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August 22, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Learn the Basics of Humanoid Robots with InMoov Finger Starter Kit

In a not so distant future, most humans will live off their government provided basic income, relaxing and drinking their robot brewed, drone delivered beer or soda, opened and served by their humanoid robot maid. Well, maybe… In the meantime, it might be interesting to learn how to make humanoid robots such as InMoov, but since it’s quite complicated, it might be better to start small… with a single finger. That’s exactly what InMoov Finger Starter Kit offers you to do in order to understand the basics principles of the complete robot. The kit includes: 1x 3D printed base support in ABS 3D printed finger parts in ABS 1 meter braided 200 LB tendon 1x 5cm filament for peg/pin use to assemble finger joints 1x wheel horn adapter (Servo Pulley) 4x screws to fix the servo to the base support. You’ll also need to provide your own Arduino Uno (or […]

August 12, 2016August 12, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Project OWL Open Source Hardware Ophthalmoscope is 25 Times Cheaper than Commercial Products

Medical grade equipments are usually very expensive, partly because of their complexity, but also because of certifications, legal reasons, and low manufacturing volumes. That’s where open source hardware can make a big difference, and there has been several open source hardware prosthetic hands or arms such as Openbionics hand, but Ebin Philip and his team has tackled another issue with Project OWL, an open indirect ophthalmoscope (OIO) designed for screening retinal diseases, which normally costs between $10,000 to $25,000, but their open source hardware design can be put together for about $400. The design features a Raspberry Pi 2 board connected to a WaveShare 5″ Touchscreen LCD, a Raspberry Pi Pi IR Camera (M12 lens mount) with 16mm FL M12 lens, a 3 Watt Luxeon LED, two 50x50mm mirrors, a linear polarizer sheet, a 20 Dioptre disposable lens, and various passive components. While the Raspberry Pi board is not open […]

August 2, 2016August 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Samsung JerryScript is a Lightweight Open Source JavaScript Engine for the Internet of Things

In the old days, micro-controller programming was all done in assembly or C, but in recent years higher level languages, included interpreted ones such as Python and JavaScript, have made their ways into MCUs with projects such as MicroPython or Espruino (JS) often running on STMicro STM32 ARM Cortex M micro-controllers, but also other platforms such as ESP8266. As I browsed through the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016 schedule, I discovered that Samsung worked on it own implementation of a JavaScript engine for the Internet of Things: JerryScript. It is a full implementation of ECMAScript 5.1 standard written in C that can run on micro-controllers with less than 64KB RAM, and less than 200KB storage (160KB footprint with ARM Thumb-2 compilation). JerryScript is comprised of two main components: Parser and Virtual Machine (VM), with the parser performing translation of input ECMAScript application into byte-code than is then executed by the Virtual […]

August 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Embedded Linux Conference & IoT Summit Europe 2016 Schedule

Embedded Linux Conference & IoT summit 2016 first took place in the US in April, but the events are now also scheduled in Europe on October 11 – 13 in Berlin, Germany, and the schedule has now been published. Even if you are no going to attend, it’s always interesting to find out more about the topic covered in that type of events, so I had a look, and created my own virtual schedule with some of the sessions. Tuesday, October 11 10:40 – 11:30 – JerryScript: An Ultra-lightweight JavaScript Engine for the Internet of Things – Tilmann Scheller, Samsung Electronics JerryScript is a lightweight JavaScript engine designed to bring the success of JavaScript to small IoT devices like lamps, thermometers, switches and sensors. This class of devices tends to use resource-constrained microcontrollers which are too small to fit a large JavaScript engine like V8 or JavaScriptCore. JerryScript is heavily […]

July 27, 2016July 27, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Jiayu S3 and S3 Plus Smartphones Get Android 6.0 Firmware Releases with Source Code

