issue 85 - Embedded systems newsletter

Embedded systems #85

I hope you all had a good week because mine has been great! Indeed, the newsletter reset is a success with dozens of new subscribers and a lot of new interactions focused on how to bring value to embedded systems people. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this week issue as much as I had to write it.

One last thing… Thank you to Willem for the header’s picture of the email .

Actually, one more last thing. We are opening the newsletter to sponsors. If you’re looking for a partner to support and if you feel aligned with the idea to have a positive impact on the embedded systems field, please, contact us by email .

Articles

Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU
A fantastic series of 4 articles going through all the details: Obtaining the firmware, reverse engineering it and flashing it back. A must read.

How ISO C became unusable for operating systems development
Interesting paper on the history of C from its usage in operation systems, through standardisations and the interesting aspects that makes ISO-C unusable for OSs.

Inside a PBX - Discovering a Firmware Backdoor
Step by step presentation on how RedTeam Pentesting discovered this backdoor. They used the open source reverse engineering tool Ghidra .

Lock-free programming for real-time systems
A video presentation showing how to use C++11 atomic operations to solve various recurring problems in lock-free programming.

Bare Metal C++ Register Access API
Javier Álvarez, the author wrote this intro for the newsletter. It’s a better intro then anything I could write: “An article discussing multiple designs for a memory-mapped register access API in C++, focusing on tradeoffs in terms of testability, ease of use, type safety and correctness. It finally proposes an approach to autogenerate this API from the SVD file for your MCU.

Rust for Embedded C Programmers
There is no doubt that Rust language is strongly penetrating our field. It has many advantages and I personally believe that all software developers should at least start to learn it. All of that being said, there is still many Not Yet Awesome things listed by Rust Embedded team.

Business

No Permits, No Fabs
Article detailing why it is so long to build semiconductor factories in the US and what it should be done to make the US competitive.

Tools

FemtoRV: a minimalistic RISC-V CPU
FemtoRV is a small and easy to understand RISC-V softcore. It’s less than 1000 lines.

Silice
Silice is a comfortable yet thin abstraction above Verilog that simplifies prototyping and writing algorithms on FPGAs.

Jobs

Embedded Software Engineer
Embedded Software Engineer, full-time in United Kingdom, Glasgow.

Misc

A pair of PS5 hacks could be the first steps towards jailbreaking Sony’s latest console
It went largely unnoticed, but it looks like the PlayStation 5 is under a solid attack. For the gamers among us, it’s something to follow.