Anna-Lena Marx

Anna-Lena Marx

Anna-Lena Marx has been working as an Embedded Systems Developer at inovex since 2015 and holds a Master’s degree in Embedded Systems. As a hobby, she also studies Electrical Engineering. Professionally, Anna-Lena focuses on the development of Embedded Systems based on Yocto or the AOSP, kernel drivers, IoT, and organizing the Embedded Systems department. She is also involved in Girl’s Day to get young girls interested in technical careers.

Yocto on the Edge - Unusual challenges when building not so embedded systems

Yocto on the Edge - Unusual challenges when building not so embedded systems

Building embedded systems with Yocto on ARM platforms is a common practice, but when the products move further to the edge and become less “embedded,” new challenges arise. In this session, we will explore the requirements and challenges faced when developing Yocto-based systems for edge computing based on Intel.

Read Post
Advanced System Profiling, Tracing and Trace Analysis with Perfetto in Android and Yocto

Advanced System Profiling, Tracing and Trace Analysis with Perfetto in Android and Yocto

Together with my colleague Stefan Lengfeld.

Tracing is a capable mechanism for deep system analysis and profiling with a minimal overhead. By recording defined system events, in Linux but also Android, tracing can be used to analyze concurrency or latency issues, for example. Android’s systrace tool made it easy to analyze and correlate traces and events due to a graphical UI, in order to help developers identify performance bottlenecks. The successor to this advanced and convenient tool is called Perfetto. It’s available for pure Linux too, and part of Yocto (meta-oe) since Langdale now. In the talk, we’ll have a look into

Read Post
Embedded World 2024

Embedded World 2024

While I’m a regular visitor of the Embedded World Exhibition, this year was different. I had not only a more business-focused visit with lots of meetings with old and new partners and customers, but I also had the chance to serve rather spontaneously as a speaker, or better “Table Captain,” at the second edition of Embedded World’s women networking event #women4ew. Thus, I want to recap both parts separately and make a reference to what changed in contrast to my experiences outlined in the recently published post on International Women’s Day.

Read Post
Android Automotive OS: A short introduction into Google's AAOS

Android Automotive OS: A short introduction into Google's AAOS

Android, or the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), is primarily known from the smartphone market. What is less well known, however, is that the AOSP also provides a good basis for embedded systems and ensures a pleasant reading experience on eReaders, for example.

Read Post
International Women's Day - Why I wear Yocto Shirts on the Embedded World Exhibition

International Women's Day - Why I wear Yocto Shirts on the Embedded World Exhibition

Today, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, I’d like to give you an insight on working in Embedded as a woman: Why I’m searching for my best Yocto shirt and the nerdiest hoodie when I’m visiting the Embedded World exhibition.

Read Post
USB Updates - Challenges, Approaches and Practical Tips

USB Updates - Challenges, Approaches and Practical Tips

Over-the-air updates have established themselves as the standard for networked devices, but the effort involved in operating the server side is not always commensurate with the benefits. In such cases, the supposedly simple and quick solution of implementing updates via USB is often chosen. But is it really always that uncomplicated? What considerations are necessary to implement USB updates effectively?

Read Post
LoRaWAN in theory and practice: A trip through Munich

LoRaWAN in theory and practice: A trip through Munich

LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is becoming increasingly popular, thanks in part to public networks such as The Things Network, which allow users to dispense with their own gateways. LoRaWAN also promises potential in terms of range and energy efficiency. But how does the standard perform in practice?

Read Post
Building a Yocto Pipeline with KAS, GitHub Actions and AWS

Building a Yocto Pipeline with KAS, GitHub Actions and AWS

Using KAS makes handling Yocto Projects easy. By shipping its own container with all needed dependencies, building sophisticated CI pipelines becomes pretty easy - in theory, or when using Gitlab. But using GitHub as a code hosting platform with self-managed Action runners on AWS comes with a set of unexpected challenges.
Anna-Lena will talk about her quest through GitHub Actions, the Cloud and how to tame them. The talk aims to point the audience to the obstacles when building CI pipelines for the Yocto Project with KAS, GitHub Actions, and custom action runners on AWS and strategies to handle them.

Read Post
Organizing My Desk as an Embedded Engineer

Organizing My Desk as an Embedded Engineer

As an embedded dev, my desk is always a mess (and I think the ones of my colleagues, too). Working with real hardware leads straight to a number of boards, additional debuggers, tools, cables and more. And of course, as the most developers, I have a number of work projects and another of private ones. Even worse, I’m working from home for a good share of my time, so both kinds contribute to the mess there. Managing this is a constant effort and fight, but rarely successful.

Read Post
Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

In our community, building embedded systems based on Linux, e.g. with Yocto or buildroot, is standard and well known. Considering Android, respectively the AOSP as a base system feels strange at the beginning as it is a huge ecosystem that implies high system requirements. Of course, embedded Android is not a solution for each issue. Nevertheless, the AOSP provides a sophisticated base platform which is packed with a

Read Post
How a modern Yocto setup could look like

How a modern Yocto setup could look like

In 2015, we built a sophisticated meeting room information system based on Android Things as a student project. As Android Things was deprecated in 2021, we started to use our Yocto Project experience to develop a maintainable, future proof embedded system.

Read Post
Raspberry Pi für die professionelle Produktentwicklung - Eine gute Idee?

Raspberry Pi für die professionelle Produktentwicklung - Eine gute Idee?

Maschinen und Geräte durch Vernetzung und Software aufzuwerten ist ein Kerngedanke des IoT. So werden die resultierenden Projekte häufig aus der Fachdomäne mit dem Wunsch nach schnellen und einfachen Erfolgen gestartet. Die Idee liegt dann nahe den beliebten Raspberry Pi als Basis zu nutzen. Das Gerät ist ja bekannt, fast alles wurde schon einmal von irgendwem gemacht und ins Netz gestellt. Klingt fast zu schön, um wahr zu sein - ist es auch aus professioneller Sicht. Die Gründe hierfür und welche Faktoren bei der Entscheidung für eine Hard- und Software-Plattform als Basis für ein IoT Produkt berücksichtigen werden sollten, sind Inhalt des Vortrags.

Read Post