Damir Avdic

That RTOS crash you blamed on code? Check your DMA buffers first. I learned the hard way. Picture this: A medical ventilator froze like clockwork every 72 hours. Debugging it felt like chasing a ghost. The system? FreeRTOS with ADC DMA. The problem? Task Control Blocks (TCBs) trashed at address 0x20001000. Here’s the culprit: → DMA buffer: 0x20000C00 (size: 1024 bytes). → DMA burst mode: 16 transfers (overran by 16 bytes). → Result: TCB’s stack pointer corrupted → task deletion → system deadlock. The brutal truth about DMA corruption: ✅ Debuggers halt the CPU, but DMA keeps running. ✅ MPUs often exclude peripheral regions. ✅ Stack analyzers don’t check DMA boundaries. Invisible, right? 💀 Here’s how we fixed it: → Dedicated MPU region for DMA buffers: ```c MPU->RBAR = 0x20000C00 | MPU_REGION_VALID; MPU->RASR = MPU_SIZE_1KB | MPU_NO_ACCESS; ``` → Added hardware flow control (DMA request/acknowledge). → Memory guards (0xDEADBEEF patterns) around buffers. Lesson learned: Your RTOS is only as safe as your DMA configuration. Now I’m curious-what’s the weirdest RTOS crash you’ve debugged? Was DMA silently wreaking havoc? #EmbeddedSystems #RTOS #Debugging #DMA #Firmware #Engineering

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Here's an uncomfortable truth: Most RTOS implementations in embedded systems are nothing but unnecessary overhead that makes developers feel sophisticated while actually introducing more problems than they solve. We've all been there, facing a complex embedded project and immediately reaching for that "industry-standard" RTOS solution. But let's be honest: in 80% of applications, an RTOS is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The context switching overhead alone can consume precious CPU cycles that your resource-constrained device can't afford to spare. And don't get me started on priority inversion issues that turn your "deterministic" system into a timing lottery. I've spent countless hours debugging mysterious timing issues only to discover they were caused by the RTOS itself, nondeterministic interrupt latency, hidden system calls, and the inevitable memory fragmentation when dynamic task creation is involved. What we really need is a return to bare-metal programming with well-structured state machines and interrupt-driven design. It's not "old school", it's engineering discipline. When your microcontroller has 32KB of flash and 4KB of RAM, every byte counts, and every unnecessary abstraction is a liability. The next time you're tempted to drop an RTOS into your project, ask yourself: Do I really need it, or am I just avoiding the hard work of designing a proper architecture? 🔥 What's the most ridiculous RTOS-induced nightmare you've ever debugged? Share your war stories below, bonus points for priority inversion horror stories! #EmbeddedSystems #RTOS #BareMetal #Firmware #EmbeddedC #RealTimeSystems #LowLevelProgramming #TechTruth #EmbeddedEngineering

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🚀 New Update on My GitHub Repository! 🔧 “Everything About C for Embedded Systems” Hey everyone! 👋 I’ve been working steadily on a structured and beginner-to-advanced guide to C programming with a focus on embedded systems, and I’m excited to share a major update to my open-source repository! 🌟 📚 Topics Covered: ✅ Control flow (if, switch, loops, break, continue, etc.) ✅ Clean and commented C code examples ✅ Mini projects like Student Report System with file handling ✅ Assignments + Interview prep questions ✅ Focused on real-world embedded C practices 🔗 GitHub Repo: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gSKjkHHp Whether you’re a beginner looking to strengthen your C skills, or an embedded developer brushing up your basics — this is for you! 📩 I’m open to feedback, contributions, and collaboration! Let’s grow together, one line of code at a time 💻✨ #CProgramming #EmbeddedSystems #GitHub #OpenSource #LearningInPublic #CodingJourney #FirmwareDevelopment

