C++-501: C++ for Embedded Developers - Mike Tarlton

Attendees perform hands on embedded programming, on target hardware, during course practicals. Approximately 50% of the course is given over to practical work.

A 5 day course covering C++ in general on the first three days and real–time issues on the last two. Fifty percent of the course is spent on practical work.

• To provide an understanding of the essentials of the C++ programming language.

• To give you practical experience of writing C++ for realtime & embedded systems.

• To give you the confidence to apply these new concepts to your next real–time project.

• The core C++ syntax and semantics

• How to access hardware in the language

• How to program interrupt handlers in C++

• About memory and performance issues associated with C++

• How real–time operating systems affect the use of the language

• A working knowledge of C

The course is designed for real–time engineers who are embarking on a project using C++ for the first time. It is also targeted at developers currently reluctant to move to C++ from C as they believe it poses too great an overhead. This course will clearly demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of C++ versus C.

The course makes use of target hardware during the realtime practical exercises. The board targeted is the Hitachi 7045F Evaluation Board (SH2micro–controller). An application board is programmed via the 7045F to give attendees a real sense of embedded application development.

After an early career in software development for the MOD, Mike worked in the Defence industry for many years gaining extensive experience in the development of real–time embedded systems.

In 2001 Mike became a freelance trainer for Feabhas, whilst initially still undertaking development assignments in the area of wireless network solutions. Most of Mikes recent development work has been in C++. In January 2007 Mike became a permanent member of the Feabhas lecturing team. Mikes speciality areas being C, C++ and Real–Time Operating Systems.

Course material, relevant textbook and lunch (the course and all material is in English).

– What is a real–time and embedded computer system

– The need for a rigorous development procedure

– Non object–oriented C++ enhancements to basic C

– Conveniences of C++ over and above C

– Key characteristics of OO development

– OO techniques and the real–time software development process

– Classes & class instances

– Methods

– Constructors & destructors

– Inlining member functions

– const member functions

– static class members and functions

– arrays of classes

– implementing object relationships

– Building class hierarchies

– Dynamic binding for class methods, virtual functions

– Polymorphism

– MI and interfaces

– Class defined conversions

– Overloading and function selection

– Friend functions

– Overloading operators

– Dynamic memory allocation revisited

– What are exceptions?

– Throwing an exception

– The try block

– Catching an exception

– Rethrowing exceptions

– Catch all handlers

– Exception specifications

– Introduce parameterised types and functions

– Function templates

– Class templates

– Introducing the Standard Template Library

– Structuring large scale software systems

– Separate implementation from interface header files

– Dealing with name conflicts

– Linking with other languages

– A summary of Embedded C++

– Embedded C++ features

– Low level facilities of C++ including:

– Accessing hardware

– Manipulating information at the bit level

– Synchronising I⁄O with CPU via

– Polling

– Interrupts

– Interrupt Service Routines in C++

– functional approach

– class approach

– Data types;

– Language features affecting portability;

– Non–standard C++ language features;

– Assembly language interfacing;

– Designing ROMable objects.

– Concurrency;

– Scheduling strategies;

– Sharing resources in multi–tasking systems;

– Synchronizing tasks;

– Transferring data between tasks.