In embedded systems there's often a wide gap between a system that "functions" and one that performs. A prototype might capture an image, but if that simple act paralyzes the device for 200 milliseconds, blocking network keep-alives, delaying sensor readings, freezing the interface, is it really
In embedded systems, we often celebrate the idea of doing more with less. Smaller MCUs, tighter power budgets, fewer components efficiency as a virtue. But once you start building real device fleets at the edge, that philosophy quickly meets its limits. At Hoomanely, our devices don’t just sample a
When your camera produces data faster than your bus can consume it, buffer sizing alone won't save you. The real problem is state ownership, and the bars cutting through our images proved it. The problem: when fast producers meet slow consumers In multi-stage embedded pipelines, timing mismatches are
The decision we didn't question When we started building our edge systems, the filesystem was the easiest decision we made. It was familiar, stable, and came with decades of engineering behind it. Logs went into files. State got persisted as small blobs. Recovery was something the OS already
Filesystems in embedded systems usually get treated as an implementation detail: picked late, configured with the defaults, and rarely touched again. In practice, a filesystem becomes a long-lived contract between firmware, storage media, update mechanisms, and whatever data pipeline sits on top of it. This post looks at embedded filesystems
Controller Area Network gets introduced as a "simple" fieldbus: ID, DLC, payload, done. In real systems, that simplicity hides a deeper reality. CAN messages become long-lived contracts between firmware, hardware, gateways, and cloud pipelines. This post reframes CAN not as a transport but as a shared language, where
Most performance problems we've run into in embedded systems didn't come from weak hardware or bad algorithms. They came from decisions that felt harmless at the time, extra logs during bring-up, convenient abstractions, background helpers added "just for safety." None of these broke the
Choosing a filesystem in embedded firmware looks simple until real devices start writing logs every few seconds, saving snapshots, updating configs, and recovering from unexpected resets. What starts as a neat API turns into a fight with corruption, wear, mount-time failures, memory stalls, directory explosions, and behavior that rarely shows
Linker scripts often get treated as arcane build artifacts, copied from a reference project, tweaked cautiously, and rarely revisited. That works until it doesn't. As modern MCUs introduce fragmented memory regions, tightly coupled RAM, external flash, and DMA-sensitive buffers, vague linker assumptions quietly turn into runtime failures. This
When DMA problems appear, they rarely announce themselves with a big red flag. More often it's vague instability: a frame that arrives corrupted once every few thousand cycles, a sensor payload that occasionally looks stale, a buffer that behaves differently at low throughput versus sustained load. In our