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Most Engineers have Multicore/Multiprocessor Experience

In a recent blog post entitled “Engineers’ Multicore/Multiprocessor Experience Improving” , VDC research revealed a survey showing that more and more engineers are gaining experience working on multicore or multiprocessor projects. In their 2011 survey, there are now only 32% of engineers who have never worked on projects based on multicore and/or multiprocessor versus 45% in 2010. VDC Research questions the the factors that are driving engineers’ expanding experience with multiprocessing, such as  the increasing availability and affordability of multicore processors, advancements in processor technology, the effectiveness of ISVs efforts around educating the engineering community about the use of multicore or the continued maturation of software solutions that enable parallel programming. But I believe it’s all of the above. There are now many cost effective multicore processors for embedded systems (mainly thanks to ARM). Some of them have low cost development platforms that attract more developers. For device where battery […]

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Can You Really Boost your Wifi Router Signal with a Beer Can?

I’ve recently come across an interesting and amusing story entitled “Boost Your WiFi Signal Using Only a Beer Can”  on discovery channel website. I’ve said to myself that I’ve got to try with my WiFi router. The interesting part is that my WiFi router (TP-LINK TL-WR940N) has 3 antennas, so I had to diligently drink three beer cans (LEO brand,  the best local beer in Thailand). Once this was done, I had all that I needed, besides a pair of scissors, a utility knife and some double faced tape. The next step was to clean the beer cans, let them dry and cut the bottom and top of the beer cans as described on discover channel blog post. There is no dotted red line on LEO beer cans, but there are yellow horizontal lines that make this can perfect for the job. After less than 5 minutes of hard work, […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Microsoft demoes Windows 8 on Tegra 3 Tablet

Microsoft demonstrated several Windows 8 features running on a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 tablet at the company’s BUILD developer conference in Anaheim, California. During the event, Mike Angulio – Microsoft’s VP of Windows planning – demonstrated: Windows 8 devices’ ability to instantly switch on and off The new Windows 8 user interface, designed to work equally well with both touch-based tablets and keyboard/mouse-based PCs New applications, mostly written in HTML5, which are always running in the background Platform agnostic applications (running on both ARM and x86) Anguilo also emphasized that all Windows 8 applications will feature hardware accelerated graphics so that developers will not need to do additional work to support hardware acceleration and their applications will automatically take advantage of graphics on both ARM and x86 platforms. Source: Microsoft Wows BUILD Crowd with Windows 8 on Quad-Core NVIDIA Tegra Tablet You can watch Windows 8 Demo from Build Conference […]

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Ziilabs Unveils Low Cost Jaguar3 Android Tablet Reference Designs

Earlier this May, Ziilabs announced the ZMS-20 dual core processors targeted at Android Honeycomb tablets. They have now unveil the 3rd generation of Android Tablet reference designs based on ZMS-20 and ZMS-40 called Jaguar3. Here’s an excerpt of the press release: ZiiLABS, a pioneering media processor and platforms company (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd), today introduced its JAGUAR3, the most powerful 3rd Generation Android 3.2 tablet series. JAGUAR3 is a series of ultra-slim, ultra-lightweight and stylish 10.1” tablet reference designs targeted at the OEM markets. With over a decade of designing experience in portable mobile devices, Creative provided the ergonomic and sexy design of this series of JAGUAR3 tablets. ZMS-20 StemCell Processors JAGUAR3’s superior performance, low power consumption and rich feature set comes from the dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 based ZMS-20 StemCell Processors. ZMS-20 has another 48 StemCell Processing cores within, which effectively make it into a 50-core processor. […]

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Google Devfest Comes to Southeast Asia

Google is coming to Southeast Asia with SE Asia Google DevFests 2011 to provide keynote and hand-on sessions on Android, Cloud, Maps, Apps and Chrome. You can now register to those events in Manilla, Chiang Mai and Kuala Lumpur.Jakarta and Singapore will be open for registration very soon. Here are the dates for the events in SE Asia: Manila: 19 September 2011 Chiang Mai: 24 September 2011 Kuala Lumpur: 29 September 2011 Singapore: 12 November 2011 Jakarta: 16 November 2011 Currently, the venue details and agenda are not available as they have just opened registration and probably wait to see how many attendees there will be and what the attendees wants to learn about (You can select the Google products you are interested in during registration). Update: The agenda and venues are now available for Manilla, Chiang Mai and Kuala Lumpur. The Agenda is different from the one India shown […]

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Faster JPEG decoding on ARM with libjpeg-turbo and NEON Instructions

libjpeg-turbo is based on libjpeg, but uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, etc.) to accelerate JPEG compression and decompression on x86 targets. On such systems, libjpeg-turbo is generally 2-4x as fast as the original version of libjpeg with the same hardware. ARM does not support MMX or SSE2 instructions, but it has its own SIMD instructions processed by the NEON Engine on ARM Cortex Core A5, A8, A9 and A15. ARM claims that “NEON technology can accelerate multimedia and signal processing algorithms such as video encode/decode, 2D/3D graphics, gaming, audio and speech processing, image processing, telephony, and sound synthesis by at least 3x the performance of ARMv5 and at least 2x the performance of ARMv6 SIMD.” Linaro worked on libjpeg-turbo and added NEON support to it. The code is available on launchpad at https://code.launchpad.net/~tom-gall/linaro/libjpeg-turbo Linaro has also provide benchmark result for libjpeg-turbo with a 12 Mpixel image on TI OMAP4 (Pandaboard) using the […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Setting Up a Git Server on Ubuntu

Git is a version control system used by many projects such as Linaro, the Linux kernel, Android, Eclipse, Qt and more. For projects that can not afford their own servers and still need to collaborate, hosted git is available from github and as today there are a total of 2,769,642 repositories (private and public) hosted on github. For software developed internally, you can start to setup you own Git server by following some simple steps (in Ubuntu). Installing the Git Server Update Ubuntu and install git-core: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install git-core That’s it. Installing Gitolite Gitolite allows you to setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. First get gitolite with git: git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite.git Obtain a public key based access to your server, so that you can log in from your workstation to the server without getting a password […]

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Best Practices for Writing Safer C Code

Thomas Honold wrote an article published on EETimes giving 17 steps to safer C code. Not only this article provides tips to write safer C code, but I believe those steps are simply best practices when writing C code for embedded systems as they shorten the software life cycle by making it easier for a software team to write, debug and maintain code and by improving the software QA procedure. Here’s a summary of the 17 steps to achieve safer C code: Follow the rules you’ve read a hundred times: Initialize variables before use. Do not ignore compiler warnings. Check return values. Use enums as error types. Define an ENUM_MAX value at the end, so that the code to check the range does not have to be modified each time you add a new error code. Expect to fail Always assume there will be an error and set to default […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC