The Embedded Frontier: Modern Trends and Practices

Hi Jacob, really great talk- I took so much from it. I'd like to ask if you've heard of the QP framework? Miro Samek and his team have produced a very comprehensive solution for developing embedded systems in C/C++ and I think it's gaining traction. What are your thoughts on it and on the future of projects using this or other frameworks similar to it?

Hi Jackob, would you kindly upload the slides. Thanks.

Thanks for the talk! Could you share a good configuration management example (C and C++)?

Thanks, that was a great keynote and Q&A! I would certainly agree that when you think you’ve learnt something, then it all changes and there’s always more to learn im our industry!

The list of positives from AI was useful. I had only thought of using it for generating code. How can firms leverage AI to do all this, without risking leaking all their valuable IP? When I tried ChatGPT to solve a problem for me, I had to think up a contrived example and do it from my own non-work computer just to be sure.

Your discussion and then questions from Ali about top-down design was something I’ve never thought about before. I can see the real advantages in focussing on what adds value to the customer. I can imagine them having difficulty visualising the end product though. They want to hold it, push buttons etc, even though the top-down design could be demo’d on a laptop.

I think one of the reasons these modern practices haven’t truely taken off in the embedded world is maybe the human element. We tend to do things how they’re always done, because it’s what we know. Not everyone reads textbooks, blogs, attends conferences or want to spend time exploring new tools and practices, so there’s an inertia to change. We book work to a project and focus on requirements, which doesn’t allow time to stop and think if there are better ways. Every time I read about your proper HAL, I wish I’d have gone down that route so I could stop debugging on target!

Hello Jacob, very interesting talk! Thank you very much! I would appreciate that if you could provide your perspectives on why rust language is the main contender for embedded system, but not other languages like C#, Go, or Swift.

Thanks for the keynote, Jacob!

My question:
In my team, we have new developers, and most of them are interns. Thinking about our developments, we intend to write a manual with good practices and design partners. For you, what's the best way that we can do this? What's the most important that we can't forget?

Thanks.

Thanks for this very informative and wide-topic talk, Jacob.
The top-down approach yields many advantages over the bottom-up in the current context. I have a question on the design/implementation of the interface. Indeed, it is usually straightforward to extract the core function from a device (GPIO_on / GPIO_off), while factorizing the initialization/configuration is much more complicated. I see two possible approaches move initialization in the application code or do the initialization inside the component.
Each implementation has a custom configuration/initialization function in the first case. This can be called from the application code, so you can pass around a ready-to-use component instance. This approach has the disadvantage of moving platform-specific code in the application layer (even if in a very confined way).
The other approach is to hide the initialization/configuration inside the component, hidden behind a generic "init" method. This hides away specific code but makes components less flexible to use since they are bound to specific hardware resources.
What approach do you suggest?
Thank you.