This is an article I stumbled across today.  I'm a fan of using stdint.h, and I like this explanation of why and when to use the different types.

Embedded.com - Guidelines for writing efficient C/C++ code

I was looking into writing something like this in December. Come January/February and someone else has already done it! I'm gonna try this out soon.

Bonjour/Zeroconf for Arduino

I ordered some scuba gear during the sales last weekend. One of the items I purchased came with a free 1W LED flashlight (the yellow one on this pageYesterday at work-just for fun-I hooked the two lines going to the LED to my oscilloscope. Below are a couple of the screenshots I took of the signal ( Read more... )

There are things we are supposed to do that we don't. Exercise. Avoiding fast foods. Use the assert() macro. Exercise is a real pain that requires time and effort. Fast food can save time, and is carefully designed to seduce us. But asserts take little time or effort, and yet are as rare as the spotted owl. The Linux kernel sports just one thousand ( Read more... )

Sometime, I plan to really check this out. It's so exciting!

LLVM 2.6 Release Notes

I think this is a neat C-preprocessor trick for implementing binary literals. Unlike 0b0101 which some compilers support and others support via a patch (gcc), this method is portable:

Barr Code: Binary Literals in C

Here's the interesting part:

// Internal Macros ( Read more... )

My introductory article on understanding counters/timers has been "published:" Back to the basics: Doing Hardware Counter/Timer design using High School Science

In the RSS feed, the editor summarizes it:Using the same unit-conversion techniques and dimensional analysis techniques learned in high school, Zane Purvis takes non-engineers and ( Read more... )

I'll be in Mexico, but you can be on the lookout for this:

...I [the editor] am using it [my article on understanding timers] this week as a featured article on the embedded.com home page and later in the week as an Editor's Top Pick in the Embedded.com newsletter, where it will get wide visibility among embedded developers. The web site attracts ( Read more... )

Today, I signed a job offer from Sensus Conservation Systems.

And, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, I will be an "Embedded Firmware Engineer" just like my blog title says I am!

My first day is August 12.

For the next three weeks, I'm helping to run this summer camp:

Autonomous Robotics Workshop
Students participating in this workshop will build a robotic car that can automatically track a line, follow a light, or hide in the dark like a cockroach. The "autonomous" part of this program means that the car will operate without input from the student ( Read more... )