The Raspberry Pi foundation is working on a camera module for the Raspberry Pi board and today they showed the very first picture taken with the “PiCam” module. The picture below has been taken with a camera module connected via the MIPI CSI-2 interface of the Raspberry Pi. On another subject, if you look closely at the top left of the picture, you can see the Raspberry Pi foundation (and probably Broadcom) uses Synopsys MetaWare Debugger (and Compiler?) to work on the software and fix bugs. Maybe more on that later… The camera module used supports up to 14 Mpixel resolution, but the final module will most probably have a 5MP resolution in order to make it cheaper. The mechanical design is not complete and the foundation does not have a price for the camera module yet. You can see what the 14MP camera module looks like (it’s basically a […]
VWorks VLAB Powers Freescale Vybrid Virtual Platform
Back in March, Freescale announced their Vybrid solution featuring both a Cortex A5 processor and a Cortex M4 microcontroller, and they had prototypes running an unnamed virtual platform in order to speed up software development and possibly have the software ready at the same time as the silicon is. Always looking to learn more, I studied and wrote about virtual hardware platforms such as Cadence Virtual System Platform, Wind River Simics Virtual Platforms and the open source Imperas OVPsim simulator. It turns out Freescale does not use any of these solutions, but relies on VWorks VLAB instead, which still use the same standard (SystemC/TLM) as the virtual hardware solutions aforementioned. VWorks uploaded a demonstration of VLAB running a virtual platform for the Freescale Vybrid controller and showing how it can handle both ARM Cortex-A5 and Cortex-M4 cores. This demo of VLAB 1.7.0 is pretty interesting and showcases: Dual (virtual) display […]
Huawei K3V2 Based MediaPad 10 FHD Tablet Hands-On Video
Earlier this year, Hisilicon – a subsidary of Huawei – unveiled the K3V2 quad-core Cortex A9 processor at Mobile World Congress and Huawei showcased the Ascend Quad D Android 4.0 smartphone as well as an high-end Android ICS Tablet based on this processor called Huawei MediaPad 10 (which nobody was allowed to use). This tablet features a 1920×1080 display with a 10-point touchscreen, 1GB RAM, 32 GB Flash and a 8MP rear camera together with a 1.3MP front camera. It also comes with a 6,600 mAh battery and is only 8.8mm thick. Huawei brought the device at CTIA 2012 and Engadget could shot an hands-on video of the MediaPad 10 FHD. No release date nor pricing is available, nevertheless it’s listed for 699.99 USD on Android-Sale.com. 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 […]
Tizen OS Running on Samsung Smartphone Reference Design (Video)
After Tizen 1.0 (codenamed Larkspur) release last week, a Samsung prototype was showcased at the Tizen Developer Conference on May 7-9 in San Francisco. The Samsung prototype fearures a 4.65 inch 1280 x 720p HD Super AMOLED display and runs Tizen on an Exyons? 1.2 Ghz dual core Cortex A9 chip with 1 GB of RAM. Vaibhav Sharma of The Handheld Blog, who has tried this developers’ reference design at the conference, shows us the main menu (similar to TouchWiz), system settings, the web browser (which scores 408 on HTML5Test.com), the picture gallery, the music player, youtube video playback etc… and it looks pretty smooth as shown in the hands-on video below. This is just a prototype, so performance will most likely be further improved once a Tizen smartphone is made available to the general public. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his […]
Xibo Digital Signage Running on Mele A1000 AllWinner A10 Set-Top Box
Those following my blog know that I recently bought a Mele A1000 to play around. For those who are not familiar with this device, the Mele A1000 is a $70 Android set-top box featuring an AllWinner A10 cortex A8 processor and lots of peripherals, and it can easily be hacked to run a Linux distributions. This hardware would also be a great digital signage player thanks to its video playback capabilities: up to 2160p video decoding and 1080p video output. Last year, I ported Xibo, an open source digital signage player, to ARM and ran it in the Beagleboard emulator (qemu), but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out in a real hardware. I’ve tried this rootfs based on Linaro ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) image for BeagleBoard in the Mele A1000, by following an adaptation of the method I provided earlier. For this demo, I created a […]
Cube U30GT Android 4.0 10.1″ Tablet Powered by Rockchip RK3066
Alldocube Technology and Science will manufacture one of the first Android 4.0 tablet based on the new Rockchip RK3066 Dual Cortex A9 Processor: the Cube U30GT which will sell under 51cube.com brand. Here are the specs of the device: CPU – RK3066, Cortex-A9 Dual Core processor 1.6 GHz GPU – Quad Core Mali 400 with OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, OpenVG1.1 RAM – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 16 GB NAND FAST / microSD Card slot (Support up to 32G) Display – 10.1″ capacitive touch screen (1280×800) Camera: 2.0 MPixel front camera 2.0 MPixel rear camera Sensors – 4-way G-sensor Connectivity – Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth and 3G (via external 3G dongle). Battery – Up to 4 hours movie playback,up to 12 hours music playback and up to 6 hours web page browsing. Weight – 450 grams Charbax discovered this tablet last month in Hong Kong. You can watch the video below to have a closer […]
Ziilabs ZMS-40 Decodes 6 HD Videos and Maps them to 3D Objects Simultaneously!
Ziilabs uploaded an impressive video that shows the Ziilabs ZMS-40 simultaneously decoding 6 High Definition Videos (although they don’t say if it’s 720p or 1080p) with 5 H.264 videos and 1 VP8/WebM video and rendering them on 3D objects via OpenGL ES. That’s quite amazing, but the next question could be why would you need that much processing power in a chip aimed at tablets? Augmented reality perhaps… 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
Embedded Artists NXP LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit Promotion
Embedded Artist and NXP have jointly designed the LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit to easily get started with motor control prototyping. This platform is based on NXP LPCXpresso MCUs and can control BLDC (Brushless DC), BLAC (Brushless AC), stepper and dual brushed DC motors. This is not a new design (2010), but Embedded Artist and NXP are discounting their development kit by 50% for a limited period, which brings the price of the kit to 149 Euros, instead of 299 Euros. The kit includes: LPCXpresso Motor Control Board LPCXpresso LPC1114 Board (The “stick” on the left in the picture above) LPCXpresso Eclipse-based IDE and GNU compiler BLDC Motor with hall sensors 24V Power supply (60W) Here are the specifications of the Motor Control Board: Controller MCU • Socket for LPCXpresso LPC1114 and LPC1343 • Socket for LPCXpresso LPC176x • Socket for LPC1xxx in PLCC44 • Expansion connector for control by LPC1800/LPC4000/LPC2900 […]