The cool thing about studying in Kiruna, Sweden's northernmost city, is that you may get to blast stuff into space on a rocket. The city is home to Esrange, a vast commercial and research rocket range, and the local technical university takes advantage of that with a menu of suitable courses, with names like "Spacecraft [...]
Quite a few embedded software developers don’t know whether their applications meet their timing requirements. In today's Tracealyzer Hands On post, we will explore how to use Tracealyzer to verify task timing and scheduling.
Percepio will not attend this year's Arm TechCon but it will still be quite the experience: three days packed with seminars and classes on topics like embedded software, chip design, security, and much more. The conference will be at the San Jose Convention Center, right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
India, Norway, France … there has been a flurry of interest around Percepio’s free academic Tracealyzer licenses lately. End of summer and beginning of the fall semester probably plays a role here, as does our announcement a few weeks ago. One of the free licenses was awarded to Anil Joseph, student at the Birla Institute [...]
WNIE Live, or What's New In Electronics – Live, takes place in Birmingham, UK, on the 25 & 26 September. Percepio is present at the exhibition through our UK distributor Phaedrus Systems; you are welcome to drop by their booth if you are in the area. Phaedrus' Chris Hills will also give a talk on [...]
To run Tracealyzer 4 on Linux, the first thing you'll need is Tracealyzer version 4.2 or later. Next, you need to install Mono. For most distributions there's a package called "mono-complete", though some distributions and package systems may instead use simply "mono". There may be additional requirements, in particular for Debian/Ubuntu- and Fedora-based systems. See [...]
Tracealyzer version 4.2 features a completely rewritten main trace view, and adds support for, among other things, Wittenstein SafeRTOS and tracing via ST-LINK debug probes. It also runs on Linux, so embedded developers using Linux hosts are now able to upgrade to the new generation of Tracealyzer.
Secure bootloaders require specialized knowledge in disparate disciplines such as driver software, middleware, cryptography, security and cloud computing just to name a few subjects. On September 26, embedded consultant and evangelistJacob Beningo will host a free webinar where attendees will explore the major components and processes necessary to implement a secure bootloader. You can choose [...]
Percepio has its roots in academia, Mälardalens Högskola in Västerås, Sweden, to be precise, and we have long supported both technical universities and their students with heavily discounted Tracealyzer licenses. Today we are taking this to the next level with the launch of a completely free site license for qualifying schools. "The embedded community has [...]
This free one-day event consists of three parallel tracks in which Synopsys experts, ecosystem partners and the ARC user community will deliver technical presentations on a range of topics, including, artificial intelligence (AI), automotive safety, internet of things (IoT), embedded vision and much, much more. Percepio CEO Johan Kraft opens the Mobile/Storage track with his [...]
When Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched their IoT platform Amazon FreeRTOS last November, Percepio was one of four launch partners presented on stage. This week AWS published an article about AWS IoT development using Amazon FreeRTOS, Percepio Tracealyzer and the NXP OM40007 IoT kit, written by Percepio CEO and founder Johan Kraft. "Tracing Amazon FreeRTOS [...]
Percepio will not attend the Microchip MASTERs conference(s) this year (although we did last year) but Tracealyzer will still feature in some Microchip classes, we're told. And if that's not reason enough to go, there are lots of other reasons – the European conference alone features over 80 classes on topics ranging from firmware design [...]
When debugging or profiling your firmware, it is often important to trace Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs) such as timer interrupts or interrupts from communication interfaces. However, using a classic ”printf” call is typically not an option since it may increase the execution time of the ISR by orders of magnitude. The integrated ”exception trace” support [...]
Tomorrow Friday is a special day here at Percepio HQ – we're moving offices. We are not moving very far, the new office is a ten-minute walk from our current one, but it is absolutely a step up for the company. We'll have our own offices with plenty of space to grow (and we are [...]
Percepio's Senior Drone Builder and Support Engineer Niclas Lindblom with his Embedded World drone. We knew we had to have something special. We knew we were going to show Tracealyzer 4 at Embedded World 2018, and we wanted the world to take notice – it was after all the largest improvement in at [...]
Percepio has released Tracealyzer version 4.1 with support for Micrium µC/OS-III. We have also added support for RTOS tracing via Arm's ITM interface (Instrumentation Trace Macrocell), that allows very fast streaming of software trace data with low overhead. “Tracealyzer 4 is such a massive improvement over previous versions and as we have been working closely [...]
You may have heard about the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR, which is the new regulatory framework for managing personal data of European Union citizens; it comes into force on 25 May, 2018. Since Percepio is based in Sweden, which is a member of the European Union, and have a lot of [...]
When you open a trace in Tracealyzer, it usually opens to the vertical timeline. This view, which shows all activity in the system, is in many ways the core of Tracealyzer and most of the other views link back to the timeline, but with its massive amount of information it is not always the best [...]
