cgnd.dev

Ditch the Segger RTT Viewer app!

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Note

This post is part of a new series of short-form posts titled Today I learned. These posts are intended to be short and more informal—my goal is for you to learn one thing quickly.

Segger’s Real Time Transfer (RTT) feels like magic 🪄, but their RTT viewer application feels like you’re stuck back in the 1980’s 📟.

For example: fonts are not configurable, there’s a clunky line-based input, and it only works with Latin1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1) encoded strings. If your device is sending UTF-8 characters to the RTT console, you get garbled output for multi-byte characters.

Teardown 2025 Talk: Are we PLM yet?

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered how product teams manage BOMs, revisions, releases, and specifications over the lifecycle of a hardware product?

In this talk, you’ll learn the basics of using Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software with KiCad. I’ll walk through how to automatically generate a KiCad database library from part data stored in Aligni, a cloud-based PLM software offering a free tier for open-source hardware organizations.

KiCon 2025 Talk: Are we PLM yet?

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Note

I gave an updated version of this talk at Teardown 2025. Make sure to check out the updated slides at Teardown 2025 Talk: Are we PLM yet?

Have you ever wondered how product teams manage BOMs, revisions, releases, and specifications over the lifecycle of a hardware product?

How to run Intel Quartus® Prime Lite Edition via Parallels on a Mac with Apple Silicon (ARM64)

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Learn how to run Intel Quartus® Prime Lite Edition via Parallels on a Mac with Apple Silicon (ARM64).

Yesterday’s post How to run Intel Quartus® Prime Lite Edition via Remote Desktop covered how to set-up and run the Quartus tools from a separate Windows machine via Remote Desktop.

This follow-up post covers how to install the exact same tools in a Windows VM running in Parallels on a Mac with Apple Silicon (ARM64). This is a nice alternative if you don’t have an extra Windows machine available, or if you want to be able to edit Windows files directly from your Mac via Parallels file sharing.

How to run Intel Quartus® Prime Lite Edition via Remote Desktop

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Info

Make sure to check out the follow up article How to run Intel Quartus® Prime Lite Edition via Parallels on a Mac with Apple Silicon (ARM64)

Learn how to run Intel Quartus® Prime Lite Edition via Remote Desktop.

I recently obtained a Terasic DE0-CV FPGA dev board and needed to install/configure licensing for the accompanying Intel® Quartus® Prime Lite Edition FPGA design software.

The Quartus Prime software requires an x86-64 machine running either Windows or Linux, but my laptop is an ARM-based Macbook Pro running macOS which is not supported.

USB-over-IP in Docker Containers

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned Docker recently introduced USB/IP protocol support in Docker Desktop version 4.35.0. Since Docker containers do not support native USB passthrough, this feature makes it possible for Docker containers to remotely access USB devices attached to a machine running Docker Desktop. This is exciting because it opens the door to using Docker containers for embedded development workflows that need to access real hardware via USB.

There is a great introductory article on the Golioth blog by founder and CEO Jonathan Beri, where he describes how he worked with the Docker team to integrate USB/IP support into Docker Desktop. The article walks through setting up a USB/IP server and how to connect to USB devices from a Docker container running in Docker Desktop.

Array initialization with ranges in C

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note

This post is part of a new series of short-form posts titled Today I learned. These posts are intended to be short and more informal—my goal is for you to learn one thing quickly.

Today I learned there is a GNU C extension for designated initializers that makes it possible to initialize a range of elements in an array.

If you happen to be using GCC (or another compatible compiler that supports this GNU extension, like Clang), you can specify a range ([first ... last]) in the designated initializer list.

2024 mid-year retrospective

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re half-way through 2024 and summer is affording me some additional time to pause and reflect on my first year of consulting.

I figured it might be interesting to do a short post on how this business came into existance and what I’ve been up to over the last year.

Starting Common Ground Electronics Link to heading

I started Common Ground Electronics back in November of 2022 as a part-time project.

Prototyping a WiFi serial logger with Golioth

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I’ll show how I built a cloud-connected WiFi serial logger proof-of-concept in a couple hours (and for less than $10) by leveraging Zephyr and Golioth.

Requirements Link to heading

A couple days ago, one of the folks in the consulting forum on https://forum.contextualelectronics.com/ asked if anybody knew of an off-the-shelf device that could forward log messages from a generic target device to the cloud.

Enforce Zephyr code quality with pre-commit

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I’ll describe how embedded firmware developers can leverage pre-commit to automate and enforce code quality checks in their Zephyr RTOS embedded firmware projects.

Note

An earlier revision of this article recommended running clang-format as a pre-commit hook. While this is still possible, there are some downsides to running clang-format automatically via pre-commit (for example, clang-format formatting does not 100% align with the Zephyr project coding style and needs some manual fixing).

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Common Ground Electronics is a boutique embedded systems engineering services firm.

We specialize in early-stage prototyping and product development with an emphasis on design for manufacturability.

Chris Wilson Link to heading

Chris has over 10 years of experience building low-power embedded systems for the Internet of Things, and over 4 years of product management experience in PCB assembly manufacturing.

Prior to starting Common Ground Electronics, Chris worked as an electronics design engineer at Cisco Systems (via Arch Rock acquisition), and more recently as the first technical product manager at Tempo Automation.

Let's chat

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We’d love to talk with you! You can get in touch by emailing [email protected]" >[email protected]

Support Link to heading

If you need support for one of our products or services, please email [email protected]" >[email protected]

Security Disclosure Link to heading

We take security very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in one of our products or services, please email [email protected]" >[email protected] with as much information as possible about the potential flaw and how it might be exploited.

Portfolio

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Services

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