TIL on cge.dev

Ditch the Segger RTT Viewer app!

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Note

This post is part of a new series of short-form posts titled Today I learned. These posts are intended to be short and more informal—my goal is for you to learn one thing quickly.

Segger’s Real Time Transfer (RTT) feels like magic 🪄, but their RTT viewer application feels like you’re stuck back in the 1980’s 📟.

For example: fonts are not configurable, there’s a clunky line-based input, and it only works with Latin1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1) encoded strings. If your device is sending UTF-8 characters to the RTT console, you get garbled output for multi-byte characters.

USB-over-IP in Docker Containers

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned Docker recently introduced USB/IP protocol support in Docker Desktop version 4.35.0. Since Docker containers do not support native USB passthrough, this feature makes it possible for Docker containers to remotely access USB devices attached to a machine running Docker Desktop. This is exciting because it opens the door to using Docker containers for embedded development workflows that need to access real hardware via USB.

There is a great introductory article on the Golioth blog by founder and CEO Jonathan Beri, where he describes how he worked with the Docker team to integrate USB/IP support into Docker Desktop. The article walks through setting up a USB/IP server and how to connect to USB devices from a Docker container running in Docker Desktop.

Array initialization with ranges in C

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note

This post is part of a new series of short-form posts titled Today I learned. These posts are intended to be short and more informal—my goal is for you to learn one thing quickly.

Today I learned there is a GNU C extension for designated initializers that makes it possible to initialize a range of elements in an array.

If you happen to be using GCC (or another compatible compiler that supports this GNU extension, like Clang), you can specify a range ([first ... last]) in the designated initializer list.