Monday, January 13
12:30-1:20pm
JCL 390
Debugging Real-Time Systems (including Autonomous Race Cars)
Lunch will be catered by Domino’s pizza.
Happy new year! The Student Seminar this week will feature Casey Duckering (@cduck) who will talk about coding really fast and tiny race cars. It’s conference and interview season; please let me know if you would like to get more practice by giving a talk at the Student Seminar.
Debugging Real-Time Systems (including Autonomous Race Cars)
Typical methods for debugging do not work on real-time systems (robots for example). If you use a breakpoint, your robot will freeze and may fall over or crash. To run new code, you have to chase it down with a USB cable and reprogram it. I’ll talk about some of my experiences building robots and some methods I’ve found to make the software development process nicer. The main focus will be how function hot patching can be implemented in C++ to enable over-the-air firmware updates without rebooting. Outside of robotics, these techniques are applicable to IoT, video games, or any software with an infinite loop.
