Microcontrollers

U-Boot is becoming the defacto standard among embedded bootloaders, from Embedded Linux to VxWorks 7 and even small solutions such as FreeRTOS. How can proprietary software work in this GPL environment? How does a device boot from NAND using U-Boot? This blog post focuses on these answers and more.

Recently, William Lamie published a mythbusting piece that examined the use of an RTOS in IoT devices on Electronic Design. His insightful comments apply to most device designs complex enough to use a microprocessor. Which, these days, is pretty much all of them. We’ve run into a lot of the same myths around one crucial component of the RTOS – the file system.

The embedded systems market is extraordinarily diverse. Virtually any electronic device that is not a desktop computer or an enterprise data center behemoth is under the “embedded system” umbrella. With such variation in form factor, use case, price point and processing need it should come as no surprise that data storage needs differ as well.

At last week's Internet of Things Developers Conference held in San Jose demonstrating the value of IoT was clearly top-of-mind. There were predictions of the number of devices that would be part of the IoT ranging from 20 billion to 50 billion.

Datalight has just released an open source preview of Reliance Edge™: our new file system for decision-quality data at the edge of Internet of Things (IoT). Later this month we will release a version under a commercial license with full MISRA C:2012 compliance. I'm excited about all the firsts with Reliance Edge, some market firsts, and some Datalight firsts.

This conference was all about ARM, from a history of ARM (nearly 30 years, starting with the Acorn and Newton) through the newest systems challenges to Safety and Security. The mbed OS looks interesting - developed by ARM, this RTOS has power management, many different connectivity stacks and other components.

I recently attended the ARM Tech Con show which is an ARM ecosystems event. Internet of Things (IoT) was the main theme. Simon Segars (ARM CEO) keynote was all about Internet of Things (IoT) and ARM sponsored an Economist magazine report to explore the level at which IoT is gaining traction in the marketplace.