The Challenge of Fixed-Size Integers Before C99 In embedded programming, before adopting the C99 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999), a significant challenge was ensuring the consistent sizing of key data objects. This complexity stemmed from the C standard’s (ISO/IEC 9899) non-committal stance on the size of an int. We knew: A short is a minimum of 16-bits. A long is a minimum of 32-bits. An int is somewhere between a short and a long. This flexibility boosted C’s portability, making it a favou...| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
BlackHat Europe 2022 During the first week of December, I had the pleasure of attending a training course at BlackHat Europe 2022 titled Assessing and Exploiting Control Systems and IIoT run by Justin Searle. Part of the course involved Assessing and Exploiting Embedded Firmware by reading on-chip Flash using OpenOCD. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the last labs during the training (we ran 9 am-6 pm each day). So I decided to follow along with the very comprehensive notes [...]| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
Creating a flash image The primary purpose of the ihex file in the embedded space is to create a file that is used to program/reprogram a target system. There are various file formats around, with the Intel Hex (ihex) format being among the most widely used. The output of the linker stage of a build process is typically to generate a .elf file (Executable and Linkable Format). Many debuggers and programmers can work directly with the ELF file format. However, in many [...]| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
Ceedling is still probably the best Test-Driven Development (TDD) environment for C programmers out there. But, as with many Free Open-Source Software ( FOSS ), tools getting it to work natively on a Windows environment involves the odd hoop-jumping exercise; either involving messing around with the likes of Cygwin or Mingw; or using a full Virtual Machine (VM) environment such as VirtualBox or VMware. However, with the introduction of Windows-Subsystem-for-Linux (WSL) and the much-improved u...| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
In this post, by Embedded I’m generally referring to deeply embedded/bare-metal systems as opposed to Linux-based embedded systems. Embedded systems and strings Historically, the need for and thus the use of strings in embedded systems was fairly limited. However, this has changed with the advent of cheaper, full graphic displays and the growth of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT). Many embedded systems sport full-colour graphics displays, supported by embedded-specific graphics libraries,...| Sticky Bits - Powered by Feabhas
