Welcome to the issue #78!
This week Arm puts online the questionable website riscv-basics.com (not online anymore because of the backfire). To give some context RISC-V is a free and open RISC ISA. One interesting fact is that it becomes a viable alternative to create SoCs without any royalties to pay. Therefore RISC-V is a threat for Arm who sells IP licenses. Therefore Arm tries to discredite the new kid on the block, creates a website containing weak claims on the risk of using RISC-V and pays ads to have it visible as much as possible.
Hopefully, it has backfired on Arm. This Arm attack against RISC-V is similar to the one done by Microsoft against Linux years ago and it is all about the rights to create open and free alternatives to commercial products. It’s a very important right and Arm seems to agree with that at least in its communication since it has shutdown riscv-basics.com.
Hardware
The Basics of Emitter-Coupled Logic
To understand how the ECL family achieves an amazing speed is exactly why this article is interesting. It’s very nice to read if you are passionate about the inner aspects of electronics components.
Software
libaco
libaco is a production ready C coroutine library. It is new but thoroughly tested and the author even provides a
proof of correctness
. Libaco has other great characteristics. A very small codebase, only 700 LOC. It is very fast and it has a very small memory footprint. The only problem right now is that libaco supports only IA32 and IA64. The author said to me that an ARM port is planned for the coming months. Once the port done, this library will be very interesting for embedded systems.
All About ESP32 – Part 3
In the issue #76 I already have selected the
All About ESP32 – Part 1
. Yahya in the third part of his series details how to use on the ESP32 the
TCP/IP stack for embedded systems lwIP
.
Build a Thread network with nRF52840-MDK
Nest the very famous IoT company focused on domotic devices maintains
OpenThread
an open source implementation of the Thread’s network protocol. This article guides us step by step to create a network of 3 nRF52840-MDK nodes Thread network.
Tali Forth 2 for the 65c02
Tali Forth 2 is the Scot effort to implement a Forth conform to the last available
Forth standard
. If you are looking for something more mature you can give a try to
pForth
as well.
Building a USB bootloader for an STM32
Kevin for his current project is working on the STM32L052 and as it found annoying to use the STLink to reprogram it, he developed an USB bootloader. In this article, Kevin describes how he designed his bootloader to be able, among other things, to communicate with any computer without the need of a driver.
Misc
Modern C++ in Embedded Systems
Michael Caisse a C++ expert, gives his insights on how the last evolution of the C++ makes it more suitable for embedded projects on bare-metal or on small RTOS.
Where GREP Came From
Brian Kernighan (co-author of the famous book
The C Programming Language
) explains in this short video how grep got its name when it has been developed over night by Ken Thompson.
The Nand Game
In the issue #10 we selected the
from nand to tetris course
because of the fun side of the course. The Nand Game is inspired by this course and so the promise is high.