Skip to content

Blog

Technology

The fire of information technology — will you use it: to create or consume? to comfort or torment? for education or entertainment? as a tool… Read More »Technology

Reflections on KiCad and EDA Tools

A recent interview with a KiCad developer prompted some reflection on KiCad and EDA (electronic design automation) tools in general. Below are samples of several PCB (printed circuit board) designs, created with KiCAD, and implemented as part of the SimpleIoT project in the last couple months.

The experience has been excellent. Above all, the tool is very fast, efficient to use, and stable. Schematic and PCB integration works well enough, and routing and copper pours are easy. Switching between inches and millimeters can be done on the fly. The KiCad library has many parts in it, and other organizations, such as DigiKey, Seeed, SnapEDA, and Ultra Librarian are also providing libraries. If a KiCad symbol/footprint for a part is not already available, it is relatively easy to create new symbols and footprints as needed. There is a good KiCad support forum. KiCad is a pleasure to use and production-ready for standard PCB designs.

Read More »Reflections on KiCad and EDA Tools

Auto-formatting/linting Go code

Some things in life you just have to experience to truly appreciate the value. One of these is auto-formatting/linting source code. When I started programming in Go in Vim, I naturally looked for editor support, and found the excellent vim-go project. Through this, I learned about gofmt and then goimports. These tools can be configured in your editor to automatically format your code when you save. goimports goes a step beyond and adds missing imports and removes unused ones.

Auto-formatting is quickly becoming the norm. The Javascript world also has an excellent formatter available named Prettier. There are formatters for many other languages as well including C/C++, shell, Elm, Rust, etc. The neoformat and ALE plugins add auto-formatting functionality to Vim/Neovim. An example of how to enable these plugins in Neovim is included in my dotfiles.

Read More »Auto-formatting/linting Go code

Microcontroller (MCU) or Microprocessor (MPU)?

As technology advances, there are two basic processing platforms for implementing embedded systems. The first is the Microcontroller Unit (MCU). These devices have varying amounts of integrated Flash (<= 2MB) and RAM (<= 1MB), and are designed to run bare-metal code or a real-time operating system (RTOS), like FreeRTOS. The second is the Linux-capable Microprocessor Unit (MPU). An example of an MCU based system is most Arduinos, and an example of an MPU based system is the Raspberry PI. An MPU typically does not have embedded Flash and RAM — at least on the same die. The fundamental difference between MCU/RTOS and MPU/Linux systems is the memory architecture and the amount of memory in the system.

Read More »Microcontroller (MCU) or Microprocessor (MPU)?

Accepting Constraints in Build Systems

As Embedded Systems become more complex, the complexity of the process to build the software for these systems also increases. As humans, our ability to deal with complexity is limited, so we develop tools and processes to manage the complexity. In the end, these tools and processes are about constraints and patterns. A well-designed tool or process encourages you to do things in a way that is consistent and maintainable, which leads to reliable and predictable results.

Read More »Accepting Constraints in Build Systems