Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft), Author at CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

May 1, 2012May 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Ziilabs ZMS-40 Decodes 6 HD Videos and Maps them to 3D Objects Simultaneously!

Ziilabs uploaded an impressive video that shows the Ziilabs ZMS-40 simultaneously decoding 6 High Definition Videos (although they don’t say if it’s 720p or 1080p) with 5 H.264 videos and 1 VP8/WebM video and rendering them on 3D objects via OpenGL ES. That’s quite amazing, but the next question could be why would you need that much processing power in a chip aimed at tablets? Augmented reality perhaps… Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

May 1, 2012May 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Embedded Artists NXP LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit Promotion

Embedded Artist and NXP have jointly designed the LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit to easily get started with motor control prototyping. This platform is based on NXP LPCXpresso MCUs and can control BLDC (Brushless DC), BLAC (Brushless AC), stepper and dual brushed DC motors. This is not a new design (2010), but Embedded Artist and NXP are discounting their development kit by 50% for a limited period, which brings the price of the kit to 149 Euros, instead of 299 Euros. The kit includes: LPCXpresso Motor Control Board LPCXpresso LPC1114 Board (The “stick” on the left in the picture above) LPCXpresso Eclipse-based IDE and GNU compiler BLDC Motor with hall sensors 24V Power supply (60W) Here are the specifications of the Motor Control Board: Controller MCU • Socket for LPCXpresso LPC1114 and LPC1343 • Socket for LPCXpresso LPC176x • Socket for LPC1xxx in PLCC44 • Expansion connector for control by LPC1800/LPC4000/LPC2900 […]

May 1, 2012June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Tizen 1.0 SDK and Source Code Release

The Tizen Technical Steering Group has announced, today, the release of Tizen 1.0 “Larkspur”. Tizen 1.0 release provides several new SDK features and improvements including: Simulator: A new browser-based tool that supports the Tizen APIs and allows you to run and debug your web applications, and simulate running applications with various device profiles. IDE: Enhancements include more flexibility around templates and debugging tools. Emulator: Significantly improved emulator performance through Intel’s Hardware Acceleration Manager for Windows and OpenGL acceleration for Linux. Updates to the platform source code include: Web: Support for additional features of W3C/HTML5 specification Location: Support for POI (Point of Interest) and route search Connectivity: Wi-Fi Direct key features added You can see the full list of changes by reading the release notes for the SDK and the source code. Tizen has also added a bug tracker and a wiki for the community and a few back-end changes have been […]

May 1, 2012May 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Yocto Project Release 1.2 Announced

The Yocto Project Release 1.2 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Denzil” and based on Poky 7.0 is the third release of the project. The project was announced in October 2010 to provide developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. Yocto Project 1.2 Features: HOB redesigned with new user interface and work flow. HOB is a GUI based tool for users to customize and build an embedded Linux image in a more intuitive and easier way. Build appliance, which is a set of changes and enhancements to enable users to build a virtual machine image running Linux built with the Yocto Project. Within the Linux running on the virtual machine, users can customize and build their own customized embedded Linux images. Error message handling improvement, making error message more efficient, useful and accurate to users. New kernel update […]

April 30, 2012June 8, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in Acer Aspire One D255E Netbook

I previously installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my Acer Aspire One D255E network (Atom N455 with GMA3150 GPU), and there were quite a few issues to solve with Ethernet, Wifi and the SD Card but eventually, everything worked fine. I have now upgraded it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, using the instructions I posted yesterday. The good news is that WiFi and the SD card worked right after the installation, but Ethernet would not work and there were 2 new issues: The system was very slow The touchpad would not work It might be possible that the touchpad and Ethernet issues do not occur by doing a fresh installation with Ubuntu 12.04 ISO, but I haven’t tried. Improving Ubuntu 12.04 Performance I noticed that if you just moved the mouse over the launcher, compiz (composting window manager handling 3D acceleration via OpenGL) would use 100% CPU. I ran glxinfo to verify […]

April 29, 2012April 29, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Upgrading Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and were expecting Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to be available in the Upgrade Manager, you were wrong. Well, at least I was wrong… Canonical won’t make it available via the Upgrade Manager in the first release, but only in July with Ubuntu 12.04.1 release, and the company recommends that most LTS users wait until then before upgrading to 12.04. But if you can’t possibly wait that long, you can run: do-release-upgrade -d or update-manager -d to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) to Ubuntu 12.04 (aka Precise Pangolin). The first command will run in the terminal, the second will start the Update Manager and allow you to select “New Ubuntu release ‘12.04’ is available”. For details on why you should NOT upgrade yet, see http://askubuntu.com/questions/125825/upgrading-lts-to-lts-server-why-wait-for-the-first-point-release. The first time I tried to upgrade I had the following errors: Could not calculate the upgrade An unresolvable […]

April 28, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

How to Create Your Own Debian / Ubuntu Image for Mele A1000 (AllWinner A10 Based STB)

Developers working on AllWinner A10 have released an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS SD card image (4GB) for the Mele A1000. I’ll show how you can create your own Debian or Ubuntu image based on this image for any size of SD Card using Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) and the recent Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as example. The current image is not perfect, for example Ethernet doesn’t work (but you can still get network connectivity with WiFi), the NAND flash can not be accessed, the system does not appear to be very stable when running X and a few more issues. But this will be fixed by the developer community over time. First download the SD card image wget http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele-ubuntu-lucid.img.lzma Install 7z (if you don’t have it yet) and decompress the file: sudo apt-get install p7zip-full 7z x mele-ubuntu-lucid.img.lzma The decompressed size is 4008706048, which might be larger than your 4GB SD Card […]

April 28, 2012April 28, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

AppliedMicro Unveils ARMv8 64-bit Apache 2 Implementation for X-Gene SoC

Last year, Applied Micro announced their Gene-X 64-bit ARMv8 core at ARM Techcon 2011, and showed a minimal demo based on Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA booting Linux ARM 64-bit to the command line. Since then, the company has made progress and just announced the availability of an Apache 2 web server implementation on their 64-bit ARMv8 X-Gene Server-on-Chip. This is the very first implementation of a fully-functional server platform running a real-world application on 64-bit ARM-based processor, said Vinay Ravuri, Vice President and General Manager of Processor Products at AppliedMicro. The platform is now capable of running a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) software stack. Back in 2011, the company announced ARMv8 support for Linux would be developed by Redhat and be available in Fedora. This 64-bit ARM web server implementation enable OEMs, ODMs, Cloud Service Providers, Independent Software Vendors and other development partners to conduct early stage performance benchmarking and […]