Embedded experts talk!

After being dormant some time, we will re-start the Embedded Systems Belgium community! The goal is to organize conferences, training, and presentations of personal projects related to embedded systems. You will also have the opportunity to enjoy a relaxing moment around a drink/pizza with others embedded enthusiasts.
Let's exchange thoughts, ideas, knowledge and projects about our passion!

The agenda will be the following one:

1. Free pizza & beer

2. Short introduction by the new organization team

3. First speaker:
   Bart Verhagen on C++ in embedded applications:
   In the 21st century, C is still THE system programming language for embedded devices. C++ on the other hand, despite being a superset of C, never reached such levels of popularity. Steadily, it is getting more traction in the embedded community. In order to assess whether C++ is a valid alternative for C for your application, a few questions need to be addressed:

• will it save development time?
• will it reduce maintenance cost?
• will it improve run time performance?
• will it reduce safety and security risks?
  In order to answer these questions, the talk builds a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of C++ for embedded applications: we will zoom in on the usefulness of the added feature set, performance, memory usage, size footprint, its 'cost-less abstraction' paradigm etc.

Bart is an expert in embedded vision and C++ for embedded systems. Previously he gave talks on IEEE Winter Conference and IE-net engineering organisation. Currently he works as a freelancer for Kapernikov, a company focused on bringing industry 4.0 to life.

4. Break: drinks & networking

5. Second speaker:
   Daniele Lacamera on Secure firmware updates for the Internet of Things
   Connected embedded systems must rely on frequent firmware updates, as recommended by security specialists, in order to promptly fix the vulnerabilities discovered. On the other hand, remote firmware updates may introduce additional security issues if not properly designed and implemented.
   WolfSSL presents a reliable secure firmware update architecture based on wolfBoot, an open source secure bootloader for 32-bit microcontrollers, that easily integrates in existing embedded systems to provide secure boot, fail-safe updates and firmware authentication.

Daniele is a free/open source technologist and embedded guru currently based in Amsterdam. Last year published "Embedded Systems Architecture" on Packt, a book which consolidates the knowledge he gained working on various embedded projects. Furthermore he started many successful open source projects, such as picoTCP, frosted OS and wolfBoot.

Doors open at 7:00pm, and we will start the first presentation at 7:30pm.

Ideas? Suggestions? We are listening!

Sponsored by Nalys. (http://www.nalys-group.com/)