.
He invests a lot of resources into getting students to learn and make projects and pays us to supervise a hands on course for students to build IoT projects.
As employees we get to work on interesting projects and he listens to us and our concerns if we feel a project is having certain problems.

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

DOS is not “Disk Operating System”. DOS, aka QDOS, is “Quick and Dirty Operating System”. This is real. Google it.
Similarly, Windows CE is not “Compact Embedded”. It's “Chaotic Evil”.

This MOTHERFUCKER was hiding from me for three FUCKING DAYS now! All the damn time I had corrupt display memory cause of it!

Context: CS and DC were accidentally swapped on the PCB! Not a hardware issue thou. The pins can be remapped in software.

I am going to create a define in my code:
#define BIT_CH CHAR_BIT

Then do search replace of CHAR_BIT to "update" the code. Probably need to wait for a refactor. No idea if CHAR_BIT is even used in our code base. I just want to be a BIT_CH.

I was sitting here thinking what a valid use for an object called BitCh or BitChar. Still trying to come up with some valid reason to create such an object.

And people say programming as an art is dead.

Just read a job posting for a junior .Net software dev. 2 years experience in C#, Visual Studio, .Net. Usual suspects right, though two years experience for a junior seems off. But they also want embedded systems experience. wat?

I've chosen system/embedded programming because I liked system programming and did not like anything connected with web, frontend or UI.

So far it seems like it was a good choice. Even though web was not such a clusterfuck before, it was already repulsive.

Saying Java is good because it runs on 3 billion devices is the same like saying mass public transport is good because it carry billions of people.

New programmer who just pick up Python be like , C is shot , is bad , python better blablabla....

Why anyone hate C so much? I personally use C for Embedded Programming, for hardware or is better compare to using python for my case.

I love python , but I love C more. Because without C the rest don't exist. Right?

So stop hating on C. Because you might use it someday.

Architect: I've been using this architecture for 20 years now and this works nice since pascal, that's why we are using it in this J2EE app.

This was the justification that I received after hearing that I shouldn't use exceptions, just make the function return a false and add the error message to a embedded message list and make the caller capture it.

Who need arrays anyway...

Company is about to get certified to ISO 9001:

Kick-off meeting with consultant announced weeks ago, mandatory for all employees.
Everyone is kind of joking about it, but also looking forward to certain workflows maybe changing to the better.

Two hours before meeting, told by CTO not to attend.

Some code I hadn't touched for half a year needs urgent patching to make the equipment pass EMC test (doing so within a few hours would help us save the lab cost for another day of testing).

When they applied RF noise to the bus lines, the CAN peripheral would glitch and need reset, this should happen covertly the first few times without raising any error to the user, so they could just finish the testing without being disturbed by the error - and the EMC lab will not test the functionality of the device after all.

The irony when you were actually supposed to learn about quality that day...

Anyone else enjoy "uncropping" images embedded in MS Office documents? People cropping out other windows/tabs from full screenshots... I've seen some weird stuff!

It's not unusual to be sent documentation / screenshots saved as MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint etc.). Kinda annoying but whatever.

Joomla 1.5 with a custom PHP CMS embedded using Iframes 😥

So excited about this beast... wish I had a model f... but this will suffice for now.. definitely going to start collecting older stuff. As an embedded software engineer working on AI projects and such give you a good reference point of what was possible in the day with less

The application that was working fine on local host failed to do one task which is to read users data from excel and save it on mongo db, in some collection document's embedded document. My last night and today morning was tensed due to this. So I decided to re deploy the same application on another instance that I have. Worked completely fine
😐😐😐

I am about to try TDD for embedded C. Does anyone around here tried that? What are your experiences with it? Thanks!

Master linux
Master vim
Quit frontend
Get a job in embedded development

Finally got a new role from testautomation to Embedded sw dev. I will also have to learn Rust for embedded and elixir for web facing side, which is nice!

I never expected embedded Linux to be this performant boot wise. On a Cyclone V HPS (800Mhz, Coretex A7) the entire system boots in 3s. Thats from power on to a shell in userspace. And it uses like 40MB of SD-Card Space. The entire speed gets throuwn out the window as soon as you use systemd. Then it takes like five times as long. I kinda want to explore this further in the future by addin LCD support with a desktop environment and get some numbers for that. Currently very happy with the results.

