Processors Category - Page 1092 of 1092 - CNX Software

May 2, 2010August 1, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Digital Signage Players in Hong Kong and China

I’ll show a few digital signage applications based on Sigma Designs EM8620 and SMP8630 series that are currently used in Hong Kong and China. Bus Digital Signage SinoCDN is a Hong Kong company providing broadband media delivery solutions. SinoCDN currently provides a digital signage solution for Hong Kong – China cross boarder buses called IPAD. Their solution is based on EM8623L Sigma Designs and allows content update thru Wifi at the border between China / Hong Kong. If you’ve ever been at the Hong Kong / China border (Lok Ma Chau) and seen some Wifi access points whose names starts with sinocdn, they are used for this purpose. Digital Signage & POS (Point-of-Sale) Heng Yu Technologies is another Hong Kong company specialized in the manufacturing of “customized input and display technology for the industrial markets” They provide point of sales and advertizing platform based on several Sigma Designs platforms, including […]

April 11, 2010April 11, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Sigma Designs SMP863X Resources

SMP8634 / SMP8635 “Secure Media Processors” from Sigma Designs are used in our set-top-box and digital signage applications. In order to develop for that platform, an SDK must be purchased directly from Sigma Designs. There are different version of the SDK, once is mainly compatible with EM862X MRUA SDK and the newer one DCCHD is not, but offer a few more features. However, as for EM8620 series, the Linux kernel is open source so companies need to release the source if they modified it in their products. For example, you could download the GPL source released by Netgem – http://www.netgem.com/en/supportLinux.php for both Linux and utilities used in their NetBox HD. This is only the GPL source for your reference, after that there are also sigma linux drivers (not released by sigma) and not GPL, and the MRUA/DCCHD package that needs to be purchased from Sigma Designs. Contrary to EM8620 series […]

March 25, 2010November 25, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Software profiling in embedded systems with O-profile

What is o-profile? See the description below extracted from http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/, o-profile official website OProfile is a system-wide profiler for Linux systems, capable of profiling all running code at low overhead. OProfile is released under the GNU GPL. It consists of a kernel driver and a daemon for collecting sample data, and several post-profiling tools for turning data into information. OProfile leverages the hardware performance counters of the CPU to enable profiling of a wide variety of interesting statistics, which can also be used for basic time-spent profiling. All code is profiled: hardware and software interrupt handlers, kernel modules, the kernel, shared libraries, and applications. OProfile is currently in alpha status; however it has proven stable over a large number of differing configurations; it is being used on machines ranging from laptops to 16-way NUMA-Q boxes. As always, there is no warranty. Why don’t we use gprof? For embedded system , […]

March 14, 2010April 6, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Resources for Cirrus Logic EP93XX – EP9301, EP9302, EP9307, EP9312 & EP9315

A few years ago, we used EP9307 in combination with a MPEG Video Decoder chip (ES6425 – now phased out) for the development of a Karaoke system for the Chinese Market. The advantage with Cirrus Logic (and many American companies) is that documentation and support can very easily be found online including datasheets, software development kit and support forum. This was so good that we really had to get the involvement of the FAE once or twice. That’s a sharp contrast with some other companies where is there a dearth of support and FAE are seldom able to help you resolve issues you may have with their products, especially if you work for a smaller company. Basically to develop for EP9307 and other EP93xx platform most of the software and hardware resources are available at http://arm.cirrus.com/ including: Linux 2.6 Documentation & Linux 2.6 Source for EP93xx Linux 2.4 Documentation & […]

March 11, 2010March 13, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Optimizing hard disk and compact flash performance in Linux Embedded Systems

Compact flash are often used in Digital Signage applications and hard-disks used in both signage application and IP set-top-box to play high definition videos. However, sometimes the performance of those devices and the performance limitations of embedded systems may make the task difficult especially for higher bit-rate videos. Choosing the right file system Once of the easiest way to improve performance is to select an appropriate file system. The best performance is achieved by ext-2, followed by ext-3, fat 32 and ntfs on the embedded system I worked with at least (e.g. Sigma Designs EM8620 and SMP8630 series). Basically, if your CF card/HDD is not supposed to be taken out of your device, then ext-2 is the obvious choice. However, if your user for whatever reasons need to take the devie out and connect it to a Windows PC FAT 32 or NTFS might be a better choice, although it […]

March 4, 2010April 13, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

NTFS for Embedded Linux Systems

NTFS benchmarchs for embedded systems Tuxera vs NTFS-3G vs ext-3

Since now more and more HD videos are larger than 4GB they can not be stored into FAT32 file system, and require the use of other file systems, the most popular being ext2/ext3 or NTFS. However, since many users may want to access the mass storage devices (IDE / SATA harddisk, USB Harddisk, USB Thumbdrives…) in Windows as well as in their embedded systems (IP STV, Digital Signage..) NTFS seems to the best choice to share data between Windows systems and embedded systems using Linux. NTFS is available in the Linux kernel. However only read-only is fully supported and the performance is about 25% less than ext-2 or ext-3 for the platforms we tested (EM8623L and SMP8635), but this is still acceptable to play most of HD Videos. However, if the device also needs to download videos from a server or other P2P clients, having a read-only file system will […]

February 15, 2010July 10, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Sigma Designs EM862X Resources

We are using EM8623 for the development of set-top-box and digital signage applications. In order to develop for that platform, an SDK must be purchased directly from Sigma Designs. However, the linux kernel is open source so companies need to release the source if they modified it in their products. For example, you could download the GPL source released by Kiss Technology – http://www.kiss-technology.com/files/firmware/GPL.zip. This is only the GPL source for your reference, after that there are also sigma linux drivers (not released by sigma) and not GPL, and the MRUA package that needs to be purchased from Sigma Designs. One the challenge of using EM862X platforms (EM8620L, EM8621L, EM8622L, EM8623L etc..) is that it has no MMU (Memory Management Unit) and that may make the software debugging very interesting.. You may experience spectacular crashes, kernel panic without any apparent reason. But most of the time this is due to […]