A course on the theories and implementations of real-time systems is about to start on Coursera platform. The course comes from the Finnish University Åbo Akademi, and lasts 5 weeks of low workload (2-3h per week). The instructor entices the learner by showing a famous real-time system failure, during the landing of the Apollo 11 on the surface of the […]
The ST Nucleo is an Arduino-like board with an STM32 as the microcontroller, and many Arduino shields can be mounted on it. I recently played with an Ethernet shield for the network connection, but since the shield also contains a microSD card slot, I wanted to access the SD card to read/write files. I’d like to […]
The following resource is a thoughtful checklist that embedded software developers can take as inspiration to improve the product. It also links to further resources (as well as the author’s book) to explore the topics and analyze in depth the rationale of some of his suggestions. Better Embedded System SW: Top 5 Embedded Software Problem Areas – Five areas to dig into […]
The desktop where I do most of my stuff is a Debian testing 32bit. Recently Google Chrome team declared the end of support of 32bit Linux distributions, and I decided to take the occasion to migrate towards a 64bit Debian. I read some guides around, some old, some with big warnings and disclaimers, some interesting. Ultimately I […]
The news site lwn just posted a guide on GCC inline assembly. The guide is written in plain colloquial language and is a great complement to GCC documentation on the matter, which is more of a reference of the various functionalities. I found that the extended form of inline assembly is a powerful way to use the machine special […]
Chris Anderson, the creator of TED, interviews Linus Torvalds on the traits that are useful to create and maintain something remarkable as Linux. Linus appears as his usual self, joking about his own defects, and being overall very lucid in its analysis of the current status of Linux kernel and what happened to get there. He […]
While adding HTTPS capabilities to my STM32 Nucleo board, I needed to solve the problem of current time. This is because TLS needs to check certificate expiration date, so we need a sufficiently accurate estimation of time. So I tried to understand what could I do to ask a network server about the time. I […]
One of my goal of the past months was to use an STM32 Nucleo board to get a webpage through HTTPS, using an Ethernet shield for TCP/IP stack. I was close last time, but I discovered that my Nucleo-F103RB did not have enough RAM. Now I have my hands on a Nucleo-F411RE that has 128KiB of RAM […]
The 28th of January has been declared the Data Privacy Day, a moment where we spread awareness on how personal information is managed, both by us and by the entities that have access to it. For the occasion, I put together a list of tips and food for thought; feel free to share it and […]
It’s been months since I started playing with a STM32 Nucleo + Ethernet shield. One of the objectives that I chase is to build a device for the Internet of Things that implement reasonably secure communications. In an effort to avoid reinventing the wheel (or at least to not reinvent too many wheels) I wanted to see if […]
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Freedom Embedded 
July 5, 2016
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