Embedded Computing Design

In our last article, we broke down the debugging process and its many woes, but also reviewed some tools and tips to make it as easy and painless as possible. Where debugging is the process of finding bugs that you know exist in your code, quality assurance testing is when you find bugs that you weren’t aware of.

We all know the suffering that is the debugging process. The hours spent banging your head against the desk… the sleepless nights spent screaming into the void over three lines of code… the moment when you realize that you sacrificed your firstborn child just to find out that you were missing a single semicolon. Coding is sometimes pain.

At this stage of your project, you’ve not only meticulously chosen and gathered materials, resources, tools, and an IDE that’s suitable for your project; but you’ve also created your pseudocode roadmap. And now, finally, it’s time to begin the real coding.

Every step in this process has built on knowing what the plan is for your code. But we have one final planning step that will help ensure you know exactly where you’re going when you do start writing code before it’s time to get into the trenches of writing code: pseudo-coding

In the last installment of this series, we reviewed the crucial steps of identifying and acquiring a development stack and tools that work best for you and your project’s needs. This time, we’ll be getting into choosing and configuring your development environment, and how the choices you’ve been making so far will help you determine what that looks like.

In this section, we’ll look at a new set of essential questions to ask yourself to determine what sort of workspace you’ll need to actually begin developing your software.

One thing every engineer — whether you’re a beginner, hobbyist, or pro — will need to do at some point is conceptualize a project. But what does that process look like from start to finish? Where do you even begin? Well, we’ve got you covered.

Protocol analysis isn’t going out of style anytime soon, and neither are the oscilloscopes you need to perform it. In fact, they’re modernizing.

Analog computing ? and even analog signal processing ? appears to be making a comeback. Why?

Kyle Voosen, Senior Business Segment Manager for Physical Test Systems and Industrial IoT at National Instruments is responsible for hardware and soft...