Embedded Linux Conference 2015 Schedule – IoT, Cars, and Drones

Embedded Linux Conference 2015 will take place in San Jose, California, on March 23 – 25, 2015, and will focus on Drones, Things and Automobiles. The schedule has been published, and whether you’ll attend or not, it’s always interested to have a look at what will be talked about to have a peak into the future of Embedded Linux, or simply keep abreast with the progress in the field.

So as usual, I’ve gone through the schedule, and made my own virtual program with talks that I find interesting.

Monday 23rd

• 9:00 – 9:30 – Driving standards and Open Source to Grow the Internet of Things by Mark Skarpness, Director of Systems Engineering at Intel

Billions of devices are beginning to come online, and many of these devices, large and small, are running open source software.  To fuel this innovation, it’s more important than ever for these devices to use a common framework to communicate with each other and the cloud.  Intel is a founding member of the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), which will use both open source innovation and standards specifications to drive interoperability across multiple operating systems and communication protocols to enable the Internet of Things. As one of the founding members of the Linux Foundation, a top external contributor to the Android Open Source Project, and a leader behind USB, WiFi, Bluetooth and other projects and standards, Intel has the depth of knowledge and a unique approach to move things forward to benefit developers and consumers.

• 9:30 – 10:00 – Project Ara with Paul Eremenko, Head of Project Ara, ATAP at Google & Marti Bolivar, Project Ara Software Lead, Google

Marti and Paul will discuss Project Ara’s aim to develop an open hardware platform for modular smartphones, with the goal of creating a vibrant module developer community and a marketplace from which consumers can create an entirely custom mobile device.

• 10:45 – 11:35 – Generalizing Android for Low-Cost 64-Bit ARM-Based Community Boards by Khasim Syed Mohammed, Linaro

Linaro is developing an open hardware platform specification to encourage software development on low-cost boards to lower the cost and accelerate the availability of maker and embedded products based on ARM SoCs. By end of 2015 there will be many compliant boards based on and adhering to this specification. The key challenge for the Android community is to enable and maintain Android for multiple platforms on a common code base. This presentation highlights the issues like non-standard SoC customizations, peripheral controller customizations from vendors and shares the possible solutions through Android software generalization.

• 11:45 – 12:35 – Open Source Drones on Linux by Lorenz Meier

This presentation will summarize the current state in academia and industry using Linux on drones, which is by now already a widespread and common pattern.

• 14:00 – 14:50 – IoTivity and Embedded Linux Support by Kishen Maloor, Intel

IoTivity is a new collaborative project, hosted at the Linux Foundation and sponsored by the Open Interconnect Consortium. Its goal is to facilitate interconnections across the billions of “things” to be on the Internet in coming years. A majority of these “things” would be low-power embedded devices. To satisfy their connectivity needs, IoTivity must support a variety of transmission media, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, 6LoWPAN over 805.15.4, etc. This session will present an overview of IoTivity’s current support for the Yocto Linux environment on embedded platforms, and how it allows us to be flexible for multiple purposes. It will also present how a developer can enable IoTivity on Yocto and make modifications.

• 15:00 – 15:50 – Performance Analysis Using the perf Suite by Mans Rullgard

When faced with a performance problem, the initial steps towards a solution include identifying the sections of code responsible and the precise reasons they are time-consuming. To this end, the ‘perf’ profiling tools provide valuable insight into the characteristics of a program. The presentation will show, using real-world examples, how the ‘perf’ tools can be used to pinpoint the parts of a program in need of optimisation.

This presentation will be a version of that given at ELCE 2014 updated based on questions and audience feedback.

• 16:20 – 17:10 – Poky meets Debian: Understanding How to Make an Embedded Linux by Using an Existing Distribution’s Source Code by Yoshitake Kobayashi, Toshiba

Poky has already become one of the most popular build system to make an embedded Linux environment. Poky refers to OpenEmbedded originally. However if you want to use other source code, how to do it? We have some experience we would like to share with you. For this study, We choose Debian source and already tried two ways to use it. The first try was probably an incorrect way and the second try may be a correct way.

In this talk, we will show both of them and also describe why we choose Debian. If you are interested in this implementation, you can download the source code from GitHub (cnxsoft: empty for now). There are some implementations available for development boards such as pandaboard, minnowboard and etc. Let’s enjoy Bitbake!

• 17:20 – 18:10 – Teaching More Fish to Fly by John Hawley, Intel

n 2013, at the Embedded Linux Conference in Europe in Edinburgh, there was a race between a dog and a blimp. It was said that despite the dogs win, that the blimp had participated in the miracle of flight. In 2014 we started showing how the MinnowBoard can be lofted and show useful. In 2015 we just want to give an update on where we are at and what interesting projects are being done both with the MinnowBoard and other platforms in the UAV space. The talk is mainly targeting taking an off the shelf embedded platform, Minnowboard Max, and it’s use in UAVs, specifically quad-copters. With the ability to do real time computer vision, as well as various GPIO capabilities we’ll explore the directions that significantly more autonomous UAVs can take with Linux and embedded platforms using, mostly, off the shelf components.

