Regarding the problem of strings in embedded, I once did a pretty nifty thing in a logging framework I built for an embedded system in an elevator (Cortex M0 I think it was) with very little flash for the binary and for logging. I had a logging macro which took in a string to log together with some arguments (like printf). The macro expanded to add an attribute to the string constant to put it in a special section I created with a linker script. Then in the macro what it actually logged was the memory offset in the section together with the arguments. So that way the log was extremely slim. As an extra bonus, I then stripped the special section with the strings from the binary and had an offline script translate the logged memory offsets and attributes to strings.
Google's embedded library Pigweed [1] industrializes exactly this approach and has some unholy macro nonsense to make the string hashing work in pure C as well.
Nope. This was all in house. But we are talking at home lifts for the rich and lazy (and sometimes elderly). And there was quite a bit of electronics in it with processors at each floor, on the control panel and for the motor controller and so on. So the cost added up. But yeah, I agree, some more flash would have been worth it.
