Hi all,

I'm currently an ECSE student finishing my second year and I have really enjoyed embedded systems so far. The most extensive experience I have at the moment alongside the fundamentals is working with ADC/IRQ/DMA (I programmed a DAC essentially).

I have this empty Wall-E toy from when I was a kid and I was thinking it's a good starting point to learn some more STM skills and apply it to something I actually care about. I think it's a good opportunity to learn:

• Communications with sensors/motors

• Designing a PCB and battery powered electronics

• Potential for RTOS and wireless communication (if the project becomes more complicated)

• Choosing STMs/making engineering decisions (something that's stressed a lot in my course to be an employable engineer)

I've been doing some reading through other's projects and other students who have posted on this subreddit and some of the advice everyone gave. I was wondering if anyone would have advice on how I could begin to tackle this, some pointers on good (non-AI) resources (especially robotics control/system design fundamentals, as I don't have much course experience with this), and also just general industry advice about embedded engineering as someone who would like to get into the industry one day (or even adjacent industries).

I know this project may be looking like a lot to do as basically a beginner, but I want to challenge myself and learn along the way by making this a long term project with room to consistently add to. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I am a UG student.

Upto now I have learned bare metal programming,freeRTOS and finally Zephyr RTOS and edge AI basics .

And also build some open source project libraries and drivers for sensor and some framing protocol also published it in the esp registery and Arduino libraries.

Now my doubt is where to head next ,or start building ideas further or learn the next phase things

Seeking your advice !

As the title states, not every (embedded) engineer has or has started out with formal education. If you broke into the industry without one what was your journey?

I'm looking for a project that could actually make use of TrustZone, hardware crypto accelerators, tamper pins, etc. on STM32 MCUs. Usually I just ignore TrustZone and RIF by putting everything in the Secure world, but I'd like to actually try using these features for once.

Anyone got any ideas where they'd actually be useful? I don't want to use them just for the sake of it.

Also, how would you even test whether your implementation is secure or not? I'd like to try breaking it afterwards to see how well it holds up 😄

I am a Embedded Firmware learner,

Doing bare metal ,freertos and zephyr Rtos firware development and building edge AI models.

I have been also building drivers and open source library in RTOS

Currently I am using Ubuntu , previously I have used Kali Linux.

Could you recommend a best distro for my taste and day to day building ?

And a new learning experience

or does ubuntu itself a good choice and stick to it

When storing static assets (fonts, UI bitmaps, device trees, config tables) in Flash on tight MCUs, heatshrink and tamp are great - but as sliding-window decoders, random-access reads of a few bytes still force you to allocate the window RAM and sequentially decode from the start of a block (or chop the asset into tiny blocks, hurting compression ratio).

I wrote blaris, an open-source C decompressor and host-side optimal compressor that eliminates the sliding window completely by resolving back-references directly in the compressed payload.

Why it's useful on small MCUs:

• Minimal RAM: 104–112 B total RAM (76 B stack + 28–36 B static, zero malloc) regardless of lookback range (64 KiB, or 128–256 KiB with aligned distances) or payload size. Heatshrink and tamp require 2^window_log bytes of RAM.

• Minimal Flash (RV32IMC, Clang -Os, including common adapter): 548–784 B Flash (vs. 1,300–1,464 for heatshrink, and 2,238–3,238 for tamp).

• Fast small random reads: On 1–32 B slices, it outperforms ratio-matched, block-indexed heatshrink/tamp (e.g., >500× faster on 1 B reads at ~36% ratio on a 15.2 KiB .dtb).

Benchmarked on ESP32-C3FN4 (code + payload in external quad-SPI Flash, no SRAM copy); SPI wait states only added ~1.30–1.33× overhead for slices ≥ 4 B compared to zero-wait-state simulation. Likely helped by the 16KiB cache.

How it works (briefly):
Tokens are split into 3 lockstep-traversable streams (controls at 1 byte/token, raw literals, and bit-packed distance_bits) so the decoder can step both forward and backward. Compact power-of-two checkpoints (7–13 B each) allow the decoder to find the literal run token faster, and an optional host-side chain-flattening pass cuts match-to-match hops by 14%–51% at a ~0.5%–2.2% ratio cost.

When NOT to use it:

• Large sequential reads (≥ 64–128 B): Because blaris resolves matches per slice without caching prior output, heatshrink/tamp overtake it if you have the RAM.

