Embedded software development in research environment: A practical guide for non-experts

Embedded microcomputer systems have grown tremendously in recent years and influence almost every aspect of our lives. They increase not only in popularity, but also in complexity. Rising computation power combined with low energy consumption enables new breed of applications and services. More often their development requires significant effort for technology research. The goal of this publication is to provide brief description of embedded software development process which fits specific requirements of research projects. Although, the software lifecycle contains larger number of steps this document describes only those related to requirements specification, architecture planning and development. The part related to testing and maintenance are not covered and will be subject of separate publication. All techniques described in this paper are based on use of popular, well documented, open source tools. Even though, presented solution was described to be use by small - even one person teams, it can be easily scaled to larger projects.