Tag Archives: series

ChibiOS/RT

ChibiOS is an open source RTOS for embedded systems. It’s comparable with FreeRTOS; but for my money is a nicer project. Comes with a hardware abstraction layer – i.e. device drivers (kind of). That means we target the ChibiOS API rather than a particular platform. A lot of manufacturers supply a device layer specific to their… Read More »

eLua and STM32F4 II

Last time we built eLua for the STM32F4DISCOVERY board, and ran an interactive Lua session on it. This time I’d like to look more at how you might integrate it into an application of your own. You might have noticed the ls command last time, when we asked for help at the eLua shell prompt.… Read More »

eLua and STM32F4

I am sufficiently taken with Lua that I went looking for interesting Lua projects. I came across eLua. eLua is a project to build a version of Lua that can be used in embedded projects. There is certainly potential there for making life easier. Often in embedded projects, the vast majority of the work is… Read More »

Pointer Implications (C++11)

While C++98 had smart pointers of a sort; they weren’t good enough for use. The language lacked the key feature that makes smart pointers work: move semantics. C++11 has introduced that language feature, and hence has solid smart pointers. The addition of smart pointers gives us some further options for passing references to objects when… Read More »

Pointer Implications (C++)

Last time we covered pointer arguments, and that article was applicable to C and C++. C++ introduced true pass-by-reference semantics. f( O & ) f( const O & ) f(O &) Previously we were careful to note that passing a pointer to a function was still only pass-by-value. The pointer was copied, and then the… Read More »

Pointer Implications (C)

Consider the declarations of various pointer-to-an-O-accepting functions: f( O * ) f( const O * ) f( O * const ) f( const O * const ) What is the author of f() telling us about what the function will do with the O we reference in each of these cases? This, and subsequent articles,… Read More »

UNIX’s Achilles’ Heel I

UNIX has one (to my mind) big hole in its API. Windows, surprisingly, doesn’t share it. This article will discuss that gap, and how it can be worked around. File Descriptor Wakes There are a few multiplexing system calls, select(), poll(), and epoll() that put a thread to sleep, with the wakeup triggered by activity… Read More »

Android Authenticators I

I found a blog that gave an example of how to make a custom authenticator for Android. I didn’t find it very clear, so this article covers my understanding that I’ve pulled this together from the example given by that blog author, and from the Android documentation, and then building something that works. To make… Read More »