Back to Brazil: LISHA and other tidbits#
Exchange period is finally over. Truth be told, it has been over for almost two months! But it feels like only now I have got my bearings back again. It is not easy leaving Finland, what an awesome country! Just as I was doing before leaving more than a year ago, I am back at work at LISHA, the Hardware and Software Integration Laboratory at Santa Catarina Federal University (UFSC), whilst working on graduating as a Mechatronics engineer. Under the supervision of Dr. Prof. Giovani Gracioli, my current filed of research are resource synchronization protocols for mutiprocessor real-time operating systems (RTOSs), or more specifically, EPOS.
Working at such high level research is very challenging work. Reading and reviewing articles that represent the top contributions in the field of RTOSs is mandatory for background research, and my current focus. Soon we shall be moving to algorithm modelling.
On a lighter note, I am also doing regular courses from the programme and my favorite so far has been Microcontrollers. We are exploring, one by one, every peripheral and interface of the Tiva C Series TM4C123GH6PM Microcontroller (using the LaunchPad development platform). It struck me how much functionality was crammed into that IC. The CCS development environment could deliver a better experience, especially on Linux, but thankfully one only needs a standard cross compiler gcc toolchain (arm-eabi-none) to develop for the board. TivaWare including all the necessary makefiles also helps a lot.
I plan to blog about the course’s final project and any other stuff that ends up being done with the board. Also if there is any progress on dw Engine I shall post about it. A friend and me are in the process of sketching up an original level and ship a demo. Let’s see what happens!