A Look at Ten Hardware Startup Blunders, Part 4: Conclusion

At Embedded Artistry, we've spent countless hours meeting with founders, working at startups, and swapping war stories with fellow engineers. After enough iterations, we started to notice a repeated set of critical strategic missteps made by new hardware companies. These missteps result in compromised designs, increased development costs, and continual schedule delays. We've selected ten …

A Look at Ten Hardware Startup Blunders, Part 3: Team

At Embedded Artistry, we've spent countless hours meeting with founders, working at startups, and swapping war stories with fellow engineers. After enough iterations, we started to notice a repeated set of critical strategic missteps made by new hardware companies. These missteps result in compromised designs, increased development costs, and continual schedule delays. We've selected ten …

A Look at Ten Hardware Startup Blunders, Part 2: Schedule and Focus

At Embedded Artistry, we've spent countless hours meeting with founders, working at startups, and swapping war stories with fellow engineers. After enough iterations, we started to notice a repeated set of critical strategic missteps made by new hardware companies. These missteps result in compromised designs, increased development costs, and continual schedule delays. We've selected ten …

Missing /usr/include after updating to OSX 10.14? Try this fix

Last week, I updated OSX to 10.14. After installing the XCode command line tools, I noticed that most of my projects were failing to compile. I did some poking around and found that /usr/include/ was missing. It seems that Apple updated their software tools to look within the OSX SDK path for headers. Unfortunately, for …

A Look at Ten Hardware Startup Blunders, Part 1: Process

At Embedded Artistry, we've spent countless hours meeting with founders, working at startups, and swapping war stories with fellow engineers. After enough iterations, we started to notice a repeated set of critical strategic missteps made by new hardware companies. These missteps result in compromised designs, increased development costs, and continual schedule delays. We've selected ten …

Musings on Supply Chain Vulnerability in Light of “The Big Hack”

At the beginning October 2018, Bloomberg dropped a bomb by publishing "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate America's Top Companies". The story claims that between 2014-2015, Supermicro server motherboards had a small IC inserted onto the PCB, possibly connected to the baseboard management controller (BMC). The chip allowed attackers to …

What I Learned from James Grenning’s Remote TDD Course

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an important software development practice which is typically foreign to embedded teams. James Grenning has put a tremendous amount of effort into teaching embedded systems developers how to adopt TDD. He published an embedded systems classic, Test-Driven Development for Embedded C, and regularly conducts TDD training seminars. Admittedly, TDD is …