• Secure firmware updates with code signing

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, we explain why firmware signing is important, how it works, and what algorithm should be used to implement it. We also detail a full implementation built with open source, cross platform libraries.

  • Monitoring Fleet Health with Heartbeat Metrics

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, we lay the foundation for how an organization should instrument their embedded firmware to measure performance, stability, and the overall “health” of each device and an entire fleet of devices. We also compare and contrast the various approaches projects generally take to surface these metrics and I’ll discuss why I believe heartbeat metrics are the best method for driving product decisions.

  • Parsing Logs Messages for Instant Crash Analysis

    by Cyril Fougeray

    Having a logger display execution information on the terminal is pretty common for firmware developers. What’s less common is having an instant stack trace when the program crashes.

  • What we've been reading in July (2020)

    by Tyler Hoffman

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

  • Step-through debugging with no debugger on Cortex-M

    by Chris Coleman

    This week we explore how to debug running systems with ARM Cortex-M’s DebugMonitor exception handler. We cover how to configure the MCU to operate in this mode and walk through an example of installing breakpoints and single-stepping on a running device!

  • How to Build Drivers for Zephyr

    by Jared Wolff

    In this post, I’ll go over some of the nuances related to creating drivers for your peripherals on Zephyr. We’ll talk about Device Tree organization, Kconfig, and CMakeLists.txt files. By the end, you should have an idea on how to tackle your own Zephyr driver aspirations!

  • Firmware Testing with Renode and GitHub Actions

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this post, I cover what it takes to build a simple firmware for use with Renode, how to build and administer tests with Robot Framework, and how to run these tests within GitHub’s continuous integration system.

  • What we've been reading in June (2020)

    by Tyler Hoffman

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