• Trusted payloads only: Designed for build-time Flash assets, so it omits runtime bounds/error checks to keep code size under ~800 B. You should add an additional layer of payload verification before calling the decompressor.

C implementation, host compressor, RV32IMC + ESP32-C3 benchmark suite, and full results: https://github.com/lis05/blaris

Hi everyone

As the title says, I'm moving to the Seattle area (Redmond more specifically) from overseas. I'm a US citizen, grew up around Seattle, but my entire professional career including education has taken place in Norway. I have a EE bachelors, 8 yoe as Embedded SW Engineer.

I'm not moving until August 2027, but am beginning my job search now.

A few questions,

First question, resume: How long should it be? I can make a skeleton one pager, though that will not describe my full experience sufficiently. Is a 2-3 page resume too long?

And about resume format, mine is pretty black and white and is content heavy. Hopefully that's still acceptable. I've been on the hiring end for a few years now and have seen candidates treating their resumes as a graphics design exercise.

Second question: recruiters, job coaches, etc. Like I said above, all of my professional experience is from Norway. I understand that the US job market can be quite different. I'd appreciate meeting a job coach or recruiter that can support me in my job search. Any recommendations or shared experience in this matter?

Thanks all!

Hello, I would like to make a project with a esp32 s3 with a screen but, I don't where to get one and what should I look for. I want to make a custom PCB, I wanted to have the screen connected with a ribbon cable. As the title says I want a 7 inch 800x480 RGB565 FPC/FFC IPS capacitive touch screen display. I don't want a bare screen, I would like to already have the touch screen and screen IC in the cable or on the back or the screen.

Edit: Forgot to say that I would want one screen for around 30 euros or less if possible.

Edit 2: I would like to be powered with 3.3V or 5V

I wrote a small clean-room C99 runtime under fairly strict real-time constraints:

• Zero heap after boot
• No large static tables (Unicode / case / collation moved out of the core)
• O(1) bounded stack sort
• Written with MISRA C:2023 / CERT C / NASA Power of Ten style rules in mind
• Current size is roughly 1.2–10.5 kB .text depending on configuration
• Side-by-side size comparisons with dietlibc, picolibc, NuttX libc, etc.
• SIMD Assembly Kernels

It was built as the runtime layer for a BTRON-derived system, but the runtime itself is intentionally minimal and separable.

I’m mainly looking for feedback from people who ship actual constrained or safety-oriented code. What would you change or drop?

I've tried and reverse image it with Google but so far the pcb schematic shows up but nothing indicating about the components.

I've feed it to gpt to try and have it deep dive with the picture but so far nothing at all.

I need to specify it for a school project.

As the title suggests I recently switched from a controls engineer to an embedded software engineer and was wondering what i should practice before my first day, thanks!

Hey i have been working some embedded systems project with my mentor for past 2 years , I can say I got pretty good at understanding what an embedded systems engineer does..

Iam looking for new problems to tackle with ......

I will also add gbe project such that you can get a better perspective of what I deal with

Project 01 :

Created a multi sensor fusion modeled biological monitoring system .

Hardware in use :

ESP32 (FIREBEETLE)

LOAD CELL SENSOR

TEMPERATURE AND HUMIDITY SENSOR

FUEL GAUGE

REAL TIME CLOCK

MICROPHONE (I2S)

SD CARDS

Via the usage of the RTOS I recorded data such as sound, temp, humidity and wieght of a particular species saved the data in the SD card and in a particular time duration sent the data with battery percent notifications to email via esp32.

The RTOS helped to build a system with more efficiency and lower latency.....

I made the system with bootcounts to save power....

Project 02 :

Inferencing a MobileNet CNN model (6 MB activation) in STM32F401RE nucleo board (96kb RAM) and the end to end inferencing latency was about 2800 ms....

I have applied a row by row inferencing technique to increase the RAM efficiency and also decreasing the number of I/O (I was using SD Cards as a secondary memory storage) . I have applied SIMD instructions while creating the kernel math for model implementation...

I am genuinely confused what shall be done further, would love to work and grow with someone with a passionate and ambitious project to push my intellectual boundaries....