Jiayu S3 and S3 Plus are your typical Android smartphones powered by Mediatek MT6752/MT6753 octa core Cortex A53 processor with 3GB RAM, 16GB flash, and a 5.5″ touch screen display. The news here is that Jiayu Germany (a reseller, not the manufacturer), and Team M.A.D (Mediatek Android Developers) comprised of XDA members, have releasing three custom ROMs based on Android 6.0.1 for the smartphone: Cyanogenmod13, Paranoid Android (AOSPA) and AICP (Android Ice Cold Project), which contrast with my Iocean MT6752 smartphone still stuck on Android 4.4.4. I’ll reproduce the technical specifications of Jiayu S3+ phone for reference: SoC- Mediatek MT6753 Octa-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 processor @ 1.3 GHz, with ARM Mali-T720 GPU System Memory – 3GB RAM Storage – 16 GB eMMC + micro SD slot up to 64GB Display – 5.5” IPS capacitive touchscreen display; 1920×1080 resolution Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi , Bluetooth 4.0, GPS / A-GPS, FM Radio Cellular […]

July 21, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Google Research PRUDAQ is a 40MSPS ADC Data Acquisition (DAQ) Cape for BeagleBone Black & Green

Engineers at Google Research wanted to measure the strength of a carrier signals without having to use a bulky oscilloscope or DAQ (Data Acquisition) system, so they looked into several makers boards to achieve this task, eventually decided to go with BeagleBone Black / Green, and created their own PRUDAQ cape capable of sampling 40 million samples per second, and open source it all. PRUDAQ cape specifications: Dual-channel simultaneously-sampled 10-bit ADC (Analog Devices AD9201) Up to 20MSPS per channel (40MSPS total) theoretical 0-2V input voltage range (DC coupled) 4:1 analog switches in front of each channel provide a total of 8 single-ended analog inputs. (See here for differential input) SMA jacks for direct access to the 2 ADC channels Flexible clock options: External input via SMA jack Internal on-board 10MHz oscillator Programmable clock from BeagleBone GPIO pins Powered via BeagleBone headers – no external power needed Fully exposed BeagleBone headers […]

July 12, 2016July 12, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

SiFive Introduces Freedom U500 and E500 Open Source RISC-V SoCs

Open source used to be a software thing, with the hardware design being kept secret for fear of being copied, but companies such as Texas Instruments realized that from a silicon vendor perspective it would make perfect sense to release open source hardware designs with full schematics, Gerber files and SoM, to allow smaller companies and hobbyists, as well as the education market, normally not having the options to go through standard sales channels and the FAE (Field Application Engineer) support, to experiment with the platform and potentially come up with commercial products. That’s exactly what they did with the Beagleboard community, but there’s still an element that’s closed source, albeit documented: the processor itself. But this could change soon, as SiFive, a startup founded by the creators of the free and open RISC-V architecture, has announced two open source SoCs with Freedom U500 processor and Freedom E300 micro-controller. Freedom […]

July 3, 2016July 3, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

AOMedia AV1 is a Royalty-free, Open Source Video Codec Aiming to Replace VP9 and Compete with H.265

The Alliance for Open Media, or AOMedia, is a new non-profit organization founded in 2015 by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, and more recently joined by AMD, ARM, and NVIDIA, whose first project is to develop AV1 royalty-free and open video codec and format to provide an alternative to H.265 / HEVC, and a successor to VP9. The project is a team effort combining teams working on Daala, Thor, and VP10 video codecs, and while AFAIK, AV1 specifications have not been released yet (target: Q1 2017), the organization has already released an early implementation of AV1 video decoder and encoder under the combination of an BSD-2 clause license and the Alliance for Open Media Patent License 1.0 , which can be found on googlesource.com. So I’ve had a quick my myself following the instructions, by first downloading one uncompressed YUV4MPEG sample:

mkdir ~/derf_cif
pushd ~/derf_cif
wget http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/husky_cif.y4m
popd

mkdir ~/derf_cif

pushd ~/derf_cif

wget http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/y4m/husky_cif.y4m

popd

and the source code:

git clone https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom
cd aom

1 2	git clone https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom cd aom

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