Embedded Computing Design

In our last article, we talked about licensing, open source, and how to protect your code. Now that we know how to properly open up our code to the world, it’s time to figure out how you could theoretically make a profit from it.

For almost as long as software has existed, the question of free software and open source has been contested. Many developers align themselves with the ideology that all software should be free to access, modify, and redistribute under the banner of open source.

We’ve come a long way in our journey through your computer. Today we’ll be ending that journey by discussing some of the firmware and software that helps your computer run.

In our last article, we talked about the core components that make your computer… well, compute — the CPU/GPU, RAM, and hard drive. So, now it’s time to move on to some of the more niche hardware concepts.

Time-Sensitive Networking, better known as TSN in the embedded community, is the IEEE 802.1Q defined standard technology that provides deterministic messaging over standard Ethernet networks.

Mission-critical systems increasingly rely on Ethernet connectivity between modules or devices.

In our last article, we covered the differences between hardware, software, and firmware. Today we’re going to take a deeper dive into the different pieces of common hardware and how they make your computer work.

We live in a digital world, surrounded by computers. We do our work on computers, we shop on computers, we carry computers around in our pockets, on our wrists, and even now, you’re reading this article on a computer.

Software surrounds us everyday, but for many of us, it’s a nebulous concept. Lots of people probably think of The Matrix with its scrolling green text, or of hackers in dark basements creating mysterious series of zeroes and ones to be used for whatever nefarious purposes.

For most people, binary is a mystifying concept of nonsensical zeroes and ones, the understanding of which is reserved for computer nerds and the computers they use. Well, today you join their ranks!