Programming Category - Page 29 of 43 - CNX Software

April 23, 2012August 12, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Texas Instruments F28069 Piccolo controlSTICK Unboxing and Review

I’ve recently received a TI F28069 Piccolo controlSTICK evaluation kit after winning a game organized by Mouser and Texas Instruments on Facebook. I’ll show what’s the content of this C2000 MCU development kit and play around with the development tools provided. Mouser sent the development tools by Fedex which took 6 days to arrive in Thailand, and the package with the development tools looks like the one below. You’ll find the following in the package: F28069 Piccolo controlSTICK USB Cable 6x Jumpers 2x Cables to connect to external hardware CD with Piccolo F28069 controlSTICK development tools Here’s a closer look to the top of Piccolo controlSTICK, with (left to right) the JTAG emulator chip, C2000 MCU (320F28069PNA) and connector… …and the bottom of Piccolo controlSTICK. Now let’s have a look at the content of the CD: The Drivers directory contains the drivers needed for the controlSTICK development kit (also used […]

April 19, 2012April 25, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Building Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi (ARMv6)

I had previously written the instructions to build an older version of Chromium (via Berkelium) for ARM using Beagleboard/Overo rootfs in order to use it with Xibo digital signage. Recently I’ve been contacted by hexxeh, who maintains Chromium OS vanilla builds for x86 and MacOS computer, as he intends to provide Chromium OS for the Raspberry Pi, and you should be able to get a SD card image once everything is working from the site above. Today, I’ll post the steps followed to build Chromium OS LKGR (“the latest revision to pass only unit tests”) optimized for ARMv6 processor with soft-float support, which is the type of processor (Broadcom BCM2835) used in the Raspberry Pi. Please note that although it can build, it still does not run properly and a few more changes are needed. First, you’ll need a fast machine to build Chromium OS in a reasonable amount of […]

April 16, 2012April 16, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Texas Instruments Releases Android 4.0.3 DevKit for Beagleboard-XM and Beaglebone

After collaborating with arowboat, android-porting and Linaro communities, Texas Instruments has released Android 4.0.3 development kits for Sitara microprocessors which support Beagleboard-XM (Sitara DM3730) and Beaglebone (Sitara AM335x) low cost development boards, as well as other Sitara-based evaluation modules and development boards. Android 4.0.3 Devkit for Beaglebone If you have a Beaglebone (and an LCD or DVI-D cape), you can use TI Android ICS 4.0.3 DevKit v3.0.1, a release providing an Android ICS 4.0.3 distribution for TI’s Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex A8 Processors. This DevKit provides Android sources with pre-integrated SGX (3D graphics accelerator) drivers, TI hardware abstraction for Audio, WLAN & Bluetooth for TI WL1271 chipset, USB mass storage, etc, as well as development and debugging tools such as a toolchain, TI CCSv5, ADT plugins and more, which are provided to build custom Android solutions for the embedded market more easily. The pre-built images includes Android default apps, multimedia […]

April 4, 2012April 4, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Nokia Qt Labs Releases Qt 5.0 Alpha

Nokia Qt Labs announced the alpha release of Qt 5 C++ application development framework, which focuses on the delivery of Qt Essential modules for Qt 5. This new version of Qt goal is to bring the focus to a model, although native Qt using C++ would still be used to implement modular backend functionality for Qt Quick. The developers explains that this module is working nicely on Qt for embedded system where UIs are full screen, but more work is needed on the desktop, and it will only be fully implemented in Qt 5.1 or 5.2. Qt developers make 4 big architectural changes to Qt internal architecture: Base all Qt ports on Qt Platform Abstraction layer (QPA) to make it easier to port Qt to other windowing systems and devices. Re-architect Qt graphics stack using a a Scenegraph on top of OpenGL to increase performance versus Qt 4, using Qt […]

April 3, 2012June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Green Hills MULTI 6.0 Compiler Improves ARM MCU Performance by up to 40%

Last week at Design West 2012, Green Hills Software announced it had achieved the highest compiler performance scores ever certified by EEMBC CoreMark and that it outperformed the nearest competing compilers by 35.5% using its MULTI 6.0 – Compiler 2012. Benchmarks were completed on 3 ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers: Freescale Kinetis K60 MCU @ 100 Mhz – 35.5% improvement over nearest competitor. Freescale Kinetis K70 MCU @ 120 Mhz – 29.6% improvement over nearest competitor. STMicroelectronics STM32F417IGt6 @ 168 MHz – 34.7% improvement over nearest competitor. Since apparently it’s bad marketing to name competitors in press releases, I went directly to the source (EEMBC Coremark benchmark results) to check out the results and competitors (IAR and Keil) for Kinetis K60 MCU. The first thing you may notice is that there are 2 tests per compiler / MCU combination. That’s because there 2 test configurations: Code in internal Flash – Data in internal […]

April 3, 2012April 3, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Vim Touch: Vim Editor for Android

Many Linux developers or admins use vi or vim in Linux to edit source or/and configuration files and some may want to use it in the go in their smartphone or tablets. Some hacks are available to install vim on Android via ADB on a rooted device, but now, it has all become nice and easy, as a touch enabled version of vim called VimTouch is also available on Android. VimTouch supports full vim syntax and finger touch gestures to help VIM much more usable on touch screens. This vim editor for Android includes the following features: Touch to scroll Fling to scroll Long press to zoom-in Two-fingers to delete lines (“dd”) or new lines (“p”) Single tap to send “ESC” Read email attachments Single instance to open files in vim window Real VIM runtime You would think it is rather cumbersome to use vi/vim on a mobile device, but reviews […]

March 29, 2012September 30, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

ARM Releases Ne10: An Open Source Library with NEON Optimized Functions

The Advanced SIMD extension (aka NEON or “MPE” Media Processing Engine) is a combined 64- and 128-bit single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set that provides standardized acceleration for media and signal processing applications for ARM Cortex-A (ARMv7) processors and the goal of these instructions is similar to MMX, SSE, and 3DNow! extensions for x86 processors. Starting early 2011, ARM has been working internally on a project codenamed Snappy to develop common functions accelerated by NEON. They have now released the first version of Snappy, now called the Ne10 library, which is available on GitHub at https://github.com/projectNe10/Ne10 . The code has been developed in C and Assembler and tested on Ubuntu on ARM (Linaro). A Makefile is also included to build it for Android (AOSP). The current functions include vector and matrix operations accelerated by NEON instructions. Since the library is open source, ARM hopes developers will make use of the Ne10 […]

March 22, 2012March 22, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Android SDK Tools and ADT Revision 17 with VM Acceleration for x86 Emulator

Google has released revision 17 of the SDK Tools and the Eclipse plugin. This release brings new features and bug fixes in for Lint static checker, the build system, and the emulator among other things. Here’s what’s new for Lint in r17: Lint API Check – Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. You can use the @TargetApi annotation to specify local overrides for conditionally loaded code. New Lint Rules – Added over 40 new Lint rules for a total of over 80, including checks for performance, XML layouts, manifest and file handling. Ignoring Lint Warnings – Added ability to suppress Lint warnings in Java code with the new @SuppressLint annotation, and in XML files with the new tools: namespace prefix and ignore attribute. New Eclipse Lint UI – Improved HTML and XML reporting and Eclipse integration. Improvements to […]