This time we are going to cover Reed-Solomon codes. (I had meant to cover this topic in Part XV, but the article was getting to be too long, so I’ve split it roughly in half.) These are one of the workhorses of error-correction, and they are used in overwhelming abundance to correct short bursts of errors. We’ll see that encoding a message using Reed-Solomon is fairly simple, so easy that we can even do it in C on an embedded system.