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Exploring Uncut - April 28th, 2025
It’s been a while since the last “Exploring Uncut” post, so without further ado, here’s a recap of some of the fun and important things from the past few weeks. Home Assistant I’ve been interested in home automation for a very (very) long time, nearly 40 years. As a teenager, I had seen an article on how to control your home using some custom electronics on your Commodore 64. That piqued my curiosity and I started researching the available products and technologies.
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Swiftly and Swift 6.1 released
Introduction End of March was a busy time for Apple, with the release of swiftly 1.0 and a few days later Swift 6.1. Let’s explore what this means for toolchain selection, mostly when doing Embedded Swift development on macOS. Xcode toolchain Xcode 16.3 comes bundled with Swift 6.1. If you don’t install anything else, open a terminal and check the current version of swift swift -print-target-info { "compilerVersion": "Apple Swift version 6.
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Exploring Uncut - April 7th, 2025
Battery low As you might have noticed, there was no post last week. I had a couple of bullet points in my note but come Sunday evening, I had not started writing any draft. I was also contemplating writing a more in-depth article on a particular topic, as I did before, but I could not decide on which one and commit to it. I just needed to disconnect and relax and did not have the energy for it.
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Exploring Uncut - March 24th, 2025
Structs, classes and memory I continued my reflection on how value and reference semantic impacts the memory allocation in the generated code. Given there’s now an active Embedded Swift channel on The Swift Programming Language Discord, I asked the question there. Some comments led me to revisite the test examples I made earlier and update them. It started to make slightly more sense but not yet totally. But then AliMark71 posted a link to the Explore Swift performance video by John McCall from WWDC 2024.
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Exploring Uncut - March 17th, 2025
Embedded Swift Community Hour Last Friday, Rauhul organized an Embedded Swift Community Hour call on Discord, where members of the community interested in Embedded Swift gathered, presented their projects and talked about the future of this topic. It was super interesting to virtually meet such a nice group of people, motivated to explore, share their findings and push the boundaries of Embedded Swift forward. I discovered super nice projects such as thelittlegame by Morten.
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Exploring Uncut - March 10th, 2025
A bit of a social life Not much happened this week in terms of exploration. Being an introvert, I try to space out social events so I have time to recharge in between. This week was a bit of a failure on that front, with one concert, two family dinners, lunch with a friend, and a GeekClub meeting. You might be wondering—what exactly is GeekClub? I’ve been a CoderDojo coach for several years now.
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Exploring Uncut - March 3rd, 2025
Introduction I would like to publish more often on this blog. I really do. In fact, I have a long list of topics to write about. I even have several draft posts that I should just finalize and publish. One main issue is that, as I reread a post to put the finishing touches on it, I ask myself more questions. Is it totally exact ? Does it need more background information ?
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Addressing previous oversights
Introduction Back in November 2024, as I closed my Blink them to death using Embedded Swift presentation at Pragma Conf, I promised to release the source code of the 3 projects I presented before the end of the year. I thought this would be an easy goal to achieve and that I’d finish way sooner. Of course the projects had been prototypes so far, so I wanted to cleanup the code and recheck everything was working as expected.
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Rolling back a brew formula
Introduction I find Homebrew super convenient to install and keep up to date the large collection of tools I rely on. But sometimes, things do not work out the way you plan. Warning At the time of this writing, a malware site masquerading as the Homebrew site is being spread through Google Ads, see this post on X by Ryan Chenkie for more details. Some weeks ago, I was cleaning up the code for an Embedded Swift project before publishing it on GitHub, and as a last check, I wanted to verify everything still worked fine with the latest versions of the various components: latest Swift snapshot toolchain, nRF Connect SDK 2.
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Timers in Swift on nRF52
Introduction In this post, we’ll continue exploring Embedded Swift on an nRF 52840 dk, using the nRF Connect SDK. Our goal this time is to execute code after a certain delay, with optional periodic repetition. In Swift, one would typically use a Timer class to implement such a feature. Can we use that with Embedded Swift? Foundation Embedded Swift is really about the Swift language, and the language only includes the Swift runtime and the standard library, both having some limitations in Embedded Swift.
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