Embedded Software Development: Challenges and Opportunities ahead for Developers

By Embedded Advisor | Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Embedded systems are found widely in today’s systems from computers that control the safety features of the latest automobiles to ATMs that are regularly used to access cash. 98 percent of today’s microprocessors will be used in embedded systems. That only leaves 2 percent in a computer.

Leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) is a process in which objects are equipped with sensors, actuators, and processors involving hardware board design and development, software systems, web APIs and protocols that together create embedded system connected environment.

Connectivity, security, software updates, debugging, and software updates are some of the major aspects that developers should concentrate. The software development future lies with more disciplined methodologies such as software requirements specification and testing, test-driven development, agile programming, and the personal software process.

The developers have a variety of ways to connect to the internet such as Wi-Fi, Cellular, Ethernet, Bluetooth Bridge, and many other sources. While each has different software stacks that developers need to learn and understand to work with the hardware. This does not even cover the other software considerations regarding which protocols to use, such as UDP, COAP, TCP / IP and several other protocols, or whether multiple protocols should be used at once. The developers can use pre-existing software stacks to help decrease this connectivity challenge.

Debugging an embedded software is hard as there are real-time constraints about when data is received or sent and interrupt handling. Every embedded project can take a lot of time and money on debugging. SOMNIUM DRT is a software development kit has most of the software debugging features that help developers make the debugging easier.

Software updates are only expected to appear miraculously and are carried out by themselves. Even in a small deployment involving several thousand devices, developers must find out how to create a firmware update job. Developers need to learn not only how to connect, but also how to secure their devices from constantly evolving and increasingly sophisticated security threats. There is a need to think carefully about how the system is divided, isolated, and what information needs to be protected. Developers need to identify clearly how secure their system is. Solutions already exist in a variety of ways in many cases. The trick is how developers and teams keep up with these new skills that they need.

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