Many of us don’t give much thought about the math our compilers do. Toss off a call to a sine function and somehow the runtime package cranks out an answer. But is that library reentrant? Fast enough? Micro Digital, which sells an RTOS and related products also has a math library called GoFa......

The Linux printk function has various logging levels, which include KERN_EMERG, KERN_ERR and others.   What, exactly, does EMERG mean? Emergency? Emerging? Emergent? The latter sounds like part of the title of a horror movie.   Or ERR – perhaps that’s error, but it could......

I read a great deal of code. The vast majority is in C with some C++ and a bit of assembly sprinkled in. Some of it is brilliantly-written, clearly by developers who are craftspeople of the highest order. Some are, well, not so nice. I sometimes wonder what the developers were thinking.   ......

A Washington Post article by the usually-interesting Joel Achenbach tackles fears many thinkers have about the future of AI. Will intelligent machines rule the world? Kill off humanity?   I remember visiting Marvin Minsky’s AI lab at MIT around 1970 while scouting colleges. They had a......

Colin Walls recently had an article on this site about floating point math. Once it was common for embedded engineers to scoff at floats; many have told me they have no place in this space. That’s simply wrong. The very first embedded program I wrote in 1972 or so used an 8008 to control a n......

I’m a huge fan of the Cortex-M family of MCUs. A wide variety of vendors have brought 32 bit processing to the low end of the market, sometimes for astonishing sub-dollar prices. In some cases these parts even have hardware floating point and SIMD instructions.   But there is a dark ......

I guess non-engineers are shocked to learn they are being irradiated. Google “living under power lines” and you’ll get 31 million hits, many of which are sites wallowing in fear about that 50 or 60 Hz signal. “Radiation” is a scary word, though some don’t unders......

Ever-innovative Microchip has a couple of new families of 8 bit microcontrollers. The CPUs remain about the same as in the rest of the PIC16 family, but the peripherals offer some pretty interesting capabilities.   I find the company’s part numbers baffling and can no longer correlate......

Robert Dewar passed away last month, June 30 at age 70.   Most readers of this site probably don’t know the name. Dr. Dewar was president and one of the founders of AdaCore, a leading supplier of support and services for Ada developers. He had a long career and contributed to many pro......

In summer of 1969, The Who held a concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. Columbia, now a city of some 100,000, barely existed. Jim Rouse was secretly buying thousands of acres of farmland to create what he hoped would be an idyllic society devoid of the racial tensions th......