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August 31, 2017August 31, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

When Your Code Lands You in Jail

You’ve probably heard about Volkswagen emission scandal that surfaced last year. Basically, the company used some tricks to detect when the vehicle was under test and ran in low emission mode during those tests, and normally on the road emitting up to 40 times over the U.S. pollution limits. Cheating is quite easy because testing is performed indoor with the car wheels on rollers as shown in the picture below, so all the software had to do is detect whether the car was actually moving forward to select the right mode. Several executives involved in the decision to rig the emissions tests got charged as expected, but what happened to the engineer who implemented the code following his boss(es)’ request? Reuters reports that he’s been sentenced to 40-month prison term, and a $200,000 fine, after pleading guilty early on, and collaborating with authorities. His lawyer argued that Jiang (Engineer surname) […]

June 2, 2017June 2, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

XOD is a Visual Programming Language for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other Maker Boards

When you think about visual programming on the Raspberry Pi or Arduino board, Scratch may come to mind, but some developers have decided to create their own visual programming language working for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other boards. Meet XOD, pronounced ksəud. The developers explains their used “functional reactive programming principles and added graphical functionality”. XOD is comprised of “nodes” that represents either some physical device like a sensor, motor, or relay, or some operation such as addition, comparison, or text concatenation, which you can link together through inputs and outputs to create a program, and XOD IDE will compile the resulting diagram to create and upload a binary program to Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc… You can also convert a XOD diagram into a node with inputs and outputs to use it in another diagram, so the language is scalable. The developers are now looking for testers to play with […]

May 19, 2017June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Top Programming Languages & Operating Systems for the Internet of Things

The Eclipse foundation has recently done its IoT Developer Survey answered by 713 developers, where they asked IoT programming languages, cloud platforms, IoT operating systems, messaging protocols (MQTT, HTTP), IoT hardware architectures and more. The results have now been published. So let’s have a look at some of the slides, especially with regards to programming languages and operating systems bearing in mind that IoT is a general terms that may apply to sensors, gateways and the cloud, so the survey correctly separated languages for different segments of the IoT ecosystem. C and C++ are still the preferred languages for constrained devices, and developers are normally using more than one language as the total is well over 100%. IoT gateways are more powerful and resourceful (memory/storage) hardware, so it’s no surprise higher level languages like Java and Python join C and C++, with Java being the most used language with 40.8% […]

May 18, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android Studio 3.0 Preview Release with Support for Kotlin Programming Language, Android O Preview Images

Most Android apps used to be programmed in Java with the Eclipse IDE, then Google introduced Android Studio in 2013 which has now replaced the latter, and with the release of Android Studio 3.0 Canary 1 preview, the company is now offering developers to program apps using Kotlin language instead of Java. Kotlin programming language is 100% compatible with Java language, and you can even mix Kotlin and Java in your code. Kotlin can make your code much more simple while declaring classes, and it has a few other improvements over Java. Android Studio also include a Java to Kotlin converter. The language has already been used by Expedia, Flipboard, Pinterest, Square, and others. Android Studio 3.0 also brings many other improvement, such as performance profiling tools for the CPU, memory, and networks showing your app performance in real-time, and faster Gradle builds for large sized app projects. Android Studio […]

January 15, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Self-hosted OpenGL ES Development on Ubuntu Touch

Blu wrote BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition review – from a developer’s perspective – last year, and now is back with a new post explaining how to develop and deploy OpenGL ES applications directly on the Ubuntu Touch tablet. Ever since I started using a BQ M10 for console apps development on the go I’ve been wanting to get something, well, flashier going on that tablet. Since I’m a graphics developer by trade and by heart, GLES was the next step on the Ubuntu Touch for me. This article is about writing, building and deploying GLES code on Ubuntu Touch itself, sans a desktop PC. Keep that in mind if some procedure seems unrefined or straight primitive to you – for one, I’m a primitive person, but some tools available on the desktop are, in my opinion, impractical on the Touch itself. That means no QtCreator today, nor Qt, for […]

October 15, 2016February 8, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

HMP, Real-Time Linux and Xenomai – A Look at Three Options to Develop Real-Time Linux Systems on Application Processors

This is a guest post about Heterogeneous Multicore Processing (HMP), Real-Time Linux, and Xenomai to develop real-time Linux systems written by Guilherme Fernandes, Raul Muñoz, Leonardo Veiga, Brandon Shibley, all working for Toradex. Introduction Application processor usage continues to broaden. System-on-Chips, usually powered by ARM Cortex-A cores, are taking over several spaces where small ARM Cortex-M, and other microcontroller devices, have traditionally dominated. This trend is driven by several facts, such as: The strong requirements for connectivity, often related to IoT and not only from a hardware point of view but also related to software, protocols, and security The need for highly interactive interfaces such as multi-touch, high-resolution screens, and elaborate graphical user interfaces; The decreasing price of SoCs, a consequence of its volume gain and new production capabilities. Typical cases exemplifying the statement above are the customers we see every day starting a product redesign upgrading from a microcontroller […]

July 27, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Top 10 Programming Languages in 2016 for Embedded Software Development

IEEE Spectrum has published a list of the top programming languages in 2016 for Web, Mobile, Enterprise, and Embedded sectors with rankings created by weighting and combining 12 metrics from 10 sources. So I thought it would be fun to have a look at the top 10 of languages used for embedded software, and the results are: As expected, C and C++ are at the top, but I’m quite surprised that “Arduino” is now considered a programming language, as it is simply based on C/C++. When I worked as an embedded software engineer a few years ago, I personally used C, and Assembly, and to a lesser extend C++ and VHDL. I only recently started to play with Arduino code, and while I’ve heard of most other languages in the list, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen Ladder Logic, probably because it’s designed to program PLCs in industrial control […]

March 19, 2015March 19, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Google Summer of Code 2015 is Now Open for Student Applications

Google has now announced that students applications for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) are now open. Students can get paid up to $5,500 to work on various open source projects selected for the event. Fewer companies have been accepted this year, and even big names like the Linux Foundation and Mozilla got their application rejected. There are still over 137 open source projects to work on including: MinnowBoard project – Potential software projects for the Intel Atom embedded board include making low speed I/O buses more accessible via intermediate open source libraries (e.g. SMBus/PMBus/Wiring libraries), and improving the open source firmware. lowRISC SoC project – Potential projects: Schematic Viewer for Netlists (SVG/JavaScript), open source FPGA compilation flow using Yosys, accessing the OpenCores ecosystem, etc… BeagleBoard.org – Lots of project ideas relying on the BeagleBone Black board, dealing with Linux kernel support for embedded devices and interfaces, ARM processor support in […]