Mentor Blogs

I recently posted some thoughts about handling non-volatile RAM - dealing with the recognition of memory that had not been initialized. I was very pleased to hear from a reader, Bert Böhne in the Netherlands, who has some experience in this matter: “In a current project we do the same. We have some non-volatile memory for settings. After each set of data we also defined one byte for a crc. When … Read More

Memory, non-volatile memory, NVRAM

People often ask me questions about embedded software. Sometimes they are complex; other times they are simple. But frequently, the simplest ones are what leads to an interesting train of thought. The one that set my brain working recently was something like this: “I have some non-volatile memory in my design, which is used to retain specific parameters through power cycling. The first time the … Read More

Memory, non-volatile memory, NVRAM

The computer world is often accused of being mired in jargon and I think that is a fair criticism. In some ways it gets worse when an everyday word is “hijacked” to have a new meaning. A good example is “program”, which had several meanings before it was applied to software. Interestingly, in the UK we use the US spelling ["program"] to refer to software, but retain the English version ["programme"] … Read More

Memory

Two weeks ago, I posted a blog about heap contiguity, where I proposed an idea for using an MMU to solve fragmentation problems, which I had previously discussed in a Web seminar. I have worked in the embedded software business for many years and have met and worked with a lot of fine people. It seems that quite a few of the read this blog, which is great. Two of them contacted me by email following … Read More

Heap, C, Memory, Dynamic Memory, MMU

A while ago I did a Webinar looking at C++ for embedded applications. It was well attended and well received and there were lots of questions and comments, which is always very satisfying. I observed that a number of people were specifically interested in dynamic memory allocation in C and C++ and the challenges that are presented to embedded and real time programmers. So I developed a further Webinar … Read More

Heap, C, Memory, Dynamic Memory, MMU