Today is test day at Curborough Sprint Track, and the University of Nottingham’s Race Team is taking its creation out for a spin. Frankie is their fully electric 2WD vehicle, able to achieve speeds of up to 80mph (129 km/h). The Team uses Tracealyzer to test the functionality of their embedded software; while writing the code, to record the trace while Frankie is running, and to review the data afterwards. And with great results.

Make no mistake: You can’t overlook software distribution in DevOps. At risk are the reliability, security and speed of your software releases — and your business itself. This is especially true in enterprises that are releasing across numerous edge endpoints or IoT devices. As your releases’ cadence and payload grow, software distribution challenges multiply, particularly at the edge.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this January. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

As much as I enjoy writing firmware, I am, at heart, a hardware engineer. I love hunting for minutia in chip datasheets. I love fiddling with eval boards, tacking on wires, and reworking nets together. I love flipping through The Art of Electronics, finding a new circuit, and piecing through its operation. This is why, when invited to write for Interrupt, I jumped at the chance to write about a hardware-related topic that’s near and dear to my heart: debug tools.

If 2021 was the soft launch of the Decade of the Internet of Things (IoT), 2022 is set to accelerate IoT-related technologies and investments, addressing societal and economic issues. The rollout of 5G, maturing of artificial intelligence algorithms for streaming IoT data, increased computing power at the edge and cheaper/better sensor technology is the “convergence” that has supercharged IoT adoption.

Last summer, we added support for the open source Zephyr RTOS to Tracealyzer. Today, in recognition of the potential of Zephyr to become the leading independent platform for small IoT devices, Percepio joined the Zephyr Project as a Silver sponsor. Percepio made significant contributions to the Zephyr source code, extending the tracing subsystem to allow full tracing of Zephyr applications in line with the capabilities of Tracealyzer.

Banking is becoming more convenient thanks to the Internet and our many connected devices, and the future of the banking industry is growing increasingly digital. Whether discussing the future of retail banking or the future of mobile banking, technology is playing a larger role in our everyday transactions. The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of this rapid evolution toward the bank of the future, and both consumers and financial institutions need to adapt to these retail and mobile banking trends.

If you develop software for an embedded system, you need some kind of system feedback. Debuggers are awesome tools, but when it comes to analyzing dynamic behavior in the field, they cannot be used. For remote debugging, many engineers turn to printf, which can usually be quickly put in place after having a putchar() implemented. This turns out to be an expensive way, in terms of processor clocks and required FLASH memory for the strings.

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is evolving at a rapid pace and while some of the early predictions for tens of billions of connected devices by 2022 have proved to be wide of the mark, the use cases are so varied that explosive adoption is likely. However, the encroachment of IoT into all aspects of our personal and business lives brings with it plenty of concerns, from security and data ownership, to business models that acknowledge and enable the global nature of connected devices.

🎉 Happy 2022 everyone! 🎉 Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this December. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.