3 ms·

It's a fine RTOS, at least it was when I was working on Deskjet firmware. At the time the open source OSes and especially the tooling really wasn't up to the ta

It's a fine RTOS, at least it was when I was working on Deskjet firmware. At the time the open source OSes and especially the tooling really wasn't up to the task. Things really have changed though, now there are alternatives.

hospitalJail 3y ago
The progress the embedded world has made on FOSS has been incredible. I started in like 2016 or 2017(ignoring the ~8 years I played with Arduino). At the end of the day, I end up often using microchip studio because that is my board and it just works nicely. However, I have tons of tiny personal projects I'll spin up with vscode and platformIO and knock stuff out. Heck, even when I was merely playing around with it, I was able to FOSS my way to building and sending everything with various software. I cannot imagine embedded pre ardunio. You'd think it would have created a scarcity of workers.
- HankB99 3y ago
  > I cannot imagine embedded pre ardunio. You'd think it would have created a scarcity of workers. That made it a useful market to be in (as a developer.) My first embedded task was on a PDP 11/23 sans OS (despite the fact that DEC had suitable RTOSs like RSX-11M)
  - linuxdude314 3y ago
    It’s not that hard, 2nd year EE classes at most. Once you learn how to read a data sheet for your MCU or SOC things start to click.
    - zwieback 3y ago
      ...and when you find yourself reading the errata sheet for your specific silicon revision you've arrived.
- amluto 3y ago
  One of my first projects was an embedded thing, long before 2016, where the number of deployments was exactly one. (It was a ruggedized device embedded into an experiment that we literally dropped from an eight story building twice a day. The device in question did just fine, although, unsurprisingly, a bunch of the rest of the apparatus needed rather regular repairs.) The development experience was miserable. The embedded code was in C, and, when something went wrong, there was about a 50% chance that the bug was in the proprietary compiler from the vendor and not in the C code at all. There was probably some way to debug the live system, but I never found it. I’m not sure where was any way to simulate the system well enough to run our code short of actually uploading it to the device. The world has come a long way :). An RPi or Arduino or anything else along those lines would likely also survive the treatment we gave this thing as long as all the connectors were very well secured.

hospitalJail 3y ago

The progress the embedded world has made on FOSS has been incredible. I started in like 2016 or 2017(ignoring the ~8 years I played with Arduino). At the end of the day, I end up often using microchip studio because that is my board and it just works nicely. However, I have tons of tiny personal projects I'll spin up with vscode and platformIO and knock stuff out. Heck, even when I was merely playing around with it, I was able to FOSS my way to building and sending everything with various software. I cannot imagine embedded pre ardunio. You'd think it would have created a scarcity of workers.

HankB99 3y ago
> I cannot imagine embedded pre ardunio. You'd think it would have created a scarcity of workers. That made it a useful market to be in (as a developer.) My first embedded task was on a PDP 11/23 sans OS (despite the fact that DEC had suitable RTOSs like RSX-11M)
- linuxdude314 3y ago
  It’s not that hard, 2nd year EE classes at most. Once you learn how to read a data sheet for your MCU or SOC things start to click.
  - zwieback 3y ago
    ...and when you find yourself reading the errata sheet for your specific silicon revision you've arrived.
amluto 3y ago
One of my first projects was an embedded thing, long before 2016, where the number of deployments was exactly one. (It was a ruggedized device embedded into an experiment that we literally dropped from an eight story building twice a day. The device in question did just fine, although, unsurprisingly, a bunch of the rest of the apparatus needed rather regular repairs.) The development experience was miserable. The embedded code was in C, and, when something went wrong, there was about a 50% chance that the bug was in the proprietary compiler from the vendor and not in the C code at all. There was probably some way to debug the live system, but I never found it. I’m not sure where was any way to simulate the system well enough to run our code short of actually uploading it to the device. The world has come a long way :). An RPi or Arduino or anything else along those lines would likely also survive the treatment we gave this thing as long as all the connectors were very well secured.