Embedded Computing Design

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!

Matter is fast becoming the only Smart Home standard that… matters. Now, Silicon Labs and Arduino have partnered up to help developers go from new board to commissioned device faster than ever, speeding time to market.

We’ve worked our way from machine code up to language-dependent syntax, and hopefully, if you’ve stuck with us, those two terms make sense! Now, we move on to two final general software structures: functions and objects.

Up to this point in our series, we’ve intentionally kept things pretty broad. The fundamentals in the last two “levels” of software are relatively applicable across most languages, but now it’s time to get a bit more specific. And the first step to that is looking at the concept of software syntax.