I wish you a happy new year. I hope you will like the 11th issue of Embedded Systems Weekly. Feel free to send your feedbacks by email embedsys@embedsysweekly.com .
Hardware
FPGA 101 - Making awesome stuff with FPGAs
A very interesting video on FPGA that starts with the basics of Field Programmable Gate Arrays and then describes for which works FPGA are better than CPUs. Personally my first contact with FPGA was very high-speed and deterministic serial communication. One of the point that Karsten Becker deals with in his presentation.
Software
On Hacking MicroSD Cards
Almost nobody is aware what are the microcontrollers embedded in the MicroSD cards. This article gives us tons of informations on MicroSD cards’ microntrollers and authors explain how they manage to update the firmware of a card and how it is certainly possible to run a man-in-the-middle attack.
The Birth of Standard Error
Another interesting piece of History. Did you know that the standard error was created to solve a problem of a … ?
Backdoor TCP-32764
Only two months after the D-link backdoor, another backdoor has been discovered in the Netgear, Linksys and Cisco modem/routers. For some of them the backdoor can be open from internet! A very bad time for these companies.
A Handy U-Boot Trick
If you plan to use U-Boot as bootloader for your next project this article will give you good practices to speed up your Linux kernel development
WS2812 LEDs controlled by an iMX233
How to drive plenty of LEDs with the cheapest hardware possible could be another title for this article.
Largest small system emulator
A demonstration that it is possible to emulate a 8086 processor with only 8086/2=4043 bytes of code. Less lines of code than the total number of transistors used to implement the original 8086 CPU.
Misc
How a CPU is made
A nice video made by the semiconductor company GlobalFoundries
Tools
Open-Source Guide for Embedded Systems Developers (EE Tip #114)
An handy list of open source tools to get the job done