The design and implementation of embedded safety (multicore) systems is highly challenging without good tool and methodology support, especially for small and medium sized development teams. Safety artifacts like hazard and risks analysis, specifications of safety functions and architectural solutions typically are realized as individual documents without a common repository, making the maintenance hard and … Read more
With growing complexity of embedded controllers and applications, the design of safety critical systems becomes more and more challenging. Tools and frameworks help to manage such challenges but are often pricy and cover only certain aspects of the overall design or implementation workflow. In previous publications, we introduced a lightweight runtime environment and discussed concepts … Read more
Surprisingly, my small RGB565 color picker appears to be the most popular page on this website. Time to dig a little deeper into the topic of RGB565 and its generation/conversion. The theory behind digital colors: Digital images consist out of pixels (big news huh?). If we want to store or transmit an image, we have … Read more
A key pattern for building safe architectures is a strict separation of QM and safety code, considering a separation not only in the memory domain but also in the time domain. On a multicore processor, this can be achieved by placing QM code on one core and safety code on another. This approach however brings … Read more
Sending data between an embedded device and something like an PC sometime can be frustrating. Usually communication standards like UART/RS232 are used to establish an easy to use connection, while other standards like USB are difficult to handle and tend to be very complicated. I was playing with the ESP32 and wrote a basic WebSocket server. … Read more
Last year I ordered an ESP32, a chip that got quiet a lot of attention because it is small, affordable and comes with a free SDK. I worked with the predecessor, the ESP8266 and I think that the ESP32 is way easier to use and the SDK (called ESP-IDF) is much more powerful compared with the ESP8266. Time to get … Read more
Multicore Mikrocontroller bringen aufgrund ihrer Komplexität besondere Herausforderungen, wie die Inter-Core Kommunikation und den Schutz von Ressourcen vor unerlaubtem Zugriff mit sich. Zudem ist die Parametrisierung und Nutzung immer leistungsfähigerer und umfangreicherer Peripherie komplex und fordert den Anwender somit zusätzlich. Die Programmierung von Multicore Mikrocontrollern stellt Entwickler vor eine große Herausforderung. „Für die Umstellung auf … Read more
Separation in the data-, resource- and time-domain is a big challenge on multicore microcontrollers. Combined with dependencies in the same domains, the result very often is a fragile, complex structure that is difficult to handle. In a previous project, an innovative runtime environment, which is based on ideas of Adaptive AUTOSAR has been developed together … Read more
Since the 70’s, Moores Law was the driving force behind the increase of computing power. As we know, we start to reach the physical limitations of downscaling, which made higher frequencies possible but also lead to higher leakage currents and therefore power consumption and heat. As squeezing a lot more GHz out of the circuits … Read more
I had to interface motor-controllers with CAN, CANopen to be specific. The Name CANopen suggests that this is some kind of open standard with tons of free Stacks and documentation, right? No, not at all. I had a hard time implementing a own CANopen-Stack on a PSoC 5LP. I want to change these circumstances by … Read more