Tuesday 24th

• 9:00 – 10:50 – Customizing AOSP for my Device by Rafael Coutinho, Phi Innovations

Android BSP gives you some tools to create your own device customizations. This can be achieved without changes on the Android main code, and just some customizations on the devices folder. It is possible to overlay some system apk configurations, ui and even services. In this tutorial I plan to show the step by step of creating a custom Android device using a AOSP. Setting up some Kernel parameters, customizing the lights HAL and sensors HAL, changing the look and feel of Settings apk etc.

• 11:20 – 12:10 – Room For Cooperation: Bionic and musl by Bernhard Rosenkränzer, Linaro

A while after Android started Bionic, another interesting libc project was started: musl. Its licensing is compatible with Android’s – so there may be room for picking the best of both worlds. This talk investigates where musl outperforms Bionic and vice versa — and whether or not (and how) Android can benefit from pulling musl code into Bionic.

• 13:40 – 14:10 – Dronecode Project and Autopilot With Linux by Andrew Tridgell, Technical Steering Committee Chair of Dronecode Project

Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell provides updates on the progress of Dronecode’s open source software project for commercial drones, and insight into the future of drone development. He will also delve into the specific task of running an autopilot directly on a Linux-based platform.

The story of a DRAM-less Linux-operated microcontroller delivered at ELC a year ago, which came as a surprise for many, wouldn’t be that surprising now. However, there are some important updates to share: moving to mainline-aligned 3.x baseline, compiling out VM-specific code, optimizing kernel XIP, and the last but not the least, starting to use picoTCP kernel networking stack.

Some size and performance benchmarks will also be presented, along with the Linux demo on the DRAM-less microcontroller board.

• 16:40 – 18:20 – Building a General Purpose Android Workstation by Ron Munitz

In this tutorial, you will have a hands-on journey of customizing, building, and using a General Purpose Desktop variant of the Android-X86 project. The tutorial assumes previous experience with building Android off the AOSP, Android-IA, CyanogenMod, or any other build system, and describes the special additions of Android-X86, such as a Kernel build system, general X86 hardware detection based HAL’s/firmware and live cd/disk installer generation and more. Then, we will explore the Linux friendly busybox minimal image, and describe the way a fully fledged Android version can be spawned out of it (with similar techniques for any other Linux distribution with the Android patches!) using chroot, and provide a listing of the ultimate Android init process.

We will continue the discussion with day to day uses, and a joint brainstorming of Linux developer uses, and justify Android-X86 as yet another X-less Linux distribution – until the time we add X to it… As a special bonus, we will address how to make any app run using a user-QEMU based ARM translator.

• 18:20 – 19:20 – BoFs: Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded by Jeff Osier-Mixon

Got a question, comment, gripe, praise, or other communication for the Yocto Project and/or OpenEmbedded? Or maybe you’d just like to learn more about these projects and their influence on the world of embedded Linux? Feel free to join us for an informal BoF.

Wednesday 25th

• 9:00 – 9:30 – Embedding Openness in the Connected Car by Matt Jones, Jaguar Land Rover

A future vehicle will be a “thing” on the Internet, but how can industry and community come together to accelerate the future concepts into production. The keynote will explore the platforms and standard needed for the future, and relate them to open prototypes from Jaguar Land Rover and the Automotive Grade Linux projects.

• 9:30 – 10:00 – Community Involvement: Looking Forward and Looking Back by Deepak Saxena

Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade, finding its way into billions of mobile devices and also into the core of cloud based services that we rely on for business, entertainment, and increasingly, security. With this explosion of devices, we have seen more companies get involved with the kernel community, some successfully, and some struggling. In this talk, we will look at some of the challenges that the industry and the community continue to face in working with each other and also more importantly think about what is next? The adoption of Linux will continue to increase throughout all market segments, bringing in numerous new organizations and new developers. How do we move forward and what changes need to happen within the industry and community cultures to work better together?

• 10:45 – 17:50 – Embedded Android Workshop by Karim Yaghmour, Opersys

While Android has been created for mobile devices — phones first and now tablets — it can, nonetheless, be used as the basis of any touch-screen system, whether it be mobile or not. Essentially, Android is a custom-built embedded Linux distribution with a very elaborate and rich set of user-space abstractions, APIs, services and virtual machine. This one-day workshop is aimed at embedded developers wanting to build embedded systems using Android. It will cover Android from the ground up, enabling developers to get a firm hold on the components that make up Android and how they need to be adapted to an embedded system. Specifically, we will start by introducing Android’s overall architecture and then proceed to peel Android’s layer one-by-one.

That’s a just a small selection of the talks, and there are many other interested sessions if you are interested in IoT, automotive or drone applications.

If you’d like to attend, you can register online with a single fee for the Embedded Linux Conference and Android Builders Summit 2015, as well as breakfasts and breaks, a T-shirt, and access to evening events:

• Early Bird Registration Fee – US$500 through January 30, 2015
• Standard Registration Fee – US$650 through March 5, 2015
• Late Registration Fee – US$750 after March 5, 2015
• Student Registration Fee – US$150
• Hobbyist Registration Fee – US$150

If you attend as a hobbyist, you need to contact events [at] linuxfoundation.org to receive a discount code.

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