Steffen Ronalter
On Embedded Software, Engineering, Linux – and Coffee.-
Embedded Programming: Loose Coupling Best Practices (Part 1/3)
When creating Embedded Software, system complexity that grows over lifetime makes it increasingly harder to reason about certain behaviors of the program. As always in engineering, it helps to divide one big problem into several smaller problems in order to be able to eventually solve it. This is what this article is all about.
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Git: Compare feature branches to master (Part 2/2)
In the previous article we’ve seen how to ask Git for changes introduced by a particular branch. This time, instead of changes, we would like to know which commits were introduced by a branch – that is, the hashes assigned to them.
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Git: Compare feature branches to master (Part 1/2)
This article shows how to display changes in Git feature branches that are not yet merged into master. We are going to find a simple answer for that simple question, starting off with basic
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Debugging on the Command Line
Do you use a GUI debugger? Chances are that it is backed by the GNU Debugger, gdb, somehow. Wouldn’t it be great to use that backend directly? In this article, we are going to highlight some strengths of gdb’s command-line interface over GUI frontends.
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Worse Than Duplication
Here are some thoughts on refactoring, especially on how to deal with duplicate code.
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Stand-alone TDD monitor using 'entr'
Have you ever thought of something that continuously monitors your project’s source tree and triggers a unit test build upon file changes? You want it to be independent of the editor or IDE you use? Then maybe this is for you.
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Fixing Typos while Writing -- Two Ideas
Here are some thoughts on text editing. No matter what kind of text you write – source code, articles, to-do lists, books – there’s always a chance you get a single letter wrong at one point. Depending on your touch typing skills, this might not happen very often. But when it happens, what do you do?
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C Bitshift Operator Revisited
Recently someone asked me about C’s bitwise shift operator, specifically about what it does to signed integers. To be honest, until then I haven’t even considered applying
(Reading time: 4 minutes)<<or>>to anything else than unsigned numbers. So let’s figure out what this is about. -
Undo Feature Using Git Plumbing Commands
Have you ever thought about adding an undo feature to your application? This blog article is an attempt to approach that task by utilizing some internals of the Git version control system together with the Memento design pattern. But please, don’t take this too seriously :-).
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Hex Parser
This article is about creating a parser for HEX files, a format that is often used as an intermediate step for programming microcontrollers. Although there are – of course – implementations out there already, I would like to use this as a welcome opportunity to play around with some interesting approaches: Object Oriented Design Patterns, Finite State Machines (FSM) and Test-Driven Development (TDD).
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From Subversion to Git: Snapshots
What does it mean that we talk about snapshots of our Git repository, while in Subversion we think in terms of file changes? For me at least, the key to understanding Git is that every commit is, in fact, a snapshot of the entire project. Not a list of patches. Not a difference to the previous commit. Just a snapshot of the whole thing.
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Bash Job Control
When working on the command line, you may sometimes find yourself in a situation where you’d like to start a new program while another long-running process (e.g. an editor) is blocking the current terminal. In the course of this article we are going to find out how to achieve quick context switching in such a case, without the need for opening up an entirely fresh terminal window.
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Introduction To Readline
When developing command line applications, you will most certainly want to have bash-like line-editing features. For that, an excellent choice is the GNU readline library. We will see in this article how to use its features from out own programs in order to provide a user experience similar to that of many free software projects out there.
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Non-Interactive Text Editing in Vim
The Vim text editor has its roots in the traditional line-based editors of the early days. Due to that heritage, it supports a set of impressively powerful
(Reading time: 3 minutes)Excommands that act on individual lines. In this article, we will see how to create a script composed of these commands and execute it from the shell. -
Vim Errorformat Challenge
The Vim text editor provides built-in support for parsing compiler output. It has quite a broad understanding of the concept of a compiler though: You can call just any command and let the editor parse its output. For this to work correctly, format strings need to be specified, matching the expected format of compiler warnings and errors. This article is meant as a challenge for you, the reader. Does that sound interesting? Read on!
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Discovering Refactoring Needs
This article is about creating a plot of complexity over change rate for a given set of source code files. According to an idea I’ve seen on twitter last week, this might help us finding spots in the code that have an influence on how well a project goes. Here I’d like to show you a quick demonstration of that idea.
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Maintaining A Clean History In Centralized Git Workflows
Git is a powerful tool for versioning (not only) source code files. It is decentralized by design but also works perfectly for setups that rely on a central server. By using a standard pull/push workflow though, the central history can grow complex pretty fast. In this article we will look at a simple centralized git approach and try to come up with a solution for keeping the history clean and easy to understand.
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Linux Shebang Insights
In Linux, you can execute an interpreted script file in exactly the same way as you would execute a compiled binary: by setting the ‘executable’ attribute and just run it. A special sequence of characters at the beginning of the script makes this possible. In this article we will explore how this – pretty elegant – way of script execution works and which components of the Linux system are involved.
