Sigma Designs SMP865X Category - Page 2 of 2 - CNX Software

September 21, 2010November 4, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Netgem Set-top-box N5000 – Toshiba Places

Mid-september, Netgem showcased their new set-top box at IBC 2010: the Netbox N5000 Internet/TV Adaptor. A modified version of this Set-top box will be used by Toshiba (Toshiba places) and be available for purchase for 99 Euros starting in October 2010 in France and later in 2011 in some other Europeans countries. [ad#Google Adsense – Wide Banner] First let’s have a look at the casing (Not the one used by Toshiba places). The front panel has the Power LED, a USB port and the remote sensor. They’ll either provide Infrared or RF remotes depending on the end customer requirements. The back of the set-top box features TV In/Out, Digital Audio (S/PDIF) output, HDMI output, an Ethernet port and the power jack (+12V). Their product brief also mentions a USB port on the rear as an option and Wifi support (802.11n). The Netbox N5000 hardware is based on Sigma Designs SMP8655 […]

August 14, 2010October 6, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Media Player based on SMP8653 – Magic Box HDP500

Magic Box HDP500 manufactured by gmini (apparently a Russian company) is a new media player featuring the 500-Mhz SMP8653 chipset from Sigma Designs. It does not use Android OS yet, and as far I know no company has yet released SMP8653 Android based products. Having said that, it comes with most of the connectivity you would expect from a decent set-top box: USB connector (device: USB storage,host: laptop/PC connection), Audio/Video Composite ouput, Component (YPbPr) output, HDMI and optical digital audio output and and Ethernet port. On the software side, it is a full featured 1080p media player, with video, music and picture galleries, Internet Radio, UPnP support… It could also be used as a NAS with the USB host connection to your PC. The missing features are: no support for digital TV (e.g. DVB-T, DMB-TH), no Wifi support, no web applications/web browser, no movie download (BT/Emule), no Real media video […]

July 28, 2010May 12, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Enabling swap in embedded systems

If your embedded system running Linux does not have enough memory, you can enable swap to get more memory. However if your platform does not have MMU (Memory Management Unit) as is the case for Sigma Designs EM8620 series, it won’t support swap, so forget it. If your platform does have MMU, as is the case for many newer platforms such as Sigma Designs SMP8630, SMP8640 and SMP8650 series, you can enable swap support. First you’ll have to make sure swap support is enabled in your kernel:

CONFIG_SWAP=y
CONFIG_SWAP_PREFETCH=y

1 2	CONFIG_SWAP=y CONFIG_SWAP_PREFETCH=y

and swapon/swapoff is enabled in busybox. So for example if you have an IDE harddisk with the second partition configured as swap. (Use fdisk to create a partition and mkswap /dev/hda2 to initialize the partition), you can enable the swap as follows:

swapon /dev/hda2

1	swapon /dev/hda2

If you get out-of-memory killer kernel error, you can change the “swapiness” to avoid oom-killer to kick in.

echo 0 &gt; /proc/sys/vm/mapped

1	echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mapped

[…]

May 22, 2010September 21, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Sigma Designs Android Demo

Here’s a demo of Android running on Sigma Designs SMP8654. They made their own GUI and start Android from there. To see the android part just go to 2:35 directly. 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 8, 2010November 18, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Resources for SMP865x SMP8652 SMP8653 SMP8654 SMP8655 SMP8656

Less than a year ago, Sigma Designs released the SMP8652, a secure media processor “designed to provide the optimal price/performance configuration for thin client applications, which include IPTV set-top boxes, digital media adapters, and hybrid cable/IP thin clients.” SMP8652 provides cost savings compared to the SMP863X series, due the integration of functions such as Ethernet and USB – that allowed them to skip PCI support in their new chip – and better performance (500Mhz MIPS24K CPU). SMP8650 series processors also use the MRUA and DCCHD SDK that need to be purchased as for the previous generation of chips. [ad#Google Adsense – Wide Banner] You can also purchase more SDK from Sigma for SMP8652: Adobe Flash Lite Qt/Webkit Integration Java VM Some DRM SDK (e.g. Microsoft DRM)… As for SMP8630 series, SMP86520 series processors also have a MMU (as most of new chips nowadays) so that you won’t come across the […]