Percepio's European training partner MicroConsult in Munich, Germany, offers an extensive 4-day course in RTOS architecture and programming. The course, aptly named "RTOS Mechanisms and their Application in Runtime Architectures for Embedded and Real-time Systems", covers a broad range of topics. General Introduction: Real-time Operating System Process/Thread/Task Management Interrupt Management Time Management Coordination Mechanisms: Synchronization [...]
This spring has seen the release of Tracealyzer 4, Percepio's most significant update to Tracealyzer so far, but that is not all. We have also simplified our licensing options and introduced some new ones, including an all-inclusive subscription license that allows you to use Tracealyzer with all of our supported operating systems. No matter what [...]
"Top Ten" is a well-tested catch phrase that can be attached to restaurants in London, high buildings over the world and, well, just about anything. And rest assured there's also a list of the Top Ten Bugs in Firmware. Written by industry veteran Michael Barr, former editor-in-chief of Embedded Systems Programming magazine and author of [...]
We have talked about it for six months, and worked on it for much longer than that, but today it is finally here - Tracealyzer 4! Starting today, you can download the new version of Percepio's powerful visualization tool and try it out for yourself. If you use Tracealyzer today, the first thing you will [...]
Västerås, Sweden, 20th February 2018 * * * Percepio announces a major update of Tracealyzer, its industry-leading tool for visual software tracing of RTOS-based embedded systems and IoT devices. Tracealyzer version 4 has been redesigned from the bottom up, from the data processing backend which is now up to 4x faster, to a [...]
In collaboration with Cypress Semiconductors, Percepio Tracealyzer® now supports Cypress PSoC® MCUs, including the hardware profiler unit in the new PSoC® 6 family. Percepio Application Note PA-019 describes in detail how to get started with Tracealyzer on Cypress PSoC® MCUs and Cypress PSoC Creator. The example is for PSoC 6, Cypress' most recent MCU family, but except for [...]
Embedded evangelist Jacob Beningo will present a free webinar on designing and debugging IoT applications. The webinar features topics like advanced RTOS application design techniques, event chaining and setting up an embedded connection to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jacob will also use Percepio Tracealyzer to show how to trace an IoT application to not just understand how [...]
Percepio's French distributor NeoMore will host two free webinars in February about RTOS tracing with Percepio Tracealyzer. Tuesday, 6 February 10.00 – Tracealyzer for Keil RTX5 (register) Thursday, 8 February 10.00 – Tracealyzer for FreeRTOS (register) Both webinars will be presented in the French language.
It's that time of year again – late December in Sweden means snow (mostly) and darkness (always), but it also means that the Christmas holiday is coming. Most of our staff will go on a well-deserved vacation break next week, so expect that it may take a little longer than usual for us to respond to [...]
A completely revamped user interface and a much improved live view are two of the most prominent features of the upcoming Tracealyzer 4, which we showed for the first time at Arm TechCon in October. We put together a series of short introduction videos where Tracealyzer 4 shows off its abilities. First out is the [...]
November was a good month for Percepio and Tracealyzer. We saw record sales, a lot of interest in the Tracealyzer 4 preview videos and everything culminated on the 29th with the release of Tracealyzer v3.3 supporting Amazon FreeRTOS, just released by Amazon Web Services along with several new IoT offerings. We believe Amazon Web Services has taken [...]
Amazon Web Services launched their own RTOS yesterday, as part of a major improvement of its IoT offerings. We're happy to announce that Tracealyzer version 3.3, which we released yesterday, fully supports Amazon FreeRTOS, the new IoT microcontroller operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS and Percepio have collaborated to provide Tracealyzer support for [...]
This is our third preview video of Tracealyzer 4, due out early next year, and this time we focus on two entirely new features: State Graphs and Intervals. Both features allow you to customize the visualization and analysis for your own system and the issue at hand. State Graphs can be created automatically from your trace, [...]
Welcome to a second glimpse of Tracealyzer 4, showing how network activity can be visualized together with the RTOS events. This way, developers of connected IoT systems can get a wider perspective of their system's real-time behavior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1O4AE4TEbE In this brief example we display events from a TCP/IP stack, but the same technique can be used [...]
A completely revamped user interface and a much improved live view are two of the most prominent features of the upcoming Tracealyzer 4, which we showed for the first time at Arm TechCon last week. If you weren't there, you can still get a feel for the new product through a short video we have put together. [...]
Deadlock is a well-known phenomenon even outside the embedded world. For a general description of deadlock, see this article; it is far better than anything I could ever hope to write. But I digress – back to deadlocks in RTOS-related programming. A clear indication that you may have a deadlock problem is when multiple tasks [...]
Percepio's stand at ArmTechCon. ArmTechCon 2017 is over and we have packed up and left. We spent two days talking to users and meeting partners, and we showed the upcoming Tracealyzer version 4 for the first time. We will have more to say about both Tracealyzer 4 and ArmTechCon in the coming weeks, but there's one little [...]
