Hi, I am Tobias and if you are as excited as I am about technology and engineering you are on the right page. Here I will write posts mainly about things I built, but I may also cover other topics that interest me.
Blog Posts
Embedded Tribal Knowledge – And What Really Bloats Your Binaries
I was working on an embedded project for the STM32F446RETX and wanted to test how bad exceptions and virtual function calls really are for embedded development. From everything I’d ever read, these features were supposed to be “bad”—especially in memory-constrained environments. So imagine my surprise when I compiled a simple test program and the resulting…
Photovoltaik Solar Optimizer
Did you know PV solar panels have a preferred load impedance for maximal power output? For example, if you connect a zero ohm resistance (short) you will have U=0V and thus P=U*I=0W. If you increase the resistance more and more power will be drawn until a maximum is reached and the the power drops when…
One Approximation to Rule them All
I recently had the task to optimize a ray tracing algorithm in hardware on an FPGA and remembered the “Fast Inverse Square Root” – that has been used to accelerate rendering for Quake 3. So I studied the math behind the FISR and found a gigantic world of very precise and fast approximations using logarithms.…
Tobias Wallner 