Cosmic Monkey

This is a quick onboarding puzzle for new members of the Flight Software (FSW) subgroup of Brown Space Engineering. It's designed to help you get acquainted with C (and all of its weirdness).

In order to correctly write the cosmic_monkey function (and its accompanying print_bytes function for visualizing the result), you'll learn about pointers, bitwise operators, and bit masking --- all of which are central to embedded systems programming.

Motivation

The name "Cosmic Monkey" comes from Netflix's "Chaos Monkey", a process that randomly terminates virtual machines and containers in the company's production environment to ensure that their software engineers implement instance failure-resilient services. In our satellite's operating system, (PVDXosV2), we have implemented a similar task that randomly flips bits to simulate what would happen if memory is corrupted by cosmic ray bit-flips. We have no control over when/where this radiation will mutate our memory, so having an angry task that goes around flipping bits is the best way to make sure PVDXos can recover if critical memory is corrupted.

Best of luck programming; we are very grateful that you've chosen to join FSW!

Instructions

1. Have a look in the stencil folder, and implement the functions whose headers are specified in ./stencil/cosmic_monkey.c
2. Modify your code so the printing in cosmic_monkey() only occurs if the DEBUG preprocessor macro is defined. (hint)
3. Write a Makefile that compiles a normal and debug version of the cosmic_monkey executable.
4. Add error-checking to OS function calls (this can be done in multiple ways; the solution code is particularly anal, we wouldn't consistently expect that level of error-checking).