Software is free and can right any wrong
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A veteran embedded developer reflects on the temptation to treat software as 'free' in embedded projects, pushing hardware responsibilities into firmware to save per-unit costs. Using examples like bit-banging UARTs and software-defined Ethernet, the post illustrates how far this can go. A cautionary story from a TI9900-era hydraulic control project shows how unchecked feature delegation to software eventually overwhelmed the system's real-time budget, requiring a major design review. The post closes by noting that FPGAs add another dimension to the hardware-vs-software trade-off.
