How-to Guide Archives - Page 2 of 2

26 October 201730 August 2023

Building CMocka as a Static Library

I had to rebuild CMocka the other day for one of my projects, and I was initially pretty confused as to why the CMocka build system was only generating dynamic libraries. The documentation didn't mention anything obvious about static libraries either. I'm still new to CMake and wasn't aware of the DefineOptions.cmake file, which clearly …

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16 October 201715 December 2021

CMocka: Enabling XML Output

I've been adding unit tests to my C-based projects with the CMocka testing framework. Now that I have tests defined, I want my build server to run the tests and track the results for each build. Jenkins requires test results to be reported in the JUnit XML format. Luckily, CMocka has built in XML support …

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6 October 20177 January 2022

An Improved Jenkins SCM Sync Configuration Plugin

This plugin has been deprecated due to Jenkins API changes. It is no longer functional. One of my favorite Jenkins plugins is the SCM Sync Configuration plugin. There have been multiple occasions where I have made a change to a project configuration only to break the build. When that happened, there was no way to …

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18 August 201715 December 2021

A GitHub Issue Template for Your Projects

Now that we have some example pull request templates, we might as well create an issue template for our GitHub projects. Table of Contents: Creating an Issue Template for Your Project My Template Example Template File Further Reading Creating an Issue Template for Your Project Similarly to a PR template, it's super easy to setup …

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4 August 201715 December 2021

A GitHub Pull Request Template for Your Projects

I've been thinking about creating GitHub issue and pull request templates for my own projects. These templates auto-populate the issue/pull-request description field and provide a skeleton framework that you can fill out. I like these templates every time I come across them, since they help provide a baseline standard of informational quality and organizational rigor. …

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30 June 201721 April 2020

Using TUMPA for Serial-to-USB Communication

The current FTDI-based debugger I have on hand is the TIAO USB Multi Protocol Adapter (aka "TUMPA"). This little guy is pretty handy, and I have often used it for JTAG debugging. Recently I found myself needing a USB-to-Serial device, so I decided to put my little TUMPA to work. I wired up the RX …

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19 June 201715 December 2021

Particle: Changing Operating Modes using Baud Rate

I was working with the Particle electron recently, and I quickly grew tired of having to press buttons to enter DFU mode. A little bit of searching led me to discover that you can change modes by connecting to the USB serial port with a specific baud rate. (I was unable to find this mentioned …

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24 May 201715 December 2021

Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3: Buildroot Setup, Configuration, and Flashing

I recently encountered the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3) while prototyping with one of my clients. I wanted to share my notes for getting Buildroot configured for CM3 builds. Getting Buildroot You can find Buildroot in the official repository or on the Buildroot Github mirror. To create your project, either fork the buildroot repository …

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19 May 201715 December 2021

Serial Debugging On the Particle Electron

As I started writing code for the Particle Electron, it wasn't long until I was fed up with my debugging setup. After a little bit of digging, I found out that it's quite simple to get USB or serial printing to work. The Particle Electron has two USB channels and four USART channels that we …

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15 May 201715 December 2021

Getting Started: Developing for Particle Electron on Your Host

One of my clients uses the Particle Electron in their product. Particle is an IoT platform provider, and Electron is a development platform that connects to the Particle cloud using a 2G/3G cellular connection. Particle provides a web IDE for developers, but I decided to get myself setup to compile Particle firmware on the host …

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