Chadd's Blog

The Importance of Computer Science Theory in Embedded System Applications

September 05, 2022

1. Computer Science topics are important for embedded systems. But most people in the industry do not go through these topics in school 2. An embedded systems engineer will struggle in a pure software project because of gaps in knowledge of programming theory 3. W

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8-Bit MDFU Client Library in MCC Melody

December 18, 2023

Working for MCU8 Applications at Microchip, I played a very large role in the design and development of the 8-bit MDFU Client library in MCC Melody as well as the pyfwimagebuilder Python application on PyPi. This Python tool and C firmware library were two of the key pieces to a newly designed firmware update ecosystem that is driven by an in-house file transfer protocol (FTP). I was responsible for designing the abstracted FTP code base as well as the code interface between the core update firmware and all of the individual peripheral library adapter layers used for the serial communication and I was able to create a common bootloader core code base that could work across all three of our 8-bit microcontroller architectures. I also utilized the Unity test framework to design the embedded unit tests that could be executed on a Jenkins pipeline for continuous automated testing on the various embedded architectures.

8-Bit MDFU Client Library
pyfwimagebuilder


Planetary Image Editor

April 18, 2021

This application removes the tedious parts of preparing publication-ready figures by limiting the amount of effort required to create scale bars and other annotations as well as extract metadata for image captions. For example, researchers looking to add a scale bar to an image product typically need to extract the pixel scale from the metadata and then calculate the mathematical ratio to make a scale bar the correct length for the image using an image editor like Adobe Photoshop. PIE does this automatically, not just for scale bars but also for figure annotations with standard icons for a north arrow, sun direction and observer position. PIE also extracts information from the metadata to fill in an image caption template at the push of a button. PIE greatly reduces the steps that researchers must complete every time they want to create a figure for publications. Automating these procedures following established standards will also enhance the completeness of captions and interoperability of figure annotations.

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