Embedded Systems Weekly #113
Tags: embedded, c, fpga
Published: 2022-08-13 15:56:00

Classpert is our sponsor this week. They offer a free seat to participate in the third cohort of the [course Making Embedded Systems](https://clas.pt/mes3). The famous 10-week course given by Elecia White, author of O’Reilly’s Making Embedded Systems and host of the popular Embedded podcast. One of you, subscribers of our newsletter, will get free access to the course next week!

Thank you to [Stoneburner](https://www.flickr.com/photos/stoneburner/) for the header's picture.

Happy reading!

## Articles 
[Saving bandwidth with delta firmware updates](https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/ota-delta-updates)
In this article, François Baldassari, CEO at Memfault, presents step-by-step a way to enable firmware updates even for the devices connected over low bandwidth. The library [JANPatch](https://github.com/janjongboom/janpatch) is used. It's the "embedded systems" and commercial friendly implementation of JojoDiff.

[From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story](https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-08-11-udp/)
Reading this article, I learnt a lot. This is the first time that I read one that goes as low as voltage waveforms, up to packets decoding. The author extracts the oscilloscope capture on a USB stick, reads and plots the wfm file with some Python code. Then with a careful read of the SGMII and QSGMII standards, he manages to decode and untangle the streams. Finally, he reads the pcap files he generated with tshark. A terrific article!

[Is it time to retire C?](https://www.embedded.com/is-it-time-to-retire-c/)
In the recent past, like in the previous decades, we have seen emerged many languages that tried to replace C. Rust, Zig or even recently Carbon, try to get there place and logically many ask themselves: Should we replace the brave old C language? Even though C is dated, the amount of legacy code and current workforce competency makes any retirement obviously difficult/impossible.

[Homebrew USB DMX Interface with Sparkfun FT232RL](https://openschemes.com/homebrew-usb-dmx-interface-with-sparkfun/)
A quick todo wiring to recycle your Sparkfun FT232RL as a part of a cheap USB DMX interface.

## Sponsor
[Making Embedded Systems Course Giveaway by Classpert](https://embedsysweekly.com/classpert-third-cohort-making-embedded-systems-giveaway/)
Classpert is giving away 1 (one) free seat to one of the Embedsys Weekly newsletter subscriber! To participate, you just have to subscribe to Embedsys Weekly newsletter before Aug, the 19th at 00:00. All the current subscribers participate automatically to the giveaway. Nothing more to do!

## News / Business
[Political Chips](https://stratechery.com/2022/political-chips/)
Very interesting article that describes the difference in strategy of chip manufacturers.

## Education / Community
[Parallel Programming for FPGAs](https://kastner.ucsd.edu/hlsbook/)
A book on how to efficiently program FPGAs using high-level synthesis. The input language used in the book is C++ with the limitations and annotations usually required by HLS tools.

[eXpOS NITC](https://exposnitc.github.io/expos-docs/about/)
eXpOS is a pedagogical operating system project created by the National Institute of Calicut. The book has been written to give to the students as much knowledge as possible over a semester. They write the OS from scratch and after 4 months they can run it in a simulator.

## Tools / Libraries
[RTIC Real-Time Interrupt-driven Concurrency](https://rtic.rs/1/book/en/)
It is a Rust concurrency framework for building real-time systems on all Cortex-M devices. If you want to see how it works a [repository with examples](https://github.com/rtic-rs/rtic-examples/tree/master/rtic_v1) is public.

## Misc
[We might have to add a ‘negative leap second’ because the earth is spinning faster](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/might-add-negative-leap-second-214112273.html)
Did you hear about this engineer horror story? The horror story of a negative leap second!