Testing Category - Page 162 of 169 - 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 21, 2012April 21, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

How-to Make a Process Continue to Run After Closing an SSH client

If you are connected to a remote server via SSH, you may want to start a time-consuming task or a background task in the server and right after starting it, close your SSH client, because you need to turn off your computer to “save the earth”, reduce your electricity bill, or simply because you need to bring your laptop with you. The problem is that if you close your SSH client, the terminal session will be terminated together all processes launched from this terminal. There are 2 tools to solve this issue: GNU screen and nohup. GNU screen screen may not be installed in your Linux distribution. In Debian/Ubuntu you can install it with apt-get: sudo apt-get install screen In your SSH terminal, start GNU screen: screen Press enter to discard the text, run your command and press Ctrl+a+d (and not Ctrl+Alt+d) to detach the screen. That’s it. You can […]

April 19, 2012April 19, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

How-to Setup a VNC Remote Connection to a Raspberry Pi

I don’t have a Raspberry Pi board, yet I’m using one right now remotely thanks to the VNC (Virtual Network Computing) protocol. The Raspberry Pi I use runs the latest Debian-13-04-2012 image. Here’s how to do to access the Raspberry Pi desktop in Windows XP. These instructions could also be followed to connect to any remote networked Linux device with minor modifications. Connect to the Raspberry Pi via SSH Install a VNC server (e.g. tightvncserver): # sudo apt-get install tightvncserver Run startx in the background # startx & Start the VNC server (it will ask a password of your choice): # tightvncserver New ‘X’ desktop is raspberrypi:1 Starting applications specified in /home/cnxsoft/.vnc/xstartup Log file is /home/cnxsoft/.vnc/raspberrypi:1.log Back to your computer. Install a VNC client such as TightVNC for Windows. You only need to select “TightVNC Viewer” during installation. Start TightVNC Viewer (In Windows XP, Start->All Programs->TightVNC->TightVNC Viewer) Enter the Raspberry […]

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 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 […]

March 31, 2012March 31, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5) Demos At Design West

ARM has shot a few video demos of their ARM Development Studio 5 (DS 5), a software development tool suite for ARM platforms, at Design West 2012. The first video shows DS 5 running on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 platform (dual cortex A9 + FPGA), and we can see the memory map, registers, call graphs and stack usage. We can also see real-time processor switching and the function that takes the most CPU resources (profiling). The second videos showcases ARM DS-5 Streamline, a performance analyzer, which helps determine how well programs are running on a Linux or Android platform, on an Samsung Exynos 4210 platform (Origen board?). This tool also to profile both the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 and ARM Mali-400 MP GPU in the platform. We are shown three types of reports: CPU/GPU Loading Threads usage Power Usage per application The third and last video shows ARM DS 5 on Freescale i.MX6 […]

March 28, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Virtual Hardware Platforms: Test & Debug Software Before the Silicon is Ready

Historically software could only be tested and debugged when the first silicon sample was ready, and the software team could not participate in the design process. But thanks to Virtual Hardware Platforms, software can be executed at speeds close to real time on an abstract model of the hardware, available long before a design has been completed. The virtual platform is designed to simplify the creation and support of virtual prototypes and allow design teams to begin developing software weeks to months before a hardware prototype is available, and software teams can use it as their application development platform. For example, Freescale is using a Virtual Hardware Platform for their new Vybrid Controllers to emulate both Cortex A5 and Cortex M4 cores, as well as peripherals and run OS such as Linux or MQX before the Controllers are ready (Q2 2012). One Virtual Hardware Platform has just won the ACE […]

March 26, 2012March 26, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Glark, an alternative to Grep

grep is a very useful tool to search or filter strings in order to look for files, parse useful info in log files and more. glark is an alternative to grep, it has few features that grep does not such as complex expressions, Perl-compatible regular expressions, and excluding binary files. It also has a more fancy way of display results. It is described as follows in the manpage: Similar to “grep”, “glark” offers: Perl-compatible regular expressions, color highlighting of matches, context around matches, complex expressions (“and” and “or”), grep output emulation, and automatic exclusion of non-text files. Its regular expressions should be familiar to persons experienced in Perl, Python, or Ruby. File may also be a list of files in the form of a path. glark is not installed by default. To install it in Debian/Ubuntu/Mint: sudo apt-get install glark It does not appear to be available in Fedora and […]