Hardware Podcasts

410: Emacs From the Future

Embedded.fm · 21 Apr 2022 · 51m · Episode 410

What this episode covers

Elecia White and Christopher White discuss the painful process of migrating from a vendor IDE to a free GCC and VS Code toolchain, highlighting issues with brittle dependencies, Python version conflicts, and Windows ARM virtualization. They then shift to a pedagogical discussion on embedded interrupts, distinguishing ISRs from asserts and callbacks, and explaining concepts like weak symbols and vector tables to students. The episode concludes with community news, including a new book club, a panel on device observability, and updates on WSL USB support.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Newark, Embedded Artistry, Memfault, Golioth
Chips
MRF1K50HR5, Raspberry Pi Pico
Tools
J-link, VS Code, Cortex-Debug, GNU arm-none-eabi, Wokwi, PulseView
Also
MCU on Eclipse, Erich Styger, Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product, Phillip Johnston, Tyler Hoffman, Jonathan Beri

Related episodes from other shows

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

  • Moore's Lobby · 49m

    Creating Next-Gen Microcontroller Developer Tools and Equipping the People Who Use Them

    Rodger Richey, Vice President of Development Tools and Academic Programs at Microchip Technology, discusses the evolution of embedded development tools over his 30-year tenure. He explains how Microchip shifted its IDE support from NetBeans to VS Code to align with developer habits and details the integration of AI as an assistant for code generation and debugging rather than a replacement. Richey also highlights Microchip's academic initiatives, including virtual internships and hardware labs in India, designed to bridge the gap between theoretical education and practical engineering skills.

    Embedded firmwareAI & machine learning
    7 chapters

  • The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast · 39m

    Christmas Special

    Hosts Jeff Gable and Luca share war stories from their careers in embedded systems, highlighting the pain of manual testing in helicopter avionics, the chaos of managing requirements with Word and Excel in Dropbox for medical devices, and the technical debt of massive #ifdef blocks in legacy machine tool software. They discuss the industry's slow adoption of modern software practices like version control and CI/CD, contrasting embedded development with web development standards. The episode concludes with book recommendations including 'The Phoenix Project' and 'Team Topologies', and reflections on the future of IoT security and agile adoption in hardware.

    Debugging & failure analysisEmbedded firmware
    6 chapters

  • The Amp Hour · 1h 09m

    Just Add Salt

    Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics and Dave Jones of EEV Blog discuss Gammell's purchase of a vintage HP 8753D VNA and the high cost of test equipment. They analyze the complexity of setting up a firmware development environment for an STM32 microcontroller, debating the trade-offs between using vendor IDEs like STM32CubeIDE versus manual toolchains like GCC and Visual Studio Code. The conversation also covers the limitations of current AI auto-routing tools for PCBs and a review of university-level electronics textbooks.

    Embedded firmwareTest & measurement
    8 chapters

  • The Amp Hour · 1h 08m

    An Interview with Jack Ganssle (2nd)

    Jack Ganssle, author of the Embedded Muse, discusses the evolution of embedded firmware, highlighting the shift toward cloud-connected platforms and the acquisition of RTOS providers like FreeRTOS by Amazon and ExpressLogic by Microsoft. He critiques the current state of vendor-supplied software, praising Renesas' Synergy platform for providing fully tested, guaranteed software components, while noting the decline of legacy RTOSs like VxWorks. Ganssle emphasizes that firmware development requires rigorous design and quality processes, arguing that jumping into code without solid requirements leads to catastrophic failures, as seen in recent medical device and aviation incidents.

    Embedded firmwareMicrocontrollers & dev platforms
    8 chapters

  • The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast · 59m

    100 Episodes! Break Out the Champagne! A Retrospective

    Joe Schneider and Jacob Beningo interview founders Luca Ingianni and Jeff Gable of the Agile Embedded Podcast, discussing their origin story as solo consultants who started the show in 2021 without prior connection. The hosts share war stories about difficult debugging challenges, including a one-line interrupt fix that took five days and a temperature-dependent DDR RAM failure that required two months to resolve. They also analyze the current state of the industry, debating whether AI is following the Gartner hype cycle like Agile did and predicting a future focus on requirements engineering and AI integration in embedded development.

    Embedded firmwareAI & machine learning
    8 chapters

The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by Embedded.fm. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.