Imagine there’s an embedded system that needs to persist some state when the processor restarts (either intentionally or due to a catastrophic error). This could be some external hardware information (what’s the position of a motor or actuator?) or a method to communicate the reset to the user (display some information on the device’s display). A simple way to store information through a reboot is to use what’s called“non-initialized” memory.

François, Chris, and I started Interrupt 2.5 years ago because we wanted a repository of great embedded firmware content, which didn’t exist. Looking back at all the posts that our community contributors have published, we think we’ve made a respectable attempt at this goal. Our goals for Interrupt were always more ambitious than just a blog with quality content. We wanted Interrupt to become a hub for everything related to embedded firmware.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this October. 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.

I love clean and tidy codebases. I love them even more if I don’t have to manually spend hours doing it myself. The problem is not everyone shares the same love and passion for tidy codebases, especially when we’re pressed for time trying to get a new firmware build released. This is where automated formatting and linting tools come in.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this September. 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.

CMSIS-Packs are a package format defined by ARM for vendors to provide various software artifacts that simplify dealing with target devices. In this article, we’ll take a look at what CMSIS-Packs are, and how they can be useful!

Newlib is a very popular libc targeting embedded systems. It’s the libc that ships with the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain published by ARM. This article takes a look at one of the commonly used functions provided by the Newlib C library: memcpy. We’ll examine the default nano implementation and the performance implications, comparing it against the faster non-default implementation. Like Interrupt? Subscribe to get our latest posts straight to your mailbox.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this July and August. 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.