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The Shell And The Whitespace
When writing conditionals in shell scripts, have you ever wondered whether that whitespace right after the opening bracket is really necessary for the expression to evaluate correctly? You might be surprised by the answer we’ll discover in the course of this short article.
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What Makes A Unit Of Code Falsifiable
In his recent book about Software Architecture, Robert C. Martin a.k.a. Uncle Bob describes programming as a discipline of science, rather than mathematics. In one of the first chapters of the book he talks about Structured Programming and how it enables us to produce – according to the scientific method – falsifiable, i.e. testable units of code.
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Thoughts on Python from a C++ developer’s viewpoint: Style
This article is about Python style. Compared to the C++ world, there are pretty rigid conventions implemented in the language itself as well as in the Python ecosystem. That makes this topic kind of surprising and worth writing some lines about.
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Thoughts on Python from a C++ developer’s viewpoint: Interfaces
In this episode I‘d like to highlight yet another Python fact I find particularly surprising. This article is about the design tool in Software Engineering: interfaces.
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Thoughts on Python from a C++ developer's viewpoint: Inside the interpreter
In this second article of the series on Python we're going to cover some really great features of the interactive interpreter. We'll see that a full-fledged debugger may not even be necessary to get serious work done in Python.
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Thoughts on Python from a C++ developer's viewpoint: Class members
In this series of articles I will present some random things I've noticed when I started studying the Python programming language a while ago. I'm actually not very experienced in the language yet, as I don't get in touch with it that often. But I think if you also do your programming mainly in C++ and tend to use Python now and then, this might be for you.
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Test-driven 7-Segment Decoder
This article is about creating a 7-segment display decoder in software. While this is probably considered a rather trivial task, it will serve as a good example for the discipline of Test-Driven Development (TDD). The motivation for a test-driven approach in this case is simple: being able to refactor later without the need to debug on hardware.
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The bash debugger: an example
Sometimes you may find yourself in a situation where you need to actually debug a shell script you're currently writing. Especially in the initial phase of development, features like single-stepping feel quite handy.
I this article we are going to look at two situations where the bash debugger (bashdb) is a great tool for shell scripting. I will also show you one bashdb feature I find really surprising.
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AVR sleep mode for fun and profit (part 2)
In the first part of this article we managed to put the AVR into power-down mode and were thereby able to lower the current consumption in idle mode to 0.0 mA. While this is great compared to the 22 mA before any optimization, there is no way to wake up the controller yet to do some actual work. This is what we're going to do in this episode.
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AVR sleep mode for fun and profit
Today's blog article is about how to optimize the power consumption of an AVR microcontroller running on batteries.
We're going to explore one of the ATmega32's sleep modes and how it affects power consumption. We will eventually reach a state where it actually makes sense to power the device from batteries. Besides sleeping, the microcontroller should do some work for us, requested by a single button press.
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TDD - Should I mock or should I not?
Today I'm going to share an observation I made recently, related to Test-Driven Development (TDD).
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Test-driving the MCP2515 CAN Controller (Part 3): Taking a look at the SPI bus
In this episode of the series we are going to focus a bit more on the target hardware. The driver code created during the previous two episodes is going to be compiled for the target microcontroller and programmed into flash memory. While it's only the reset functionality of the MCP2515 we can verify right now, I think it's a step into the right direction.
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Passing heavy C++ objects by value
Big objects are traditionally passed to methods by reference. Some weeks ago I talked to a colleague about that and decided to investigate a bit further. As a result of my research I must admit that, starting with C++11, things have indeed changed. Depending on what happens inside the body of the called method, passing by value may be actually more efficient.
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Pulling a decent single Espresso shot from the Gaggia Classic
Pulling one single Espresso from the Gaggia Classic? Where is the challenge here? As this was the first thing I tried to accomplish right after I got my home Espresso machine some months ago, I can confirm it's unfortunately not that easy as it seems. „Pulling singles is more difficult than pulling doubles.“ That’s what they tell you, and that's what I experienced as well.
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Background make execution in Vim 8
Version 8 of the Vim text editor introduced a great new feature for executing processes asynchronously. In this article I'm going to show you a plugin that makes use of these async jobs and how I utilize them to build a C++ project in the background.
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Test-driving the MCP2515 CAN Controller (Part 2)
It turns out the device driver design established previously has a serious drawback. While the SpiDriver interface enables unit testing, the cost of polymorphism has to be paid also in production code. In this article you are going to see how high that cost is, i.e. how much extra code the compiler actually generates for providing virtual methods. We will also introduce one possible solution to overcome that additional cost.
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Test-driving the MCP2515 CAN Controller (Part 1)
So you are pretty much into Test-Driven Development (TDD)? You love to practice it on your development machine but think it might be quite a hassle when it comes to writing code for small microcontrollers?
In this blog article we are going to take a journey to Embedded TDD using the MCP2515 Controller Area Network (CAN) controller as an example. We will begin to write a device driver for that particular controller without even having any working hardware at hand....
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