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🔧 Why C Still Reigns Supreme in the World of Systems and Embedded Development Despite the flood of modern programming languages, C is not going anywhere and for very good reasons. If you're an aspiring embedded systems engineer, systems programmer, compiler developer, or even working in IoT, automotive, aerospace, medical devices, robotics, OS kernels, or performance-critical AI systems—you need to know C. Not just surface-level, but deep—pointer-arithmetic, memory models, linker behavior, and beyond. 💡 Why Is C Still So Important? ✅ Foundational to Modern Software C forms the core of modern operating systems, device drivers, microcontroller firmware, networking stacks, and more. Linux, Windows kernel components, embedded RTOSs, and most bootloaders are all written in C. ✅ Portability + Performance With its ability to compile directly to machine-level instructions and fine-grained control over memory and CPU usage, C enables highly efficient and deterministic code—crucial in embedded and real-time systems. ✅ Hardware-Level Control C gives you direct access to registers, memory addresses, and low-level operations. That’s why ARM Cortex-M, AVR, STM32, PIC, and even bare-metal RISC-V systems are taught and programmed in C. ✅ Toolchain Ecosystem Toolchains like GCC, IAR, Keil, Clang, and GHS are optimized for C. Most debugging tools, static analyzers, and safety certification tools are designed with C in mind—especially in MISRA, AUTOSAR, ISO 26262, and DO-178C compliant industries. ✅ Ubiquity in Industry Interviews Whether it's NXP, Infineon, Qualcomm, Intel, or Bosch—C questions dominate embedded interviews. From bit manipulation to memory maps to ISRs, you can’t escape it. 📍 Where Is C Used? Microcontrollers & Bare Metal Programming (e.g., STM32, AVR, MSP430) Kernel and OS Development (Linux Kernel, Windows NT) Drivers and Firmware (USB, UART, I2C, SPI, CAN) IoT Platforms (Contiki, RIOT OS, Zephyr) Automotive Software (AUTOSAR BSW modules) Medical and Aerospace Systems (Safety-critical environments) Compiler and Interpreter Backends Network Stack and Protocol Implementation 🔍 How Much C Should You Know? ➡️ Enough to design your own OS kernel modules and bootloaders. But practically, you should master: 🧠 Pointers and Memory Management Pointer arithmetic, const correctness, double/triple pointers Dynamic/static memory regions (stack/heap/data/bss) 🛠️ Bitwise Operations & Memory Mapping Efficient register-level manipulation (critical for peripheral drivers) 🔁 Control Flow, Optimization, and Inlining Loop unrolling, reducing function call overhead 📎 Linkers, Compilers, and Makefiles Understand .data, .bss, heap, and stack behavior Learn gcc, ld, nm, objdump and make 🧪 Unit Testing and Safety Coding Standards CppUTest and MISRA C compliance 🧬 Interrupts and ISRs Handling concurrency, atomic operations, volatile, and memory barriers 💻 Toolchain Knowledge Cross-compilation, flashing, and JTAG/SWD debugging #CProgramming

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If you want to improve your C++ skills, here's a course for you. You'll code in C++ and use the powerful open-source JUCE framework to build an audio plugin. You'll also gain a solid understanding of digital signal processing concepts, learn how to create a responsive GUI for your plugin, and more. https://lnkd.in/gJq_3SAa

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Our Qt Academy course 2D with Qt Design Studio has been updated! 🎓 Review the fundamentals of composing a 2D user interface with Qt Design Studio. In this course, you’ll work with ready-made components, create one of your own, and get hands-on experience with Design Studio’s core features. Sign up for this free course and get started: https://lnkd.in/dTcyFG_W

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”Oh, so you’re a programmer? You make apps?” ”Not exactly... more like... embedded systems” silence And then comes the polite smile and a quick change of topic 🙂 Ever happened to you? For me, it is more than I can count. Embedded systems are a strange corner of the tech world. For most people, they’re completely invisible. They’re not “the app on your phone” or “a website you use”. But without them, your phone wouldn’t work. Neither would your car. Or 80% of the things around us. And honestly, it’s hard to explain in two sentences. How do you casually describe working on code that runs on a microcontroller, controls a device, operates in extreme conditions, and has to be reliable for 10 years? On one hand – it doesn’t surprise me anymore. On the other hand, I believe it’s worth trying to explain. Because if we don’t show people what embedded really is – and how much depends on well-designed embedded systems – no one else will. Without that awareness, embedded will always be „somewhere in the background”, even though, in reality, it’s what holds the entire tech world together. Do you have your go-to way of explaining what you do to friends or family? 😄 #embedded #embeddedsoftware #softwareengineering #technology #Tronel #thoughts

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What is the first skill new developers should really work on? In embedded development, it used to be mostly about technical skills. Programming. Code organization. Debugging. As projects became more complex, communication skills mattered more, because we had to explain what we were doing. And time management became critical, because there is always more work than time. All of this is still important. But today, I think new developers need to focus on something else first. 👉 Critical thinking. Without it, many junior roles will be easy to replace with AI. Critical thinking lets you build a step by step reasoning path when debugging instead of jumping randomly between ideas. It lets you review what an AI tool produces and decide whether it actually makes sense, and where it might be wrong. Even if you do not know all the technical details (and especially in that case!) And it lets you find a new way forward when everyone else is stuck. Find out an opportunity everyone overlooked until now. What do you think is the most important skill new developers need to learn today?

