It’s the last of the year and the 10th issue of Embedded Systems Weekly. I wish you a happy New Year’s Eve with your family and your friends. This will be the first one for ESW but I want to take this time to thank you for your support. The messages, the reshares and the retweets give me energy to make the next issue and are signals that I do good issues. Let’s enjoy embedded systems together along the next year.
Hardware
“Big boys race our young girls but Violet generally wins” or “Bad beer rots out your guts but veggies go well”
Whatever your style there is a mnemonic to help you to memorize the electronics color codes. Resistance value of resistors will have no secrets for you.
Hacking a Christmas Tree for Less Blinkyness
A very informative video by Mads Nielsen to illustrate how he hacks his Christmas tree light building a variable frequency drive with a 4069 inverter. Mads explains everything and even he draws the schematics to make it clearer.
From NAND to Tetris : Building a Modern Computer From First Principles
NAND To Tetris is a very great course that breaks the conventional topic centric approach of classic courses. You used to have courses on hardware architecture, operating systems or software engineering. Here, each of these topics are linked one another to build a general-purpose computer system from scratch
Reverse Engineering a Furby
How to transform a gift of your children by a gift for you? You can reverse it like it is is described in this article. The author goes to decap and to take high resolution pictures of the proprietary chips in order to discover what they are.
Software
Exploring the Arrow SoCKit Part I - Blinking LEDs
Part II – Installing Linux
Part III – Controlling FPGA from Software
An interesting series in which Howard Mao discovers the the Altera Cyclone V system on chip. The SOC main components are an ARM processor and a FPGA.
ASM80
ASM80 is an online IDE to code in 8bit microprocessors assembler (8080, 8085..). It has a compiler and a debugger built-in.
TCP in 30 instructions
An historic email from the TCP/IP computer scientist
Van Jacobson
written in september 1993. In this email he explains how TCP could be handled in about 30 instructions. Respect.
Study of the techniques for emulation programming
A complete study that deals with almost all the aspects: the CPU, the memory, the graphics and the sounds components.
Misc
Mars rover Curiosity’s software upgraded
Always fascinating to know how software is managed for this type of embedded systems.
PHP Flaw Threatens Embedded Linux Devices
If you plan to integrate PHP in your embedded systems. Think twice…