• What we've been reading in March (2024)

    by Tyler Hoffman

    Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this March.

  • Diving into JTAG — BSDL (Part 4)

    by Aliaksandr Kavalchuk

    In the previous article of this series, we briefly touched on how .bsd files written in Boundary Scan Description Language (BSDL) describe the structure of the boundary scan chain and the instruction set. In this article, we will examine this language’s syntax more closely before seeing how .bsd files are leveraged in JTAG testing in the next article.

  • Diving into JTAG — Boundary Scan (Part 3)

    by Aliaksandr Kavalchuk

    In the third installment of this JTAG deep dive series, we will talk in-depth about JTAG Boundary-Scan, a method used to test interconnects on PCBs and internal IC sub-blocks. It is defined in the IEEE 1149.1 standard. I recommend reading Part 1 & Part 2 of the series to get a good background on debugging with JTAG before jumping into this one!

  • Differences Between ELF-32 and ELF-64

    by Eric Johnson

    The ELF object file format is one of the most commonly used today. Most build systems provide an output to this format, and ELF is commonly used to output coredumps. The format varies in subtle ways for 32-bit and 64-bit targets though, which can present problems for tools supporting both. This post will highlight the main differences and is intended as a quick reference for these differences.

  • What we've been reading in February (2024)

    by Tyler Hoffman

    Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this February.

  • Diving into JTAG — Debugging (Part 2)

    by Aliaksandr Kavalchuk

    In this second part of a JTAG deep-dive series, we take an in-depth look at interacting with a microcontroller’s memory and engaging with the processor core and debug registers. While the use of JTAG in testing is fairly standardized when it comes to debugging, each processor architecture has its unique nuances. With that in mind, this article will focus on debugging using JTAG on the ARM Cortex-M architecture, specifically with the STM32F407VG microcontroller.

  • Best Practices for Monitoring Device Connectivity

    by Eric Johnson

    This post will cover why device connectivity is complex and what methods we have available to diagnose and solve connectivity problems, both in the office and remotely in production. The tool at the core of our strategy is metrics, but we’ll briefly survey other tools like logging and protocol analysis. We’ll look in-depth at the utility of metrics and wrap up with some practical metric examples to use in your device.

  • Practical Zephyr - Devicetree semantics (Part 4)

    by Martin Lampacher

    Having covered the Devicetree basics in the previous article, we now add semantics to our Devicetree using so-called bindings: For each supported type, we’ll create a corresponding binding and look at the generated output to understand how it can be used with Zephyr’s Devicetree API.