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CppCon, The C++ Conference 2024 - Cassio Neri: "How to Quickly Convert Floating-Point Numbers in C++" youtu.be/fPZ1ZdA7Iwc Standard C++ provides a few functions to convert a double or float value to string, namely, sprintf, stringstream::operator＜＜, snprintf, to_string, to_chars and format. This talk concerns what goes on behind the scenes, i.e, the algorithms which these functions might use to do their job. Curiously, many of these algorithms have dragon-related names like Dragon, Grisu, Errol, Ryu and Dragonbox. Here mythology meets technology and we shall introduce the new dragon that has just arrived in the den. (Please leave your bows and arrows at home, they won't be necessary here.) The following topics are some of those covered in this presentation:- algorithms, mathematics, arithmetic, floating point, floating point numbers, floating point math, floating point arithmetic, decimal floating-point representation, binary floating-point representation, IEEE 754, programming languages, c++, cpp --- Cassio Neri holds a PHD in Applied Mathematics from University of Paris Dauphine. Cassio has been professionally coding in C++ for more than 15 years but his coding experience has started far earlier when he was a kid. He currently works on the financial industry in London but had previously worked in academia for more than a decade. Cassio authored research articles and has published them on peer-reviewed journals on Mathematics, Finance, Computer Science and C++.

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ANDATA will be present at this years SafetyWeek 2025 (https://lnkd.in/dJdGF8p7) as exibitor and as speaker about "Combining Physical and Virtual Testing for an Optimized, Effective Test Design of ADAS and Pre-Crash Systems" Scenario bases, such as the EuroNCAP test catalogue for assessing collision avoidance systems, are becoming increasingly complex and resource-intensive. As a result, simulation must play a growing role in complementing physical testing to support: 👉 rapid identification of the most critical test cases, 👉 design of effective test plans, 👉 robustness and sensitivity analyses, 👉 simultaneous estimation of false positive rates and real-world (mis)performance, and 👉 mapping between proving ground tests, real-world data, and large-scale simulation datasets. 💡 An integrated approach can open new ways in approval and release argumentation - reducing the need for extensive physical testing by strategically leveraging targeted, well-designed simulations. #adas #integralsafety #visionzero #scenariomanagement #safetyweek #andata #collisionavoidance #ai #virtualtesting

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Zephyr is overkill for most embedded projects, and that’s precisely the point. Most embedded developers pick the smallest, leanest RTOS, or even write bare-metal code. Zephyr (with complex configuration, build system, subsystems) feels like “too much” for blinking LEDs or reading sensors. But that “overkill” is intentional. Zephyr’s real value has never been in minimalism. Its real value is in scalability, reuse, and its ecosystem! Look, Zephyr’s learning curve is steep because it solves hard problems up front. The device tree system feels unnecessary… until you need to support multiple boards cleanly. The Kconfig system seems bloated… until you have 27 modules and want to enable/disable them per build. Zephyr is overkill for many solo, short-term projects. True. But that’s like saying Git is overkill for managing blinking LED firmware. You’re missing the bigger picture. Learning Zephyr means learning how to think as a professional. That’s not wasted effort. That’s investing in your future as an embedded developer.

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🔐 Breaking RSA with ~1M physical qubits? That’s the breakthrough outlined in a recent paper by Craig Gidney at Google: 📄 https://lnkd.in/dQZuNaHt The work proposes optimized circuit constructions and error correction layouts that reduce the qubit requirements for factoring RSA-2048 from ~20 million (2019 estimates) to just 1 million physical qubits—a 20× improvement. This dramatically shifts the horizon for practical quantum attacks on today’s cryptographic standards. ⚠️ If validated, these results substantially accelerate the urgency for quantum readiness—not in theory, but in practice. At BlueQubit, we're focused on developing quantum software solutions that help enterprises and defense organizations prepare for and transition to the post-quantum era. That means tools for identifying cryptographic risk, supporting hybrid classical-quantum architectures, and integrating quantum solutions into existing workflows. 🚀 Algorithmic advances like this reshape timelines, risk models, and strategic priorities. For sectors with long data retention or sensitive infrastructure, now is the time to take quantum threats seriously—and plan accordingly. 🛡️ #QuantumComputing #PostQuantumCryptography #Cybersecurity #QuantumReadiness #BlueQubit #ShorAlgorithm #PQCTools #EnterpriseSecurity #DefenseTech

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A new year starts, a good time to strengthen your knowledge and skills on Embedded Linux technologies! Bootlin has scheduled on-line public sessions of all its training courses in February and March this year, and we have seats left in all of them (but for some of them, only a few seats are left!). Here are the sessions available: 👉 Embedded Linux System Development, Feb 9-20 👉 Linux Kernel Driver Development, Feb 9-19 👉 Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, Feb 9-13 👉 Embedded Linux with Buildroot, Mar 16-20 👉 Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT, Mar 24-26 👉 Debugging, Tracing, Profiling and Performance Analysis with Linux, Mar 2-5 👉 Embedded Linux Networking, Feb 2-6 👉 Embedded Linux Audio, Mar 9-13 Why chose Bootlin for your training course? 👉 Freely available training materials, published under an open-source license, for over 20 years! 👉 Meaningful and challenging practical labs on real hardware 👉 Experienced trainers who are all full-time engineers at Bootlin 👉 Over 1200 engineers trained in 2025 Registration for our sessions takes place directly on-line on our website.

