Programming ESP8266 Boards with a Smartphone

In recent days, I wrote about low cost MCU boards such as the $2 BluePill, and the One Dollar Board project, but several people commented that while the board themselves are very cheap, it might still be a problem in some developing countries, where access to computers cannot be taken for granted. So person suggested that such initiative would work better in some countries if programming was possible via a smartphone instead. Is that true? According to a 2014/2015 study by Pew Research Center, there is some truth to it, but it varies greatly between countries. For example,  55% of Brazilian adults own a computer at home, while only 24% own a smartphone, but in Kenya only 8% own a computer at home, while 15% own a smartphone. Some devices in the “cellphones but not smartphones” might be feature phones with WiFi and a web browser. Anyway ideally a low […]

Setup Guide & Mini Review of BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition Tablet from a Developer’s Perspective

BQ Aquaris M10 UBuntu Edition is the first officially supported Ubuntu tablet on the market. Blu, a frequent commenter on this blog, has purchased the Full HD version, and in the guest post below, shares his experience setting up the device for development purpose, before shortly providing his overall impressions about the tablet itself. Quick introduction Ever since I had to retire my trusty-but-ancient ARM notebook (a Genesi Efika iMX51) I’ve been looking for a new ARM notebook or perhaps a 2-in-1 device, that I could use for development on the go. The basic requirements are long battery life, passive cooling and reasonable price. Also, Just Enough Power™ for running vim, a couple of toolchains (gcc/clang with gold) and, well, enough grunt to run my coding experiments. Naturally, BQ M10 Ubuntu Edition immediately got my attention to the extent of me placing an order, which got delivered this past week. […]

Future Versions of Kodi Might Not Get an Android Port Unless The Project Find Developers

As I shortly mentioned yesterday in LibreELEC post, Kodi has now lost its only Android developer earlier this year due to some disagreements, and the project is now (mostly) maintained in Kodi forks such as SPMC or MrMC. The situation is not yet critical, but if Android developers are not found soon, there may not be an Android version in the future, as mentioned on the latest blog post on Kodi.tv. Here’s the excerpt of that developer post specific to Android: A Call for Android Devs (and Windows and iOS) As many of you know, we are a bit shorthanded in the Android development department. While there are actually two projects SPMC and MrMC that have Android devs committing code, the upstream project Kodi has no one at the moment. If you are familiar with C++ and Android development (particularly recent Android TV development) and would like to help, feel […]

GNU Complexity Command Line Tool Measures Complexity of C Code

GNU complexity is a command line tool that computes a complexity measure of C source code, similar to pmccabe, but with a different method of calculating results with short functions scoring lower than pmccabe and highly nested functionality can score considerably higher. It can be useful to locate suspicious areas in unfamiliar code, get an idea of the efforts required to either understand the code or test it, or self-assess your own code. Bruce Korb, the maintainer, has just released version 1.5 with some bug fixes, so I’ve given it a quick try. We’ll need to get the code, build and install it first:

The user’s manual provides some insights and an example, which I’ve used against a directory in Linux source code:

The resulting table shows six information per line: the computed score, the number of lines between the opening and closing curly braces (ln-ct), the number […]

Embedded Systems Conference 2016 Schedule – April 13-14

The Embedded Systems Conference 2016 will take place in Boston on April 13-14, and the organizers have now released the schedule, minus some keynotes, which features four main tracks: Embedded Hardware, Embedded Software, Connected Devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), and the ESC Engineering Theatre. As usual, I’ve gone through the list of talks and composed my own little virtual schedule which ended up with sessions focusing on power management, IoT, and security, as well some optimization and drivers development talks among others, such as patents, and the origin of Gerber files. Wednesday 13 8:00 – 9:00 – Power Management in Embedded Systems by Colin Walls, Embedded Software Technologist, Mentor Graphics The importance of power management in today’s embedded designs has been steadily growing as an increasing number of battery powered devices are developed. In this session, we will discuss design considerations that should be made when starting a […]

Light Biz OS Firmware, Android and Ubuntu Image, and Android SDK Released for GeekBox (RK3368)

GeekBox is an upcoming Android TV box based on Rockchip RK3368 octa-core processor that doubles as a system-on-module and development board. The company has now uploaded the Android 5.1 SDK, including Linux 3.10.79 kernel, on github. It’s not for the Android SDK for RK3368, but at least it’s not just an outdated tarball, and will hopefully be regularly updated directly on github. Beside the source code, the company also released three firmware image including Rockchip’s Light Biz OS desktop operating system based on Lollipop: Biz OS for GeekBox – V151208 (8th of December 2015) Android and Lubuntu dual boot image  – V151129 (29th of November 2015) Android 5.1 image – V151129 (29th of November 2015) It’s quite possible those images will also work on other Rockchip RK3368 platform with some modifications, e.g. an updated device tree file for a given hardware. I’ve downloaded Biz OS adn the dual boot image, […]

Allwinner A64 Android 5.1 SDK and Linux Source Code

Allwinner A64 is likely to become quite popular as it will be used in PINE A64 board, Olimex open source hardware laptop featuring A64-OLinuXino board, and some low cost tablets. We’ve already got some documentation such as Allwinner A64 datasheet and user’s manual, but AFAIK, there was no source code released for the board. The good news is that you can now download Android 5.1 SDK and Linux source code on Baidu with four files available: lichee_A64_A5.1_V1.0.tar.gz – Linux source code android_A64_A5.1_V1.0.tar.gz– Android 5.1 SDK android_prebuilts_A64_A5.1_V1.0.tar.gz – Some pre-built binaries for Android A64硬件资料.zip – Documentation including the datasheet, product brief, and user’s manual which we’ve already got, but also some hardware with reference schematics, PCB layout files, and BoM for an Allwinner A64 tablet. That’s about 7.4GB to download, and apart from the documentation, the download is not quite complete yet, so I could not look into the details of […]

Free Electrons Releases Buildroot Training Materials

Free Electrons develops embedded Linux & Android software, and also provides related training. On-site training sessions are scheduled from time to time, or organized on request, and they usually release their training materials for free, as they did for their Embedded Linux training in 2012, or their Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded course more recently. Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons’ Chief Technical Officer, recently informed me that the company also released training materials for Buildroot, which like the Yocto Project is a build system, but it had been around for much longer, and the company is actively participating in its development with over 2,800 patches submitted upstream over the years. Four main resources have been released for the course, under a Creative Commons BY-SA license: training materials for Buildroot – 325 pages Practical labs instructions (PDF) with BeagleBone Black – 32 pages Practical labs data (.tar.xz) – Patchsets for drivers, rootfs, and […]

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