TIL you can crash a Tomcat request processing if the app reads request bodies using a reader() and you feed it a json body with an innocent nbsp :) the whole request processing just goes *pooooft*

reminds me of an ios bug which could brick the phone if it received an sms with weird chars.

These lynch-pin-bugs where a single byte/char in the right place at the right time can tear things down, are so subtle and fascinate me for some reason :)

You want to change the wifi network to which is your embedded device connected?
It's easy:
- The native process is broken
- ESP is in the correct state, but refuse to communicate with anything
- Restore to default doesn't work
- Flashing default firmware doesn't help
- download the whole NodeJS/NPM
- compile two perl binaries
- bump into 2 year old bug, that your Intel wifi won't connect to the ESP SoftAP
- reinstall the Intel driver, just to find out it's still not fixed
- connect the external Atheros wifi adapter
- connect that shit back to the cloud

And just after little under 4 days of fiddling with GPIO pins it finally works and communicates.

What the hell did I miss?

I've been seeing lots of dev communities joking/not joking about replacing C++.

Did we somehow replace all C code in literally every embedded product overnight?

After working with so many platforms and languages i think OpenSuse and QT5 is the best option for developing desktop/mobile/embedded solutions

NODE CRYPTO YOU PUSS RIDDEN CANCEROUS CYST ON THE SWEATY BALLSACK OF THE INTERNET... fucking explain to me how every mother fucking module in node with require(‘crypto’) in it throws a hissy fit at runtime when I call only 1 file with it in it?! These packages that I’m not fucking using by the way but are nonetheless included by default in node are the ones having a meltdown.. and nodes answer?! Use the embedded functions. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!! If I didn’t need it Node could go and get gang raped by an angry pack of silverback gorillas. Fuuuuuuucccckkkkk yoouuuuu

I have a random question. Does it make me a less of a developer if I say no to a embedded side project proposed by a friend?
I mean I'm all into side projects n building something cool but hardware and embedded stuff isn't something I like or feel passionate about.

> Be me
> Programming for an embedded system
> It's not interruptable
> Got ISR Fault (Interrupt Service Register)
> WTF
> Breakpoints are useless
> WTF
> Comment out some lines
> Turns out it goes ISRF Infinite Loop because of the multi dimensional array of strings
> WTF
> Use pointer intead of defining actual size
> Works
> WTF

WTF?

Fucking customer industrial machine doesn't work properly because the dumbass who designed the control algo failed to consider basic physics how this shit is even supposed to work. Just to be sure, he also included some race condition in the measurement part of the software.

Good News: WordPress has decided to update its embedded jQuery version to the latest as of Version 5.0

Bad News: Decided to look up what else to expect with that update, find out the Gutenberg editor is on its way to replace the TinyMCE editor, and will be sweeping meta boxes away along with it...

Today we had a cryptolocker running through our file servers. The locker came from a mailicious e-mail from a strange address. The email contained a strange pdf file with an embedded docm file. 6 people out of a workplace of 80 opened that file. These people...

Fuck windows!

Now that I have your attention. My problem is with "IAR embedded workbench", not so much with windows but I'll get to that.
I've used that IDE for a few years.. 2 years ago. Since then I apparently forgot how to even create a project from scratch with adding all the necessary libraries and all that.

My initial deal with a client was to give them a solution using whatever tools I deem necessary. As I recently moved to linux and IAR is not available for that os.. and I also enjoyed working with CLion and PyCharm which Are available I decide to use CLion to write my C project.
A problem was that to compile code for microcontrollers I need tools unsupported by CLion.. oh well. I can do all the compilation and uploading of the code through terminal .. so I make a bash script that does it all. Super convenient. Development is going well and all.. until they ask me for the project.

I sent them the project so that they can see my progress. They can't do shit with what I gave them because they don't even have make on their machines let alone the compiler. All they have is IAR. But the guy that wants to see the code is not really a programmer.. he is a hardware specialist so I can't expect him to do anything more than use what he knows. He doesn't need or want to learn more right now.

