Writing Arduino Code using Visual Studio and Visual Micro

In this video, we look at jumping up from the standard Arduino IDE and take a stab at programming use Microsoft’s Visual Studio Community Edition 2017 and third-party extension Visual Micro. We also look at how to put our code under source code control using GitHub. Some of the tools we use: Microsoft Visual Studio…

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Bus Pirate and the MCP4725 DAC via I2C

Bus Pirate and the MCP4725 DAC via I2C.  Wow.  What a mouthful.  Following up on one of the most popular posts (SparkFun DAC Breakout Board Tutorial) in this guide we will take a look at controlling the MCP4725 DAC via the I2C protocol using a Bus Pirate from Dangerous Prototype.  Before we get started let’s…

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Expanding Your Horizons … And Your Ports

One frustrating aspect of designing a project around a microcontroller is the realization that you don’t have enough GPIO pins to drive all the all components you want to include. If you are lucky there are larger chips with the same architecture you have chosen (think going from and Arduino Uno to an Arduino Mega)….

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Arduino Inks IoT Deal With Telstra

At the end of the November 2018 Australian teleco Telstra announced they were partnering with open source hardware leader Arduino to bring next-generation networks and hardware to Australian developers and engineers. As part of the deal, Telstra will sell local developers the forthcoming MKR NB 1500 development board along with a M2M SIM card. The…

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Hardware Tools with IoT Security Applicability

Over the past few years, cybersecurity has entered the public consciousness thanks to attacks that had direct effects on consumers privacy. Attacking traditional Information Technology (IT) systems such as desktop computers and servers can almost be a trivial matter for attackers with even moderate skills. Thanks to the plethora of software tools available and the…

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Demystifying Firmware Debugging

Debugging embedded systems and associated firmware can be more art than science. Is the problem in hardware or is it in software? Both? The ability to understand what’s going inside the processor at any given moment is key to troubleshooting. The difficulty in achieving this deep is understanding is compounded for systems integrators that are…

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Open Hardware or Secure IoT: Is It a Mutually Exclusive Choice?

Despite the eye rolls sometimes given to the name “Internet of Things” or IoT for short, no one is arguing that the future isn’t connected. Market soothsayers such as Business Insider recently release their revised 2018 IoT market predictions. Some highlights include 1 billion installed IoT devices in just U.S. homes will occur by 2023….

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Primer on Embedded Side Channel Attacks

“Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” Sun-Tzu, Art of War For much of the history of embedded systems, many product designers and engineers have had the luxury of building rather closed loop systems with little to no interaction with other systems. A so-called “security through obscurity” was perhaps not…

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Arduino Graduates, Enters the Professional World

The humble Arduino embedded development platform marked it’s 15th year of existence recently. Ever since the original RS-232 serial port-based Arduino became a reality, the companies behind the platform have made steady progress in improving the capabilities with each new generations of boards. The board and the associated C-based programming language (originally called Wiring) were…

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