Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

By : Maya Posch
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

5 (1)
By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

C++ is a great choice for embedded development, most notably, because it does not add any bloat, extends maintainability, and offers many advantages over different programming languages. Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17 will show you how C++ can be used to build robust and concurrent systems that leverage the available hardware resources. Starting with a primer on embedded programming and the latest features of C++17, the book takes you through various facets of good programming. You’ll learn how to use the concurrency, memory management, and functional programming features of C++ to build embedded systems. You will understand how to integrate your systems with external peripherals and efficient ways of working with drivers. This book will also guide you in testing and optimizing code for better performance and implementing useful design patterns. As an additional benefit, you will see how to work with Qt, the popular GUI library used for building embedded systems. By the end of the book, you will have gained the confidence to use C++ for embedded programming.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Memory management


The storage and memory system of microcontrollers consists out of multiple components. There is a section of read-only-memory (ROM) that is only written to once when the chip is programmed, but which cannot normally be altered by the MCU itself, as we saw in the previous section.

The MCU may also have a bit of persistent storage, in the form of EEPROM or equivalent. Finally, there are CPU registers and the random-access memory (RAM). This results in the following exemplary memory layout:

The use of a modified Harvard architecture (split program and data memory at some architectural level, generally with the data buses) is common with MCUs. With the AVR architecture, for example, the program memory is found in the ROM, which for the ATmega2560 is connected using its own bus with the CPU core, as one can seen on the block diagram for this MCU, which we looked at previously in Chapter 1, What Are Embedded Systems?

A major advantage of having separate buses for these memory spaces...