• Does and should IT exercise complete control over an embedded developer’s workstation?

    Robert Cravotta
    The IT (information technology) group is tasked with providing production-level network computing services. To do this, often times IT organizations impose strict policies that conflict with what the user of those services says they want. Does (and should) IT control every workstation in your embedded development environment?

  • Is it always a software problem?

    Robert Cravotta
    Is it always a software problem if the software can detect, limit, or fix an undesirable operating condition? When working in the capacity of developing application code, hardware and software problems were relatively straightforward to sort. As an embedded developer though, every problem ultimately was classified as a software problem no matter the root cause.

  • How important are Software Coding Standards?

    Robert Cravotta
    How important are software coding standards to your projects? Do you use an industry standard or do you have a custom set of conventions that captures the lessons learned of your own “tribe” of developers? How formal is your coding guidelines and how do you enforce them? Or, do you find that spending too much effort on such guidelines contributes more to “mine is better than yours” religious wars than helping the team…

  • Are you using (or planning to use) Java for programming embedded systems?

    Robert Cravotta
    Java is a general-purpose software programming language that features concurrent, class-based, object-oriented constructs that is designed to embody as few implementation dependencies of the target processor as possible. It is a programming language that targets application developers and provides an abstract platform that lets them write their software once and easily run it on many different target processors. Java…

  • When and how much should embedded developers implement robust defenses against malicious software in their designs?

    Robert Cravotta
    Malware is showing up in various consumer products that support a USB connection. Unfortunately, that USB connection is providing a mechanism for malware to infect computers. Recent examples affected devices sold or handed out by Olympus and IBM. How should embedded developers respond to this type of vulnerability?

  • What are your criteria for when to use fixed-point versus floating-point arithmetic in your embedded design?

    Robert Cravotta
    The trade-offs between using fixed-point versus floating-point arithmetic in embedded designs continues to evolve. One set of trades-offs between using either type of arithmetic involves system cost, processing performance, and ease-of-use. Implementing fixed-point arithmetic is more complicated than using floating-point arithmetic on a processor with a floating-point unit. The extra complexity of determining scaling…