Priority inversion at work – the high-priority (red) task is blocked by lower priority tasks. The central idea underlying an RTOS with a fixed-priority scheduler is that a high-priority task should be scheduled ahead of one with lower priority. If necessary, the RTOS can even pre-empt the running task, forcing it to yield the CPU to [...]
Our Korean distributor Dioiz is running a hands-on seminar on embedded development with, among other tools, Tracealyzer this week. It is sold out by now, but there will be a second event on November 22 and Dioiz has let us know that applications are welcome. More info here – note though that both the invitation and the [...]
When you have a task in your system that is supposed to execute at regular intervals, say for instance that it needs to read a sensor value every 5 milliseconds, then you have a system that is sensitive to random delays – also known as “jitter”. When your task experiences jitter, it sometimes has to [...]
Industry veteran Cliff Wood today joins Percepio as Sales Manager for USA and South America. – Cliff has been working with Percepio informally for some time and many of our U.S. customers may have met him, but today we are happy to welcome him as Percepio’s first regional Sales Manager, says Percepio CEO Johan Kraft. Cliff [...]
The ”theme” of this year’s Arm TechCon conference is of course … Arm. Over 4000 embedded systems specialists are expected to descend upon Santa Clara, California, in two weeks to discuss all things Arm, from silicon design and software development to computer vision and the Internet of Things. Among these enthusiasts is of course a [...]
In embedded systems using multitasking, you may run into a situation where some of your tasks run slowly or not at all. This is called task starvation (the affected tasks are starved of CPU time) and it can happen for a number of reasons; today we will look at one particular reason – a fixed [...]
Tracealyzer v3.2 adds powerful filtering functions to reduce the amount of data that must be sent to the monitoring host computer. This makes Tracealyzer applicable to a wider range of development setups. Today we are happy to present version 3.2 of Tracealyzer for FreeRTOS. The new version is available for download from percepio.com/download/ immediately. [...]
There is no doubt a learning curve when you begin using a real-time operating system (RTOS) in your development. You will work at a higher abstraction level, using more or less parallel tasks rather than just subroutines, and you will need to consider how your tasks shall share data and the processor time with each [...]
Photo: Sara Arnald, CC-BY Have you ever wanted to debug your hobby MCU project with a tracing tool, but felt that you couldn't afford a pro tool like Percepio Tracealyzer? Well, now you can! From now till the end of this year, you can purchase a non-commercial Tracealyzer Makers Edition license at the heavily discounted price [...]
A research group at Mälardalen University here in Västerås, Sweden, is investigating how RTOS trace tools like Percepio Tracealyzer can be extended for testing purposes and automatically detect bugs related to concurrency and timing. To validate their research, they need real-world bug examples. We at Percepio want to help them obtain RTOS traces, recorded with Tracealyzer, [...]
Embedded Conference Scandinavia 2017 will be in Stockholm, Sweden on 7–8 November. Please see our blog post for further details.
Sensors Midwest takes place in Rosemont outside Chicago on October 3–4. See our blog post for details.
Embedded Conference Scandinavia, ECS, takes place on 7–8 November, 2017 at Kistamässan in Stockholm, Sweden. Last year’s conference attracted just under 2,000 delegates so ECS now claims to be the largest embedded conference in Europe. The conference program is still in flux but the organizers have announced the first keynote speaker: Maarten Struys, Account [...]
Synopsys ARC Processor Summit is a free one-day event where you can pick from any of 25+ technical seminars on embedded development and electronic design. This year’s Summit takes place on September 26 and Percepio will be there discussing how to catch bugs in RTOS-based programming. Once again we are represented on the stage by [...]
Percepio’s Field Application Engineer Niclas Lindblom will talk about using Percepio Tracealyzer to debug common timing issues in RTOS applications at the Microchip MASTERs tech conference in the U.S. in August. Niclas shares a four-hour class with Darren Wenn, Global Group Leader for embedded development at Microchip, and they will focus on the combination of [...]
Percepio’s Field Application Engineer Niclas Lindblom will talk about using Percepio Tracealyzer to debug common timing issues in RTOS applications at the Microchip MASTERs tech conference in Berlin in September. Niclas shares a four-hour class with Darren Wenn, Global Group Leader for embedded development at Microchip, and they will focus on the combination of Tracealyzer [...]
Summer is finally approaching here in Sweden. Last Friday we celebrated Midsummer, and the coming weeks will be a bit slower than usual as most Swedes check out from work and enjoy their summer vacation. But only a bit slower, mind you: the lights will stay on at Percepio HQ as we work on new [...]
You may have heard about "Running Snail", a team of German university students building an electric race car as a school project – we blogged about them last year. Now they're at it again, they will build a new car for the 2017/18 competitive season, and of course Percepio will continue to sponsor the team with licenses [...]