So I go to windows and start porting my code to an IAR project and 2 days later I am still stuck with it. FUCK. Not only was the installation process horrible but the tools I wanted to install additionally did not work as promised either.

I know it took me about 2 days to setup all I needed on linux but I was enjoying it every step of the way. While this garbage is frustrating me so much. The fact that I used to do it before adds to the pain.

I am this close to telling them to just look at my code in notepad and I can setup a vm for them in which they can compile it if they really really need to.

If they just told me from the very start that they want me to work with IAR that would have been fine. I would have never seen the easier way and would have gladly figure it out then. Not now.

I was working with my embedded systems friend a few days ago on a website, and since we work with electronics, it was something new.

I then went home and started learning web development.

Holy shit I love it

I will continue to until it’s time to know about JavaScript

I really hate when I have to work on something wrong. I mean, the client wants to embedded a third party service on their website, using iframe. Then, they want us to change the layout and behavior of the embedded page. And well, no matter what, I have to do what they want. Great job.

Project Manager: "C++ has become much better for embedded now so we're gonna use it in the new project."

Me: "I didn't C that coming."

I know it's silly but I'm proud of it 🤓

Did I really go to university, have object oriented programming taught to me from scratch and embedded in me as best practice, work with OO frameworks for 3 years and become a damn good web dev just to use Drupal?

ESNext (next version of JavaScript) — because no matter what I do, as long as I'm working with web technologies, JavaScript is king. My career has evolved from UI-focused work, primarily working with JavaScript, yet I've also worked on embedded platforms and even operating systems! JavaScript is my foundation and you must always remember your roots!

You may soon have a new operating system from Google to run on your Raspberry Pi. Details are still extremely sparse, the only description on the GitHub page is “Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)”. But, here’s what we do know:

The new OS, called Fuchsia, will be based on Magenta, which is in turn built on LittleKernel. That means that, surprisingly, Google will not be using a Linux kernel for the new OS but something more like an embedded RTOS. Although Google is targeting embedded systems, the possibility of being able to run it on a desktop has been mentioned, so it may not be too minimalistic.

Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht has named the Raspberry Pi 3 specifically as one system it will run on, and said that it’ll be available soon. But, it seems Google is aiming to make it run on a variety of ARM devices (both 32 bit and 64 bit), as well as 64 bit PCs. This is a direct effort to compete against other commercial embedded operating systems that are currently available, and especially on IoT devices.

e = mc²

embedded = more code²

is it fair to say linux is the most popular operating system kernel?

i mean, it powers android, the most popular mobile os, chrome os, nearly all servers, raspberry pi’s, embedded devices and linux desktop operating systems. it has the be the most popular kernel, right?

NodeJS:
*Put image in Folder*
</>Import Image from "./images/image"

Xamarin
*Create Folder ONLY FROM VISUAL STUDIO*
*place image into folder*
*Properties: Build action: Embedded Resource*

THE FUCKING RECOURSEID DOESNT EVEN APPEAR WHAT THE FUCK XAMARIN

I’ve been trying to implement an alarm clock as an example for my physical computing lecture but the merge of my existing low power clock with my existing state machine based timer is driving me nuts. And I’m the lecturer of this course!

Reminder, include legal language in next project that says if we're using JIRA then we're using JIRA and not a thousand emails with requirements embedded in spreadsheets and PowerPoints.

Holy shit! I have not programmed a Teensy micro in a while. So I was looking at what they offer and saw they now have a 600Mhz version that is the same size/pinout as their 72MHz version. I am just amazed by how much micros have changed. I love the embedded wifi chips that are out there too. I guess I am going to be playing with the Teensy the next few weeks. I love playing around with embedded audio processing. Lately I have been playing with bluetooth wireless audio. So this will fit nicely. The chip has 2 AD and assorted digital audio inputs/outputs.

I dunno, I was excited and this seems like a nice new years present.

Wanted to do a "quick" software update on a test device for our colleagues who test the system

Here I am looking up what led indicators blinking correlates to what hardware error

Embedded development <3

🎲 ...

