Embedded & IoT

Memory & Power Constraints

6 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.

  • You're building a battery-powered sensor node that has to run for a year on a small battery. What firmware techniques would you use to make the battery last? Junior level
  • You're designing a battery-powered environmental sensor that has to run five years on a single coin cell. How do you build and defend that energy budget?Go Pro Senior level
  • You're building a sensor node that has to run for over a year on a small coin-cell battery while still reporting data periodically. How do you reason about the power budget and design the firmware to hit that target?Go Pro Mid level
  • In firmware that has to run for months without a reboot, how do you decide between static and dynamic memory allocation, and how do you keep RAM from being a source of field failures?Go Pro Senior level
  • You're working on a microcontroller with only a few tens of kilobytes of RAM, and the team wants to start using malloc and free freely the way they would in a desktop service. What's your concern, and how do you manage memory on a part like that?Go Pro Mid level
  • On a microcontroller with a few kilobytes of RAM, why do embedded teams usually avoid calling malloc and free at runtime, and what do they do instead?Go Pro Junior level
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