EmbeddedNation

We are a team of professionals who have dedicated ourselves to the art and craft of embedded system development. We're based in Stockholm, Sweden and we're working with some of the most interesting and innovative companies of our region. Our experience is that many embedded software development projects are made unnecessarily difficult by the lack... of open specifications of the underlying hardware. The lack of documentation prevents the open source community from developing robust and easily integratable drivers for that hardware. Instead, what we find is that much driver and software feature development is done behind closed doors, with binary drivers being common for newly released chipsets. We believe that the problem is twofold. First, in selecting a hardware platform for a next generation product, the quality and availability of open specifications and software drivers is (in our experience) rarely a major factor. Instead the determining factors are cost and the promised feature set of the new SoC. Secondly, whereas available development time before deployment is usually very scarce, when a deployed system exhibits unstable behaviour there is usually no limit to the resources that will be spent on tracking down the bugs responsible. This is in essence a budgeting problem, where robust driver development is being starved for the benefit of chasing down bugs in deployed systems. Our view is that we can only build a stable system by understanding the parts that it's composed of and ensuring that they are indeed robust. We feel that the only way to do that is study comprehensive hardware documentation and preferably preexisting, peer-reviewed, driver implementations. A major benefit of this approach is that time spent on learning the details of the hardware platform is cumulative, whereas chasing random bugs in a system we don't really understand does not in a meaningful way lead to learning over time. While we rarely are the ultimate arbiters of hardware selection and development budgeting, we make it our ...Read More