I hate doing JavaScript full-stack projects for huge greedy dipshit companies, but I’ve gained a lot of engineering experience and now finally I have the skill to move to embedded, VR/ AR or a combination of both.

If anyone reading this is in the are of AR/ VR, please share any tips or stories. Would appreciate it a lot!

Windows Embedded in a bus stop, ok

Website for a gallery that wanted a 10k website for just 1k ... Must haz super CMS so that they could send me word documents each week so I could manuallly copy paste that shit into the CMS, and somehow extract and restore the lowres embedded images in full resolution ...

I guess it was safe to say this was my first client from hell 😅😂😂😂

The second was a website for some ballroom dude that got my referral from gallery X ... Yup, same shitty type of client

X : What do you do?
Me : I am an embedded software developer
X: So you develop software?
Me: Yes, but my software works on BareMetal.
X: So you work in a metal workshop.
Me: -_-

Just started a new job as a software developer, even though I basically applied as an embedded software developer. I knew from the interview there was gonna be alot of legacy / high level stuff and they were pushing me away from embedded with the promise I could do it 'later on'.

Finally started and it turns out there's a shit tonne of legacy Python code for their non-existent test framework that's basically tied directly into a Qt GUI app and I'm doing shit that nobody else wants to do. Can't see myself wanting to do this for anywhere more than 2-3 months. Should I just bail now? Seems a bit dodgy if I leave having only worked there for a week? Job actually pays really well though.

Plan was to take an extended vacation around July/August, so quitting this early and then telling another employer later on that I need to bail for summer seems wrong also, not to mention COVID sucks and is making everything hell now.

What is your opinion on eSIM (embedded SIM)?

Now that Apple has built the first smartphone without modular SIM, it is, as history shows, only a matter of time until the same vendors who mock Apple for doing this will hypocritically follow Apple in implementing it themselves. There will be an outrage, but it will fade and the new restriction will be tolerated.

To me, "eSIM" appears like an euphemistic / euphemSIMtic (pun intended) marketing term, like calling non-replaceable batteries "eBatteries" ("embedded batteries") would be. It is less modular and more locked-down.

Does anyone here have any good resources for introduction to embedded, low level development, or anything on advanced C concepts? I've been having trouble trying to step into more complicated topics like bit manipulation and stuff I can do with memory management. Also any advice is also appreciated.

I've been noticing that without any specialization development can become repetitive, as in, a bunch of fancy ways of doing the same CURD operations.

Something that just calls me is low level development, wether it is embedded development (microcontrollers and such) or Linux Kernel and device drivers. I've been polishing my C skills for a while now and started to look into kernel development and uff, is it overwhelming!

I just wanted to see if some of you guys are or had experience in system development and how you got there. Thx!

So today (as of 5 min ago) marks a great day for my personal projects! I just got my embedded systems Flash memory driver debugging on my PC in Visual Studio, talking directly to the REAL flash chip, WITHOUT being tied to a embedded target! It's glorious. I can finally debug and write tons of tests without having to worry about the constraints of my embedded system. Ahhh. All the pieces I've needed to build this have slowly come together over weekends, and it feels so good to have this tool in my arsenal now! Great day indeed.

Does everyone here either is a web related developer? It seems like embedded software developers are a rare kind in this place.

Html5 vs Adobe flash. Html5 won
Html5 vs java Web embedded app. Html5 won
Therefore Html5 vs java 3 billion devices. Ans=?

Any embedded C programers out there
Rant:I really strugling for work

FML having to take on and support a python test framework that looks like it was written by a junior C embedded dev without a mentor.

- Imports everywhere in the code
- No abstraction or OOP
- sys.path.append fest (broken imports of course)
- Global variables fest
- No docstrings
- No readme
- Somehow mixed with a jUnit test framework as well
- Uses Windows environment variables profusely
- Pycharm has a stroke when I open files from this project

The moment I realized im an actual dev:

I used to always copy/paste embed codes and not think of how they work. Embedded iframes, embedded video, embedded appointment forms.