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Major changes starting in 2026 for my personal projects and Infelab - Infinite Electronics Laboratory products. From now on, all new embedded GUI projects will be developed using LVGL, replacing Qt as our default framework for this purpose. This decision reflects our focus on lightweight and efficient solutions, better performance on resource-constrained devices and improved portability across embedded platforms Existing Qt-based projects remain unchanged, but all new developments will follow this new direction.

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🟦 Embedded Tuesday #17 – Bitwise Operators: Bare-Metal Code Starts Here If you write bare-metal code, you have to understand bitwise operators. There’s no real way around it. In embedded systems, we work very close to the hardware: registers, flags, control bits, status bits…and all of them are controlled bit by bit. Bitwise operators are simply the language we use to talk to the hardware. 🔹 What are bitwise operators and what do they do? & (AND) → used to mask or clear bits | (OR) → used to set bits ^ (XOR) → used to toggle bits ~ (NOT) → used to invert bits << >> (shift) → used to move bits left or right You see these operators everywhere: GPIO control, peripheral configuration, status checking, register setup… 🔹 The most common pattern you’ll see GPIOA->ODR |= (1 << 5); Let’s break the logic down. First: 1    = 0000 0001 1 << 5  = 0010 0000 When we shift 1 left 5 times, we create a bit mask: only bit 5 is 1, all other bits are 0. Now comes OR (|). OR logic is simple: if one of the bits is 1, the result is 1 So when we OR this mask with the register: bit 5 becomes 1 no matter what all other bits stay unchanged That’s why OR is used to SET a bit. 🔹 Clearing a bit (the correct way) GPIOA->ODR &= ~(1 << 5); Step by step: (1 << 5) → only bit 5 is 1 ~(1 << 5) → bit 5 becomes 0, all other bits become 1 Now AND (&) logic: if one of the bits is 0, the result is 0 So: bit 5 → forced to 0 other bits → stay exactly the same That’s why AND with a NOT mask is used to CLEAR a bit. 🔑 The core idea (this is the part to remember) (1 << n) → “I only care about this bit” | → force a bit to 1 & ~ → force a bit to 0 other bits are not affected If you don’t understand this logic, you’re not really controlling the MCU. That’s why bitwise operators are not a nice to know topic. They are a must for every embedded developer. #EmbeddedTuesday #EmbeddedSystems #BareMetal #EmbeddedSoftware #BitwiseOperators #Microcontrollers

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C++Now 2025 - Dietmar Kühl: "The Sender/Receiver Framework in C++ - Getting the Lazy Task Done" youtu.be/gAnvppqvJw0 The C++26 specification includes the sender/receiver framework for dealing with asynchronous operations. It defines a vocabulary, as well as various algorithms and utilities using this vocabulary. The current specification doesn't include a matching coroutine task class template, though it is expected that most users would use coroutines to actually use the facilities. This presentation discusses various aspects for creating a coroutine task suitable for many needs, including: The basic operation of a sender/receiver aware task Scheduler affinity and why it is important Allocator support for the coroutine frame Providing an environment to child operations Propagating errors without exceptions --- Dietmar Kühl is a senior software developer at Bloomberg, where he works on the data distribution environment used both internally and by enterprise installations at clients. Before joining Bloomberg, he did consulting for software projects mainly in the finance sector. He is a regular attendee of the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee (WG21) and presents at conferences. He used to be a moderator of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated and frequently answers questions on Stack Overflow.

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C++ in Embedded Systems: A practical transition from C to modern C++  by Amar Mahmutbegović — is your go-to guide to elevate code readability, maintainability, and performance in real-world firmware projects.   This practical guide empowers you to: 🔺 Debunk myths about C++ in embedded systems 🔺 Set up build automation in resource-constrained environments 🔺 Use strong types to improve type-safety 🔺 Apply techniques like Resource Acquisition Initialization (RAII) 🔺 Leverage Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) with Boost SML 🔺 Adopt software best practices like SOLID for embedded applications Who this book is for: This book is for embedded developers who primarily use C and want to adopt a modern C++ approach. It covers fundamental C++ concepts, making it accessible to beginners, while assuming basic familiarity so that you can fully leverage advanced features like compile-time computation. Even those with some C++ background will learn new ways to apply modern best practices, resulting in more efficient and maintainable embedded applications.   📖 Pre-order now on Packt or Amazon — print or Kindle purchase includes a free PDF eBook 🔗 Packt: https://lnkd.in/d4NZBtng 🔗 Amazon: https://lnkd.in/dhVUxxzm

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