I want to make an offline dictionary/encyclopedia gadget which reads from an SD card and runs off AA batteries. I have a software background but I know very little about electronics and haven't worked with micro-controllers before, so I don't know if I should use STM32 or ESP32 or something else.

this project will require some potentially uncommon components:

• an SD card module that can address >100GB of data

• a AA battery pack module that can provide sufficient power

I thought it might be a good idea to find these components before I decide on a microcontroller, in case there is limited availability or certain components only work with certain microcontrollers. any pointers for how to look for these components? or general advice on what to use for this project?

related post from a few days ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/1xup260/platform_for_gadgets_that_can_readwrite_sd_cards/

While building my own KVM, I made a few small HDMI to CSI capture boards around the Rockchip RK628H. The documentation is terrible around these chips but the performance is impressive for the cost. We've moved the bridge onto our own boards now, so I've put all three up as open hardware: schematics, Fusion and EAGLE files, gerbers, JLCPCB BOMs, plus the drivers and installers. It can also do HDMI to DSI, you'd just need to update the connector for the pinout needed.

Max Specs (needs 2x 4-lanes):

• Dual MIPI DSI => 2560x1600@60fps

• Dual MIPI CSI => 3840x2160@60fps

*It can also work on the Pi 4B only has 2 camera lanes, which tops out at 1080p60 (60.00 fps, tested on a CM4 limited to 2 lanes). Just need a 22-pin to 15-pin adapter cable.

**The Aura can only encode 4K30, but the RK628H can do 4K60 input

It's most similar to the Waveshare HDMI to CSI board that the DIY PiKVM uses but can do higher resolution/fps. Rockchip's stock driver had a few real bugs and fixes are in the repo. The source never saw EDID changes until you replugged the cable, audio was never advertised, and a hot HDMI replug could wedge the chip until a power cycle.

CERN-OHL-S for the hardware, GPL for the software. Build them, change them, sell them, just keep your changes open. Repo: https://github.com/WarpKVM/rk628-bridge-boards

Happy to answer questions, or try other hosts if someone has one! More open source goodies coming soon!

Hi r/embedded,

Debugging silicon faults when bringing up new microcontrollers is notoriously tedious, especially when you're staring at raw hexadecimal register dumps (`CFSR`, `HFSR`, `BFAR`, `MMFAR`) on Cortex-M or cryptic ESP32 Guru Meditation backtraces without a debugger attached.

I've open-sourced **Hardware Debug Anything (HDA)**, an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server designed to connect AI coding assistants directly to silicon diagnostics:

- **ARM HardFault & BusFault Decoder**: Parses raw hex bitmasks into plain-English root causes (precise bus error, unaligned memory access, stack overflow, memory management faults).

- **ESP32 Guru Meditation Parser**: Decodes crash frames and backtrace register dumps.

- **Antmicro Renode Virtual Hardware Integration**: Generates `.resc` simulation scripts so firmware can be validated in virtual silicon without needing physical hardware on the desk.

- **I2C/SPI Diagnostics**: Automated pull-up resistor calculations and NACK troubleshooting.

- **GitHub Repository:** https://github.com/hosseinnosrati/hardware-debug-anything

I also built an accompanying EDA tool for closed-loop SPICE simulation and KiCad export (**Circuit Design Anything**): https://github.com/hosseinnosrati/circuit-design-anything

Both are 100% open-source (Apache 2.0). I’d appreciate any feedback from the embedded community!

Hi any developers that working on ch32?

Hey everyone,

Standard edge perception stacks (camera -> frame buffer -> companion GPU) introduce 50–100ms latency. In high-speed, low-altitude flight, that delay causes drones to crash into the ground during sudden prop-wash or ground-effect turbulence before the motor controller can react.

To solve this latency bottleneck, I built an auxiliary flight coprocessor board (30x30mm, 6.8g) that runs a sparse continuous-time neural model (CfC / Liquid time-constant network) compiled directly to bare-metal C++ on an MCU.

Technical Breakdown:

• Sensor loop: Reads raw IMU and optical flow over SPI.

• Execution: The continuous-time ODE forward pass executes deterministically in 0.48ms on-chip (no dynamic memory allocation / zero malloc to prevent heap fragmentation).

• Physical Response: Overrides motor signals directly via DShot to initiate a 4.0G recovery maneuver within 48ms total physical window.

• Model Architecture: 19-neuron recurrent sparse topology (632 active parameters / 99.51% sparsity derived from connectome wiring), allowing the full state vector to fit inside L1 cache.

• Power: Draws under 1 Watt, eliminating the weight and heat of companion single-board computers.

In flight testing, this allowed the quadcopter to arrest sudden vertical drops and recover without external optical tracking or desktop compute.