One day, I'm given an embed link and I freakin knew what everything meant. I knew the HTML, I understood what the JS call was, and I saw how it communicated back to its site. It was super exciting to finally understand what I was copying/pasting... Like I finally opened my eyes and saw the real world.

First patch for buildroot submitted and added applied to master!! 😁

I had the impression that git (like, more than "git add ." was just too complicated and that making patches was some sort of dark magic using some obscure unix tools.

Well, it turns out that is actually pretty easy, fun and exhilarating!!

Looking forward to build up until I'm making contributions to the kernel! 🤓

Dear Santa,

My name is Steve.

My age is none of your business.

I've been a very good boy this year.

If I could have any present in the world, it would be an embedded, serverless PostgreSQL.

Love,
Steve.

Trying to build an executable for a an embedded device. There is 135MB of space on the device. Debug build is 135MB, release build is 138MB...

I have questions and I am afraid of what the answers are. Gotta sort out my sketchy build environment tomorrow.

Today is just me and my friend, two embedded systems geeks making a website.

It’s going awful but it’s fun as hell😂

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

Much like traditional engineering I can see software engineering suddenly becoming very very regulated around the world. Different systems safety bodies will open up for things like embedded systems development where their is a risk of harm, mandatory security standards will be put in place etc.

Enjoy the cowboy days ladies/gents/others regulatory bodies are on their way!

Anyone here worked a whole lot with low level programming?

I have always worked with high level languages like Python and C++, but I’ve also had an interest in working with embedded systems, real close to the metal.

Any directions on where I should go to start learning low level programming? Sites, languages, etc?

Appreciated devRant fam!😊

First day at Jetpack Compose: Wow, how cool!
One week of Jetpack Compose: This preview never works right!
One month of Jetpack Compose: Damn! There's no mature component to this shit!
Two months of Jetpack Compose: There's no going back and start using embedded applications as intent.

Don't get into it.

Four steps of professional development:
1. Simple and bad
2. Complicated and bad
3. Complicated and good
4. Simple and good

At CSS and frontend in general, I'm easy four, straight up. At architecture, I'm perhaps two in devops/docker/kubernetes/other crap and three at DB design. At electrical engineering and embedded stuff, I'm 1, no questions asked.

What are your rankings?

!rant
I gotta say I really love the beauty of being able to merge math, code, and hardware all in a well tuned symphony to make something awesome. Building an LQR controller for a custom quadrotor flight controller and it is just so much fun!

Today at work I started doing 1 month old task with production problem.

First of all why now ?
Because I already fixed all the other urgent production problems I had during last month, done about 4 deployments of those super urgent errors.
Now I can start with not trivial one that are pending for quite time.
I am the only backend developer in this project ...

This is a dtp application and the problem is that we are not verifying if we got all fonts embedded in customer provided pdf files.

We are generating high quality images of those pdf for printing just fine from the beginning but now we need valid PDF with all fonts embedded in it. ( don’t ask me why I am only a hammer in this process )

After running simple test using python script against database it turned out we have over 500 broken PDF files without fonts.

So I guess I have just one sentence to say about it.

Fuck you PDF format for not being strict and allowing this shit.

why the fuck is the fucking windows embedded kernel changing the utc time when changing the current daylight setting. its not supposed to change for fucks sake..per definition....its the local time that shall change...ridiculous..

Things I loved doing.
Measuring a ToF between two ultrasonic transducer !!

Oh god, structure alignement, why you do this... You might be interested if you do C/C++ but haven't tried passing structures as binary to other programs.

Just started working recently with a lib that's only a DLL and a header file that doesn't compile. So using python I was able to use the DLL and redefined all of the structures using ctypes, and the nice thing is: it works.

But I spent the whole afternoon debugging why the data in my structures was incoherent. After much cussing, I figured out that the DLL was compiled with 2 bytes packing...

Packing refers to how structures don't just have all the data placed next to each other in a buffer. Instead, the standard way a compiler will allocate memory for a structure is to ensure that for each field of the structure, the offset between the pointer to the structure and the one to the field in that structure is a multiple of either the size of the field, or the size of the processor's words. That means that typically, you'll find that in a structure containing a char and a long, allocated at pointer p, the double will be starting at p+4 instead of the p+1 you might assume.
With most compilers, on most architectures, you still have the option to force an other alignment for your structures. Well that was the case here, with a single pragma hidden in a sea of ifdefs... Man that took some time to debug...

