I offer my capacity for firmware & embedded partnerships. 🛠️

Focusing on software-first shops that hit a hardware wall. If you ship great code but lack an in-house team to handle microcontrollers, drivers, or IoT interfaces, I’m here to bridge that gap.

Think of me as your remote embedded extension.

Shoot me an email if you’re navigating an integration bottleneck or looking for a collaborator.

In this blog we will be concerned with the world of embedded development. I see it that the tooling and the dev environments have come a long way in the last 10 years, and it is an exciting world! This blog will be more concerned from a hobbyist / maker viewpoint, involving parts mostly sourced from the bargain site Aliexpress.

More specifically we will be looking at IoT development. Specifically the low power wireless devices; namely BLE, Zigbee and the open standard 802.15.4. (Why they didn't give it a human friendly name I dont know?!).

Most development walkthroughs will be done on Linux environment, specifically Debian. Linux oriented articles/guides will be scattered throughout. I'm also a Linux addict. And where possible we will take a open-source/open-standard approach. This tends to be relevant for longer, whereas proprietary tools change or disappear!

The development environments we will tackle are based on open source project components integrated into the respective SDK by the vendor: such as FreeRTOS and lwIP. Only we would be using a barebones Makefile based approach.

Even though this is a hobbyist blog, this one is a little different. We would not be using Arduino. Instead we would be using the above frameworks. This might be a controversial choice, but I feel that closer-to-metal frameworks are more exciting.. This blog is an aide to move out from Arduino to more resource friendly frameworks such as FreeRTOS or RIOT-OS.

FreeRTOS is a real-time kernel that enables multitasking; makes the life of a firmware dev easier. Good resources about RTOS theory include:

• Digi-key Youtube series
• μC/OS-II User’s Manual Chapter 2: “Real-Time Systems Concepts” pp47. Accessible here is an excellent intro into the world of RTOS. It has slow paced, thorough treatment.