Databases for Linux Embedded Systems: Berkeley DB and SQLite

Embedded systems often need to use database to store contact information, EPG data and more. Many Linux systems use MySQL, however such a large database management system may not always be appropriate for embedded systems. Hence, there are lightweight database management systems  implementation that are especially suited to embedded systems by their binary footprint, memory footprint and CPU requirements. If you want to develop in C in Linux and your requirement is to have no (or little) license to pay in your application, you could consider Oracle Berkeley DB or SQLite among others. Oracle Berkeley DB (previously Sleepycat Berkeley DB)  is described as follows: Berkeley DB enables the development of custom data management solutions, without the overhead traditionally associated with such custom projects. Berkeley DB provides a collection of well-proven building-block technologies that can be configured to address any application need from the hand-held device to the datacenter, from a […]

Linaro Development Board “Snowball” by ST Ericsson

ST Ericsson unveiled a development board based on Nova A9500 (dual ARM Cortex A9 processor and MALI 400 GPU) at MWC 2011 called Snowball (or SKY-S9500-ULP-CXX) for the embedded Linux community and professional developers. This board was designed by CALAO Systems and can be pre-ordered on their website for 200 USD (SKY-S9500-ULP-C11 / Software Development Kit – SDK) or 300 USD (SKY-S9500-ULP-C01 / Production development Kit – PDK). The difference between the SDK and PDK is that the former has no expansion connectors, no battery backup for RTC and only support serial over USB port (for Linux console). First, some pictures with description of the snowball development board. The full documentations for Snowball development board can be found in Calao Systems File Repository, where you’ll get the bottom and top assembly diagrams for both C01 and C11, the major components datasheet, documentation and some photos. The specifications of the boards: – […]

AMD Embedded G-Series mini-PC, motherboard and thin client

AMD announced its embedded processor G-Series at CES 2011. Here are some products that will be soon available based on this platform. Futjisu Mini-ITX mainboards – models D3003-S1 and D3003-S2 The D3003-S1 motherboard will feature an AMD Single-Core T44R (1.2GHz/9W) and the D3003-S2 an AMD Dual-Core T56N (1.6GHz/18W). Both models will have an onboard ATI graphics card with VGA, DVI, LVDS (D3003-S1 only) and diplayport  (D3003-S2 only) outputs, HD Audio,  dual GbE LAN, serial ATA III RAID, mSATA socket support, USB 2.0, 8 Bit GPIO connector and be designed for fanless operation. Mass production of the boards will start in April 2011. Check the preliminary specifications for details. CompuLab’s fit-PC3 mini-PC Compulab already manufactures the fit-PC2 and fit-PC2i based on the Intel Atom platforms running Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7. The Israel-based company  will embed AMD Embedded G-Series processor in its latest fit-PC3 mini-PC. This “miniature fanless industrial PC” […]

Emulate an ARM Plaform with QEMU on Ubuntu 10.10

When developing software for embedded systems, you may need to support multiple architectures such as  arm, mips, x86, powerpc, alpha etc.. but you may not have the hardware required on hand to test them. This is where QEMU – a processor emulator – comes to the rescue. In a way, QEMU is similar to VirtualBox, VMWare or Citrix Xendeskop except it can support multiple architectures. I’ll show how to run Debian Lenny ARMEL in QEMU on a computer running Ubuntu 10.10 (aka Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat). QEMU (Qemu-kvm) Installation First install qemu-kvm and qemu-kvm-extras (the latter contains qemu-system-arm): sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm qemu-kvm-extras Let’s check qemu version: jaufranc@CNX-TOWER:~/edev$ qemu –version QEMU PC emulator version 0.12.5 (qemu-kvm-0.12.5), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard Debian ARM Installation in QEMU Create a directory to store the required files for the emulator and  download the Debian Lenny ARMEL kernel (vmlinuz) and debian installer rootfs (initrd.gz): mkdir […]

Ziilabs ZMS-05 and ZMS-08 SDK and Development Boards

Ziilabs (originally 3DLABS) is Singapore company, subsidiary of Creative Technology, that provides media application processors for consumers electronics and has offices in the UK, China, USA and Singapore. Ziilabs Media Processors Overview Ziilabs has two media processors: ZMS-05 – A Low Power HD Programmable Media Rich Processor based on two ARM9 core (ARM9-EJS) mainly aimed at smartphones and tablets with the following media capabilities: High compute density SIMD architecture High resolution – decode to 1080p / 720p encode Simultaneous video encode/decode at D1 Wide rage of optimised CODECs and APIs Accelerated OpenGL ES 3D graphics Hardware compositing Advanced image processing 8 GFlops programmable compute ZMS-08 – A HD Media Rich Applications Processor based on an ARM Cortex A8 running @ 1GHz mainly aimed at media players, set-top boxes and digital signage solutions with the following media capabilities: Blu-ray Quality 1080p H.264 Video Decode 1080p H.264 Video Encode 720p H.264 Video […]

Texas Instruments OMAP 5 based on ARM Cortex A15 Core

Texas Instruments announced its new generation of mobile chips OMAP 5 based on the latest ARM core Cortex A15.  Press release excerpt: DALLAS (Feb. 7, 2011) /PRNewswire/ — Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announced today the next generation of its popular OMAP™ family: the OMAP 5 mobile applications platform, which is positioned to transform how mobile devices, such as Smartphones, tablets and other mobile form factors are used, making them even more valuable in our daily lives. … The 28 nanometer OMAP 5 applications processors carry on the OMAP family tradition of delivering significant increases in performance and functionality, while lowering power consumption compared to their predecessors. Specifically, they offer up to 3x processing performance and five-fold 3D graphics improvement, yet provide a nearly 60 percent average power reduction compared to a sample user experience on the OMAP 4 platform. Additionally, the OMAP 5 platform’s software is designed for […]

Running .NET applications on Linux Embedded Systems

You may have some applications developed using Microsoft .NET application framework that are running on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. .NET for Linux If after spending much effort and time, you have a request to port your application to Linux, you don’t need to rewrite everything thanks to Mono, an open source implementation of .NET framework that can be run in Windows, Linux and MacOS. The development framework is composed of three parts: Mono – An open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET MonoDevelop – An open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Mono Tools for Visual Studio – Development Tools to develop and migrate .NET applications to Mono on Linux without leaving Visual Studio. This application can be tried for 30 days and / or purchased. This tools is compatible with Visual […]

Folders and Files Comparison in Linux with Meld

Beyond Compare and Winmerge are tools that can be used to compare files in Windows, but the latter is not available in Linux and the former is only available as a commercial application. One alternative is to use Meld, a diff and merge tool for Linux. This open source program is a GUI for diff2 and diff3 written using pygkt toolit based on Python, Glade and GTK+. This is not as powerful as the two programs aforementioned, but still very useful. It can also compare 3 files at the same time. To install it in ubuntu: sudo apt-get install meld It will still allow you to compare files, directory and merge changes. The file comparison merge function is a little confusing at first, but after a while you’ll get used to it. Meld can also support version control comparison with CVS, SVN, GIT, Bazaar-ng or Mercurial. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started […]

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