Play Angry Birds For Real with Mbed NXP Cortex-M0 Slingshot

If you’re just bored to play Angry Birds with the touchscreen of your smartphone or with your mouse in Angry Birds for Chrome, you can now bring the fun back to the game by playing with a real slingshot ! mbed designed a USB slingshot with an mbed NXP LPC11U24 (Cortex-M0 MCU) board that emulates a USB mouse. mbed measures the angle and strength applied with: An accelerometer that measure the tilt by tracking the gravity vector A rubber stretch sensor used as the sling, and measure how much it is stretched. They built the slingshot with the following hardware components: mbed NXP LPC11U24 board – 59 USD 3-axis Accelerometer – ADXL345 Accelerometer connect via SPI  – 14.95 USD Stretch Sensor connected to pin 15 (analog input) – 9.95 USD USB B connector Handcrafted Slingshot Here’s how mbed describes their NXP board: The mbed NXP LPC11U24 MCU module is a […]

Texas Instruments OMAP5 Demo at MWC 2012

Charbax of armdevices.net has uploaded a very interesting video with an OMAP5430 demo and an interview at Texas Instruments booth at MWC 2012. Using the OMAP5 development kit, they demo several 3D applications, the web browser and the picture gallery and it looks extremely smooth. They discussed about the OMAP5 vs Tegra 3 benchmark, and it appears mobile web browsers are not yet optimized for more than 2 cores which could explain the performance difference somewhat. The OMAP5 currently runs at 800 MHz, but there will eventually be 2 versions: 1.7 and 2.0 GHz when the OMAP 5 AP is released. This should show a performance improvement of over 4x against the Tegra 3, although I’m sure in the meantime, Nvidia will have announced the Tegra 4 (Wayne). The OMAP 5 also offers impressive improvement in power consumption, as the SGX544 GPU cores are augmented by a dedicated 2D hardware-accelerated […]

HiSilicon Unveils Quad-Core Cortex A9 K3V2 Processor (Hi3620)

HiSilicon, a subsidiary of Huawei, has unveiled the K3V2 quad-core cortex A9 processor at mobile world congress 2012, Barcelona. The processor comes in two version 1.2 and 1.5 GHz and the company claims the chip delivers 30 to 50 percent more performance than existing quad-core processor including the NVidia Tegra3. This performance boost is apparently possible thanks to a 64-bit memory bus as well as a powerful 16-core GPU (by an unnamed US chip designer) that is at least twice as fast as the competition. The current versions of the chip are manufacturer using TSMC 40 nm low power process, but the company plans to move to 28-nm technology for further power efficiency later this year. They do not use a companion core like the NVidia Tegra 3 to save power, but instead HiSilicon designed an A.I.PS (Artificial Intelligence Power Scaling) Core in K3V2, which can manage cores CPU and […]

Qualcomm Showcases Glasses-Free 3D Tablet Powered by SnapDragon S4 Processor

Mobile World Congress 2012 starts today and we should get a flood of announcements today. In the video below, Qualcomm showcases their Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor in a developer tablet showing 4 independnat videos decoded by the 4 cores and a 3D game demo taking advantage of the faster GPU (50% faster than the previous generation). They also showcase the Snapdragon S4 dual-core MDP Tablet with Full High-Definition glasses-free 3D display in WUXGA (1920×1200) resolution. This tablet also has 2 8MP rear camera in order to capture 3D movies and photos. 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

Ubuntu on ARM: Improvements and Optimizations Done by Linaro – ELCE 2012

Ricardo Salveti de Araujo, developer platform lead for Linaro, displays the improvements Linaro have added to Ubuntu on ARM. Abstract: Since Linaro’s start, there was a need to have a supported platform for ARM, that could use the Linaro changes, to improve the ARM experience in general and to show the results of the work done by Linaro. In this session, it’ll be presented why Ubuntu was selected as the base platform for Linaro, describing the benefits and the areas Linaro is continuously investing to improve it. It’ll also be described the current state of the platform, showing some of Linaro’s achievements and also how we’re working to support the main SoC boards available, like Panda, Beagle, Origen, iMX53 and Snowball with the latest development by Ubuntu and Canonical, like Ubuntu TV, Phone and Tablet. You can also download the presentation slides. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 […]

The Yocto Project Overview and Update – ELC 2012

Saul Wold, User Space Architect at Intel Open Source Technology Center, discusses the latest on the Yocto Project at the Embedded Linux Conference 2012. Abstract: The Yocto Project is a joint project to unify the world’s efforts around embedded Linux and to make Linux the best choice for embedded designs. The Yocto Project is an open source starting point for embedded Linux development which contains tools, templates, methods and actual working code to get started with an embedded device project. In addition, the Yocto Project includes Eclipse plug-ins to assist the developer. This talk gives a walk-through of the key parts of the Yocto Project for developing embedded Linux projects. In addition, features will be described from the latest release of Yocto. At the end of the talk, developers should be able to start their own embedded project using the Yocto Project and use it for developing the next great […]

Low Cost Freescale iMX6 Quad Sabre Lite Development Board

i.MX6q SABRE Lite Board is a low-cost development platform based on Freescale Quad Core Cortex A9 i.MX 6Quad Application Processor. This will probably be the first low cost ARM quad-core development board to hit the market. Nvidia has previously announced the CARMA Tegra 3 CUDA Development Kit, but the price has not been announced and when I look at the picture of the board and the specs, “low cost” does not come to mind. Here are the technical specifications for the Sabre Lite board: Quad-Core ARM® Cortex A9 processor at 1GHz per core 1GB DDR3 @ 532MHz 3 display ports (RGB, LVDS, and HDMI 1.4a) Two camera ports (1xParallel, 1x MIPI CSI-2) Multi-stream-capable HD video engine delivering H.264 1080p60 decode,1080p30 encode and 3-D video playback in HD Triple Play Graphics system consisting of a Quad-shader 3D unit, and a separate 2-D and separate OpenVG Vertex acceleration engine for superior 3D, […]

Metaio To Introduce Augmented City Platform at MWC 2012

Metaio has unveiled plans to add 3D Object Tracking and Visual Search to its free mobile Augmented Reality SDK for Android and iOS, part of the Augmented City platform. This  SDK is optimized by major ARM chipset providers, and assembles technologies necessary for creating interactive and immersive AR experiences, such as the overlay of virtual information on building facades, city streets and almost any 3D real world object or device, says the company. Metaio Mobile SDK is specifically optimized for Texas Instruments OMAP4460/4470 and ST Ericsson NovaThor processors using respectively PowerVR SGX540, SGX544 and Mali-400 GPUs. The metaio Augmented City platform consists of diverse mobile and web software packages that use computer vision technology to insert 3D and digital information into the real world. Whereas  many existing Augmented Reality (AR) platforms limit experiences to GPS mapping and the anchoring of graphics to simple, 2D surfaces,  metaio platform can deliver real-time […]

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