Coverage of Two Security Events Colin summarizes some interesting presentations from the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas—along with an extra bonus event. This will help you keep up-to-date with some of the latest embedded attacks, including execute only memory...

The March issue of Circuit Cellar is coming next week! Electronics solutions for medical wearables, PCB assembly services, a deep look into LPWAN, an LoRa-based tracking project, redefining the kilogram, industrial-strength power supplies, rotating LIDAR project, USB security attacks and...

Tool Advances Speed Design-to-Manufacture Process In my time working in the electronics division of a research organization, I would often have colleagues from other divisions come to me asking for assistance with designing specialized hardware for their projects. Typically, they...

Modules in Action In Part 1 of this article series, Brian examined some of the technologies and services available today, enabling you to ease into the IoT cloud. Now, in Part 2, he discusses the hardware features of the Particle...

Realism Revamp While music-playing video games are fun, their user interfaces tend to leave a lot to be desired. Learn how these two Cornell students designed and built a musical video game that’s interfaced using a custom-built wireless guitar controller....

Coming to your inbox tomorrow: Circuit Cellar’s Microcontroller Watch newsletter. Tomorrow’s newsletter keeps you up-to-date on latest microcontroller news. In this section, we examine microcontrollers along with their associated tools and support products. Already a Circuit Cellar Newsletter subscriber? Great! You’ll get your...

Bulletproofing Car Design Formal tools can prove that a fault is safe, residual or latent—and they can quickly determine a worst-case/best-case diagnostic coverage without time-consuming analysis. In this article, Doug presents an improved formal verification flow that uses sequential logic...

Embedded Database Systems in the Age of IoT Embedded database systems have been around since the late 70s. Industry veterans, like myself, remember Btrieve, C-tree, Empress, db_VISTA and dBASE. Back in the day, embedded databases were used for departmental computing...

Web Connecting MCUs There are many advantages to having the control/monitoring of devices communicate indirectly with the user interface for those devices—using some form of “always-on” server. When this server is something beyond one in your home, it’s called the...

MCU-Driven Art In North America, most radio-controlled clocks use WWVB’s transmissions to set the correct time. WWVB is a Colorado-based time signal radio station. Learn how these two Cornell students designed and built a prototype of a Digital WWVB Clock....

Coming to your inbox on Tuesday: Circuit Cellar’s Analog & Power newsletter. This newsletter content zeros in on the latest developments in analog and power technologies including ADCs, DACs, DC-DC converters, AC-DC converters, power supplies, op amps, batteries and more....

Efficiency Put to the Test When Jeff puts his mind to a technology topic, he goes in deep. In this article, he explores several aspects of LED lighting—including the history, math, science and technology of LEDs. He discusses everything from...

Dealing with Challenges and Tradeoffs in Motion Control The global motion control industry saw trends similar to the machine vision market with an estimated 8% growth in 2018. Within this broader market stability, robot motion control has continued a focus...

Purposeful Protection Just because an electronic device is simple, you shouldn’t relegate it to an afterthought in your embedded system design. Such is the case with fuses. Robert explores the fundamentals of this seemingly simple device. In this article, he...

SeeedStudio has built an SoM based on STMicroelectronics’ Arm Cortex A7/M4 hybrid SoC called the SOM-STM32MP157C, along with a Raspberry Pi “inspired” baseboard called the NPi-STM32MP157C. Together these products form a new SBC designated Odyssey-STM32MP157C. Although product details for the...

Axiomtek has released the Intel 8th Gen based CEM520, which follows its earlier 6th Gen Skylake Core and Xeon E3 based CEM500 COM Express Basic Type 6 module. Other Coffee Lake driven Basic Type 6 modules include Avalue’s recent ESM-CFH. Unlike the ESM-CFH...

Coming to your inbox tomorrow: Circuit Cellar’s Embedded Boards newsletter. Tomorrow’s newsletter content focuses on both standard and non-standard embedded computer boards that ease prototyping efforts and let you smoothly scale up to production volumes. Already a Circuit Cellar Newsletter subscriber? Great!...

Choices for Industrial Designs As MCU performance and functionality improve, the boundaries between MCUs and microprocessor units (MPUs) have gotten murky. In this article, Jacko examines the changing landscape in MPU vs. MCU capabilities, OS implications and the specifics of...

Superhero Sight In this project article, learn how these two Cornell students designed a system to overlay images from a visible light camera and an infrared camera. They use software running on a PIC32 MCU to interface the two types...

Motorola Flash Innovation 2003 – Design Contest Grand Prize Richard DreherU.S Abstract: Have you ever wondered what the birds, deer, or bears were doing in your backyard when you weren’t around? With the Remote Observation Station, you can watch wildlife...

Helpful Hosting Sometimes you want to connect a USB device such as a flash drive to a simple microcontroller. The problem is most MCUs cannot function as a USB host. In this article, Stuart steps through the technology and device...

AVR 2004 Design Contest – First Prize This low-cost project measures fuel consumption in real time. An ATmega8515 microcontroller collects vehicle speed and airflow data from the vehicle’s engine computer using the SAE J1850 VPW bit-serial bus, which is one...

Gateworks has released the second generation of the GW16122 IoT Radio for rugged and industrial applications. This next generation card features greatly improved output power through a 20dBm power amplifier, more storage space and a simplified design, says Gateworks. Software...

Semtech has announced that Elmeasure and ClodPi Labs (ClodPi) have developed a new LoRa-based prepaid energy metering solution using Semtech’s LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN protocol. This new line of prepaid smart meters tracks and reports usage data in real...

Advantech has announced the release of its latest LPWAN wireless, compact size, self-powered IoT sensor nodes: the WISE-2210 CT node and WISE-2211 wireless sensor node. Utilizing low-power, wide-area networks (LPWAN), these latest editions to the WISE series of remote sensors...