Programming Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition

A Few Words About Hardware

It is the nature of programming that books about the subject must include examples. Typically, these examples are selected so that interested readers can easily experiment with them. That means readers must have access to the very same software development tools and hardware platforms used by the authors. Unfortunately, it does not make sense to run any of the example programs on the platforms available to most readers—PCs, Macs, and Unix workstations.

Even selecting a standard embedded platform is difficult. As you have already learned, there is no such thing as a “typical” embedded system. Whatever hardware is selected, the majority of readers will not have access to it. But despite this rather significant problem, we do feel it is important to select a reference hardware platform for use in the examples. In so doing, we hope to make the examples consistent and, thus, the entire discussion more clear—whether you have the chosen hardware in front of you or not.

In choosing an example platform, our first criterion was that the platform had to have a mix of peripherals to support numerous examples in the book. In addition, we sought a platform that would allow readers to carry on their study of embedded software development by expanding on our examples with more advanced projects. Another criterion was to find a development board that supported the GNU software development tools; with their open source licensing and coverage on a wide variety of embedded ...