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The heart of every embedded design is not hardware, but software
(or "firmware" in an embedded system). For every hour spent designing
hardware, there are easily ten hours spent on writing and debugging
software. We have been developing embedded software since the 1970's,
and have accumulated a lot of tools and techniques to make the
software writing process go more quickly while producing more robust
code.
Some of the ways we speed code development are:
- Reusable code - MCDI has a massive code library that
addresses all of the sensors and actuators we have encountered. We
can quickly "cut and paste" old code into new products.
- Object-based code - Most of our code is in the C
language, which is quite portable to new architechtures. Even though
C is not an object-oriented language, ours is written in
object-based fashion, which greatly enhances its re-useability. This
makes creating working prototypes much easier than starting from
scratch.
- Custom tools - We have developed specialized tools to aid
in software development. For example, we have a dot-matrix character
generator tool used to build character sets for various size
displays, and automatically generates the C-source file that can be
linked in with the projects source code.
At MCDI, we pride ourselves on writing code that isn't
"quick-and-dirty", but "quick and solid".
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