I spent the last several months rewriting the continuous-time ODE solver into fixed-point arithmetic and optimizing the timer interrupt routines to get the loop time down from 2ms to 0.48ms.

Happy to answer technical questions about the C++ fixed-point implementation, SPI interrupt timing, or motor override architecture!

I've been building a CM4-pinout module for camera and video work: Rockchip RV1126B, 1GB LPDDR4X, 8GB eMMC, WiFi 6. Not a lot of documentation out there about this chip, so it was a fun project. Most similar to the CM4101008 but I used CM4101000 for comparison due to availability. First boards just came back from JLC this week, so I ran it against a the CM4101000 on the same carrier with the same two IMX415 cameras, stock tools on both, median of 3 runs.

*The second 4-lane camera borrows the DSI0 pins, so on a stock CM4 carrier it's 2-lane. So not entirely pin to pin compatible, but super close.

**I've been doing some direct MPP work and have gotten 4K30 encode on the RV1126B. Didn't include this since it wasn't apples to apples.

Takeaways:

• If you're doing cameras, video or vision, the RV1126B is the undoubtedly a better fit. Which makes sense given that's what it's made for and it's newer. Two full 4-lane cameras, 4K and H.265 encode, real-time 1080p from the camera, and about 10x faster object detection on the NPU.

• If you need raw CPU, HDMI or PCIe, CM4 is still a clear winner. It's about 2x faster on CPU which is expected given the A72 vs A53. RV1126B has DSI if you need a simple screen though.

• RV1126B uses about half the power under load and runs about 20°C cooler.

• The CM4 needed `gpu_freq_min=500` and `core_freq_min=500` to hit 25 fps on the camera (18 fps without them).

I'm honestly super impressed with the RV1126B, definitely recommend for video/camera work. Happy to run other tests if anyone wants something specific. Questions welcome about the design, manufacturing, or firmware bring up!

I've been experimenting with running agentic workflows on ultra-constrained hardware and recently open-sourced tiny-langgraph.

The engine lets you define workflows in Python using nodes and edges, then compiles them to C while checking behavioral correctness.

It also supports:

• Multi-board collaboration over ESP-NOW

• Contract-based agent communication

• An MCP server on each board

• Optional on-device language models

• Plan verification before execution

Tested on ESP32-S3 and ESP8266 modules.

GitHub: https://github.com/mak-ahoy/tiny-langgraph

Would love to hear what embedded developers think about this approach and where it could be useful. Plus any feedback on the system itself?

I feel finding like-minded people is not easy.

Even in the same field, people can be at very different levels. One may be working with milliamps, another with furnace-level SCR systems. Both have potential, but their ideas and discussions may not always connect.

My question is:

- How do you find people who match your current thinking and learning level?

- People who understand your present struggles and ambitions?

- People whose ideas and priorities connect with yours?

How do you find your kind of people in industry?

Hello, I am a comp eng student and my friends and I are working on a project. The project is about a rocket engine system and I need to get 16 sensors data in every 20ms which is 800 data per second. We were thinking that what if we use esp32 to read data by usb-uart instead of reading them with stm32 by tcp due to price and accessibility. So the question is 'is usb-uart a good way to get data'. I need to sketch a graph for each sensor. I also need to save data to the database. So instead of having data with tcp as packages, using usb-uart is worth it? What are the problems I may have for each way?

It may be a basic question, but consider that I am still learning.

By the way we still use stm to control the relays. The point is esp is easier to find and cheaper to test the system.

Thank you for your advice.

Cad design? Fusion will be $700 per year.

Have any connectivity? Yea you do. $3,000 to $10,000 on the low side.

You use bluetooth? Time to pay the committee $12,000 per device that uses your protocol.

You wanna use this open source library? Oh actually their license states you have to pay them $2 per device.

I'll tell you what tho, I ain't paying nothing. Not like I just have that sort of money laying around. Maybe once I hit $100k YRR I'll entertain it. Till then my board is a dev board and the FCC can suck it.

Hi, I was porting Linux to a PPC460EX-based device, but I accidentally corrupted the bootloader. I have a backup of the bootloader, but I have no way of writing it because I don't have any hardware that can write to the 56-pin NOR flash. However, the board has JTAG pins, so in theory I can connect via JTAG and write a new bootloader. To do that, though, I need the PPC460EX BSDL file. I would really appreciate it if anyone who has it would be willing to share it with me.