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

September 14, 2011September 14, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Sony Announced the Android Walkman NW-Z1000

Sony Corp announced three new series of its Walkman portable music including the “NW-Z1000” series powered by Nvidia Tegra 2, equipped with an 4.3-inch TFT LCD panel and running Android 2.3 (gingerbread). NW-Z1000 user interface is slightly customized and its sound quality is improved thanks to a digital amplifier chip called “S-Master MX.” The changes made to the UI include shortcut icons for Sony’s music applications and video players at the bottom of the screen. The NW-Z1000 has wireless LAN capability, GPS and sensors such as acceleration sensor and is pre-installed with GMS (Google Mobile Service) which includes Google Maps, YouTube and Android Market. Here are the specifications of the NW-Z1000 series Walkmans: Android 2.3 with access to the Google market YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and various Sony apps pre-installed (Sony Music Player, Photo Player, etc.) 4.3-inch LCD with 480×800 resolution NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core mobile CPU (1GHz) 512MB main […]

September 14, 2011September 14, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Ziilabs Unveils Low Cost Jaguar3 Android Tablet Reference Designs

Earlier this May, Ziilabs announced the ZMS-20 dual core processors targeted at Android Honeycomb tablets. They have now unveil the 3rd generation of Android Tablet reference designs based on ZMS-20 and ZMS-40 called Jaguar3. Here’s an excerpt of the press release: ZiiLABS, a pioneering media processor and platforms company (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd), today introduced its JAGUAR3, the most powerful 3rd Generation Android 3.2 tablet series. JAGUAR3 is a series of ultra-slim, ultra-lightweight and stylish 10.1” tablet reference designs targeted at the OEM markets. With over a decade of designing experience in portable mobile devices, Creative provided the ergonomic and sexy design of this series of JAGUAR3 tablets. ZMS-20 StemCell Processors JAGUAR3’s superior performance, low power consumption and rich feature set comes from the dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 based ZMS-20 StemCell Processors. ZMS-20 has another 48 StemCell Processing cores within, which effectively make it into a 50-core processor. […]

September 14, 2011September 16, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Google Devfest Comes to Southeast Asia

Google is coming to Southeast Asia with SE Asia Google DevFests 2011 to provide keynote and hand-on sessions on Android, Cloud, Maps, Apps and Chrome. You can now register to those events in Manilla, Chiang Mai and Kuala Lumpur.Jakarta and Singapore will be open for registration very soon. Here are the dates for the events in SE Asia: Manila: 19 September 2011 Chiang Mai: 24 September 2011 Kuala Lumpur: 29 September 2011 Singapore: 12 November 2011 Jakarta: 16 November 2011 Currently, the venue details and agenda are not available as they have just opened registration and probably wait to see how many attendees there will be and what the attendees wants to learn about (You can select the Google products you are interested in during registration). Update: The agenda and venues are now available for Manilla, Chiang Mai and Kuala Lumpur. The Agenda is different from the one India shown […]

September 13, 2011September 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Faster JPEG decoding on ARM with libjpeg-turbo and NEON Instructions

libjpeg-turbo is based on libjpeg, but uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, etc.) to accelerate JPEG compression and decompression on x86 targets. On such systems, libjpeg-turbo is generally 2-4x as fast as the original version of libjpeg with the same hardware. ARM does not support MMX or SSE2 instructions, but it has its own SIMD instructions processed by the NEON Engine on ARM Cortex Core A5, A8, A9 and A15. ARM claims that “NEON technology can accelerate multimedia and signal processing algorithms such as video encode/decode, 2D/3D graphics, gaming, audio and speech processing, image processing, telephony, and sound synthesis by at least 3x the performance of ARMv5 and at least 2x the performance of ARMv6 SIMD.” Linaro worked on libjpeg-turbo and added NEON support to it. The code is available on launchpad at https://code.launchpad.net/~tom-gall/linaro/libjpeg-turbo Linaro has also provide benchmark result for libjpeg-turbo with a 12 Mpixel image on TI OMAP4 (Pandaboard) using the […]

September 13, 2011November 11, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Setting Up a Git Server on Ubuntu

Git is a version control system used by many projects such as Linaro, the Linux kernel, Android, Eclipse, Qt and more. For projects that can not afford their own servers and still need to collaborate, hosted git is available from github and as today there are a total of 2,769,642 repositories (private and public) hosted on github. For software developed internally, you can start to setup you own Git server by following some simple steps (in Ubuntu). Installing the Git Server Update Ubuntu and install git-core: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install git-core That’s it. Installing Gitolite Gitolite allows you to setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. First get gitolite with git: git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite.git Obtain a public key based access to your server, so that you can log in from your workstation to the server without getting a password […]

September 13, 2011September 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Best Practices for Writing Safer C Code

Thomas Honold wrote an article published on EETimes giving 17 steps to safer C code. Not only this article provides tips to write safer C code, but I believe those steps are simply best practices when writing C code for embedded systems as they shorten the software life cycle by making it easier for a software team to write, debug and maintain code and by improving the software QA procedure. Here’s a summary of the 17 steps to achieve safer C code: Follow the rules you’ve read a hundred times: Initialize variables before use. Do not ignore compiler warnings. Check return values. Use enums as error types. Define an ENUM_MAX value at the end, so that the code to check the range does not have to be modified each time you add a new error code. Expect to fail Always assume there will be an error and set to default […]

September 12, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

What Programming Language Should I Learn ?

“What programming language should I learn ?” is a question often asked by people new to software development. The answer is always “it depends”. But for embedded systems, it seems C language is a must as you can see in the chart below (Source: “The 2011 Embedded Market Study” by Embedded.com). For the 2011 survey, 1886 respondents from across the embedded industry answered that their embedded project was mostly programmed in C language (62%), followed by C++ (22%), assembler (5%) and Java (2%). The other languages were all under 1%. 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

September 12, 2011September 12, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android 2.3.4 Release For ST Ericsson Snowball Development Board

Igloo Community – the team developing for ST Ericsson Snowball Nova A9500 development board – has released the first version of Android 2.3.4 for the board. It can be downloaded at http://igloocommunity.org/download/android/images/20110910/. Here are the main features for this release: Based on Android 2.3.4 HDMI/DVI-D display support Graphics acceleration with the Mali 400 GPU Bluetooth support Multimedia acceleration Ethernet connectivity microSD card support Sensors support ADB over ethernet (by default) and over USB OTG port and the Known issues: WLAN connectivity is disabled in the UI due to startup problems with the interface. Audio recording does not work Consecutive audio playback might not work Potrait mode does not work (rotating the device corrupts screen until rotated back) Might be a temporary problem, but the browser crashes on the default google page when loading finishes. Other pages seem to work fine, so interrupting loading or going through the search acts as […]