My company just released its website today. Previously, it just used its parent company's site.

Now, the problem is that it sucks big time. Awful design, pixelated stock photos, bad navigation, and broken grammar.

In the company's defence, it's not a web shop. It employs zero web devs. The site was built by an external company.

But if you are like me, you visit company websites before you apply for a job, and in this case, it would bed a big red flag.

Or maybe the hard-core embedded devs they are looking to employ wouldn't notice? Maybe they are all stuck in the year 2000 as well? I used to be a web developer so maybe my criteria are broken?

Work hard at improving my skills in embedded software and electrical engineering for sure!

Since it caught my interest half a year ago, I've read several books and articles on the topic, but never got to get my hands on the actual thing.

This will definitely be the year where I'll go nuts and learn all I can to prepare for my next internship, which I really want to be related to embedded software!

Hello ratnters,
I'm new around here and I'm part of the niche of embedded software developer.
Is there any fellow MCU programmer around here?

Have a great night everyone!

Always nice when you discover that your hardware has an *ELABORATE* HARDWARE OFFLOADING ENGINE with full protocol implementation for something you spent two months writing software for...

Well, at least the current solution works like it is supposed to. Don't know that yet of the hardware implementation.
It would save 4 euro component cost though if we switch to the offloading engine

When it gets embedded

How the fuck am I supposed to go on learning embedded programming, when almost all chips/parts take at least 2 months to ship...
This will take ages 🙃

At work we develop for embedded systems. Using the heap can raise unknown effects sometimes. So we always try to avoid using it. To show our attitude regarding the heap we want to make T-Shirts like the No Ma'am shirts from Married... with Children but with No Heap instead of No Ma'am. Now we need a meaning of the acronym. Our currently idea is:

Nerdy
Opponents of
HEAP
E
Allocation
Practice

We do not find a good word for the E, we also aren't native speaker, thus we are not sure which synonym for word like based can be used in such context. So i want to ask if someone has a good idea or even a better idea for the whole acronym :)

Soo question for the few embedded engineers on here. Do you guys use microchip’s, or NXP’s SDK for the hardware drivers? Or do you read the ref manual and build the HAL and PAL drivers per the need of the project for less code bloat and saving code space.

I and my coworkers always end up writing the drivers ourselves , so we have a better understanding of the specific hardware of the chip. Just trying to see if We’re the majority or the minority of embedded engineers.

Not really sure how many embedded folks are even on here.

And no not talking about RasPie, and arduino folks (no offense)

Debugging is not about process, it's about end.

(I just finished two week long debugging session - approx 5 hours a day. It was nasty bug appearing only with optimalizations in embedded C, you can imagine joy when it came to life tonight. So now I am resting at pub with glass of cider knowing I am loosing needed sleep but I simply do not care right now. Sweet careless.)

Scratch away the PCB trace that was initially connected and solder a wire straight to the IC pin to connect it it to the place you want

Side job - some consulting.
Second day of editing 70k one file, unmanageable javascript code to find memory leaks for some embedded device that is running on chromium embedded framework. Luckily there is chromium remote debugger for it so I can make snapshot and place some breakpoints.

Like seriously how fucked up are those ORMs? Prisma “yeah we support mongodb, but we will force you to write in a relational way.” I always hit on hard walls whenever ever I try an ORM in my projects.

Don’t get me wrong they are good for dummy stuff. But if you want to go a little bit crazy with mongo, embedded documents with refs it’s a mess…

Typescript and good old mongodb adapter bb anything else.

I'm probably going to have to say IE. Microsoft pretended like they fixed everything, then removed conditional comments to "prove" it, except now you have to have five times as much code and eighteen different file formats just to get a stinking video embedded in a web page.

Welcome, Edge. Not a moment too soon.

After debugging my embedded code for five hours my teammate just sent me a message "I just commited the latest PCB". Well thanks, after looking at the new layout I got the initial code working by just changing one variable!