Tech

In the world of Industrial IoT (IIoT), reliability is everything. Sensors must read accurately, actuators must respond predictably, and communication must flow without surprises. On the embedded side, this means precise control of hardware resources, minimal overhead, and code that behaves deterministically. Enter Embedded Rust and RTIC—a pairing that gives engineers both safety and performance without compromise. Why Embedded Rust? Rust’s focus on memory safety, zero-cost abstractions, and strict compile-time checks makes it ideal for embedded systems. Unlike C, Rust prevents entire classes of bugs like null pointer dereferences or buffer overflows. When your MCU has just a few kilobytes of RAM, these protections are not optional—they’re essential. ...

1. Introduction I come from a networking background. For years, my world revolved around packets, routing tables, latency, and uptime. Over time, it became clear that the boundary between IT and OT (Operational Technology) was becoming less rigid as industrial systems moved onto standard IP networks. Networks were no longer just carrying business traffic — they were increasingly responsible for transporting sensor data, telemetry, and control signals from the physical world. That realization pushed me toward Industrial IoT (IIoT) and, inevitably, embedded systems. ...

I have just completed Andrew Ng’s Deep Learning Specialisation course by deeplearning.ai available through Coursera. This is my summary and opinion of the course offering. The specialisation consists of 5 courses and it is suggested that they be completed in 3 months by devoting 11 hours per week. It really depends on your previous knowledge, experience and how quickly you can grasp the concepts. When stuck with the assignments and concepts I found the forum to be very helpful. I found the assignments to reasonably difficult. The only thing I didn’t like is that by forcing you to complete the given code (complete missing blanks) you are a bit constrained. For example it would be nice to state the function signature and leave it to the student to implement it in their own way. The good thing is that one can always make such suggestions through the forums. The courses don’t have to be completed in any particular order but I found it more helpful to follow the suggested order. ...