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A Simple Embedded System in X Flavours
Tim Guite - Watch Now - Duration: 12:13
Most of us are here because we enjoy writing code that makes things happen in the real world. Throughout this conference and tech talks during the year, we are presented with lots of options for our embedded systems.
These options are often presented to us as floating gently down a calm river.
Yet, when we come to use these technologies in our serious systems, where we want reliability, unit testing and CI/CD, we feel like we are rapidly tumbling down towards a big waterfall.
How do I get a simple embedded system to work for me?
In this talk, I will discuss my experience getting a simple embedded system (reading a sensor and displaying it to a user) working in X technologies such as:
- Simulation: Custom, Renode, Wokwi
- Bare Metal / Languages: C, C++, Rust (Ferrocene), Ada, Circuit Python, Arduino, LibHal
- RTOS: ThreadX, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Integrity OS, Riot OS, PX5, uC OS III, eCos, SafeRTOS, Nucleus
Hey Mark, yea it is a really cool tool! Uri has a talk this year which goes into much more detail here: https://embeddedonlineconference.com/session/Breaking_Good_Why_Virtual_Hardware_Prefers_Rough_Handling
This was the first time I've used it in depth and I was quite impressed with how well it works!
Thanks for this overview of tools. Just like CI is getting more and more used in embedded systems, I am looking forward to seeing simulation tools like Wokwi and Renode being used more and more in the near future.
Also, sorry for the driver: I worked on the dht20 driver in Zephyr. Don't hesistate to raise an issue on Zephyr's github so it can be improved ;-)
Glad you found it useful! I really think that every embedded project beyond hobby level should have CI or a very CI-like script which builds and runs tests. Hopefully simulation tools can help extend that to (virtual) hardware in the loop tests and also allow more firmware development to take place alongside/ahead of electronic design!
Thanks for contributing the device driver! I probably did something wrong but will give it another look soon!
That was a great presentation (it linked well with Uri Shaked's talk "Breaking Good" about wokwi). It's hard to know what to even look for when getting started. "In the meantime I'll tell you how I got here" - this was my favourite bit, just after seeing all the detail in VS Code screen. Have you since had any joy with Renode? It seems to have potential, but I found little documentation out there apart from their own and a couple of articles from memfault that I didn't find useful for getting started.
Thanks Simon, glad you enjoyed it! Not yet, I agree that Renode has potential and that moving past the demos they have is not obvious. Worth looking into further!
Very happy to answer any questions :) The repo is here if you want to look at the code: https://github.com/TimGuite/simple_embedded_system
I've never seen Wokwi before. Seems really interesting, especially for that period of time before you get custom PCBAs back from the vendor. Normally I try to hack together dev boards, but maybe this could be worth trying instead.