In the previous articles, we covered Devicetree in great detail: We’ve seen how we can create our own nodes, we’ve seen the supported property types, we know what bindings are, and we’ve seen how to access the Devicetree using Zephyr’s devicetree.h API. In this fifth article of the Practical Zephyr series, we’ll look at how Devicetree is used in practice by dissecting the Blinky application.

In the previous article of this series, we briefly touched on how.bsd files written in Boundary Scan Description Language (BSDL) describe the structure of the boundary scan chain and the instruction set. In this article, we will examine this language’s syntax more closely before seeing how.bsd files are leveraged in JTAG testing in the next article.

In the third installment of this JTAG deep dive series, we will talk in-depth about JTAG Boundary-Scan, a method used to test interconnects on PCBs and internal IC sub-blocks. It is defined in the IEEE 1149.1 standard. I recommend reading Part 1 & Part 2 of the series to get a good background on debugging with JTAG before jumping into this one!

Have you ever wondered if ELF is portable between 32-bit and 64-bit targets? Probably not, but this might be a common scenario for you if you work on 32-bit embedded devices but use a 64-bit host. Or maybe you’ve developed tooling for 32-bit MCUs and are transitioning to working on 64-bit targets. The ELF object file format is one of the most commonly used today. Most build systems provide an output to this format, and ELF is commonly used to output coredumps.