Collaborate Disseminate
Thanks to the virus crisis, lots of people are designing makeshift ventilator designs in the hopes of saving people’s lives. Many of these are based around some sort of Arduino-powered CPU. [Armstrong Subero] things that’s a great idea, but cautions that making an electronic pair of dice is a different …read more
Continue reading Making an Arduino Ventilator? Read This First
One of the goals of programming languages back in the 1950s was to create a way to write assembly language concepts in an abstract, high-level manner. This would allow the same code to be used across the wildly different system architectures of that era and subsequent decades, requiring only a …read more
Continue reading Write Once, Run Everywhere: Cross-Platform Programming Done Right
When, in late July, Armis researchers revealed the existence of the so-called Urgent11 vulnerabilities in Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system, they noted that RTOS offerings by other vendors may also be vulnerable. As it turns out, th… Continue reading Urgent11 flaws affect more medical, industrial devices than previously thought
There are 11 security flaws affecting VxWorks: “the most widely used operating system you may never have heard about”. Continue reading ‘Urgent/11’ flaws affect 200 million devices – from routers to elevators
Microsoft has never been shy about being acquisitive, and today it announced it’s buying Express Logic, a San Diego company that has developed a real-time operating system (RTOS) aimed at controlling the growing number of IoT devices in the world. The companies did not share the purchase price. Express Logic is not some wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky […] Continue reading Microsoft delves deeper into IoT with Express Logic acquisition
The king of machine tools is the lathe, and if the king has a heart, it’s probably the leadscrew. That’s the bit that allows threading operations, arguably the most important job a lathe can tackle. It’s a simple concept, really – the leadscrew is mechanically linked through gears to the …read more
Continue reading Benchtop Lathe Gets An Electronic Leadscrew Makeover
If you’re building a CNC or laser, there’s an excellent chance you’ll be using Grbl to get moving. It’s also a pretty safe bet you’d end up running it on some variation of the Arduino sitting in a motor controller breakout board. It’s cheap, easy to setup and use, and effectively the “industry” standard for DIY machines so there’s no shortage of information out there. What’s not to love?
Well, quite a few things in fact. As [bdring] explains, Grbl pushes the capability of the Arduino to the very limit; making it something of a dead-end for future development. Plus …read more
Frustrated by the glut of unsecured IoT devices? So are Microsoft. And they’re using custom Linux and hardware to do something about it.
Microsoft have announced a new ecosystem for secure IoT devices called “Azure Sphere.” This system is threefold: Hardware, Software, and Cloud. The hardware component is a Microsoft-certified microcontroller which contains Microsoft Pluton, a hardware security subsystem. The first Microsoft-certified Azure Sphere chip will be the MediaTek MT3620, launching this year. The software layer is a custom Linux-based Operating System (OS) that is more capable than the average Real-Time OS (RTOS) common to low-powered IoT devices. Yes, that’s …read more
Continue reading Microsoft Secures IoT from the Microcontroller Up
Zephyr is an open source real-time operating system (RTOS) that appeared on the scene a few years ago with support for a few boards. The new 1.11 release adds a lot of features, a lot of new boards, and also has a Windows development environment. But don’t worry, the environment is portable so it still runs on Linux and Mac, as well.
The OS has support for many ARM and x86 boards. It also supports ESP32, NIOS II, and can also target Linux which is useful for debugging or studying execution using desktop tools.
It’s not short of features, being …read more
Continue reading Zephyr Adds Features, Platforms, And Windows
The NXP Semiconductors MQX RTOS prior to version 5.1 contains a buffer overflow in the DHCP client,which may lead to memory corruption allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code,as well as an out of bounds read in the DNS client which may lead to a denial of service. Continue reading VU#590639: NXP Semiconductors MQX RTOS contains multiple vulnerabilities