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ViewSonic Android Tablet: ViewPad 7

Lots of Android Tablet were shown at IFA 2010 in Berlin. The most hyped was Samsung Galaxy Tab. Charbax has lot of videos about different devices. Among them, ViewSonic Viewpad 7 seems to be worth looking at with Android 2.2, #G, Wifi, video calling, capacitive touch screen and a retail price that should be 399 Euros. It actually seems to be doing all what the pricey Samsung tablet is doing (except lower camcorder resolution). On the hardware side, it is most likely using Qualcomm MSM7227 (ARM11).

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Samsung Galaxy Tab Video

As blogged previously, Samsung released its Android Tablet at IFA in Berlin today. Here’s a video to show off the Samsung Galaxy Tab including the TV commercial at the end: That looks really good until you look at the price tag: 799 Euros. Here are the full specs of this Android tablet: Network: 2.5G (GSM/ GPRS/ EDGE) : 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz 3G (HSUPA 5.76Mbps, HSDPA 7.2Mbps) : 900 / 1900 / 2100 MHz OS: Android 2.2 (Froyo) Display: 7.0 inch TFT-LCD, WSVGA (1024 x 600) Processor: Cortex A8 1.0GHz (ARM) Application Processor with PowerVR SGX540 Camera: 3 MP Camera with Auto-Focus and LED Flash 1.3MP front camera for Video Telephony Mini-HDMI connector with 1080p video output. Docking Station GPS (A-GPS) Value-added Features: Android Market™ and Samsung Apps for more applications and contents Readers Hub, Media Hub, Music Hub, Social Hub (Facebook/Google/Outlook) Adobe Flash 10.1 player […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Digital Signage: Implementing a smooth scrolling text

Many digital signage hardware feature scroll text. However, in many cases the scrolling text is either not smooth, sometimes teared or very slow. It may depends on the performance of the hardware used but also on the implementation of the software. Once easy way to implemented scrolling text is just to redraw the text again and again at different position. However, this is very slow and yields poor results unless maybe you have a Truetype accelerator or similar hardware font accelerator. The next step is then to convert the text into pixmaps. This can either be done in the digital signage manager software (Windows PC/MAC or Linux based) or the digital signage player. Doing so in the latter makes it much more flexible. So you may create 2 pixmaps whose width and length match the region to be displayed, you write the text on those 2 pixmaps, then simply move […]

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Script to convert Twitter RSS feeds into text

[Update Nov 2012: URLs such as http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/759251.rss do not work anymore, but you can get a Twitter timeline RSS feed by using http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx, where xxxxx is the screen name such as cnxsoft] We needed to convert Twitter RSS feeds to UTF-16 text for displaying them into a digital signage (That did not support RSS feed directly).  This digital signage supports regular http download, .e.g every 5 minutes. Here’s the script (called with crontab) we used for CNN News Twitter RSS feed. #!/bin/sh # CNN Twitter wget http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/759251.rss sleep 10 cat 759251.rss | grep title | sed s/\<title\>// | sed s/\<\\/title\>// > cnn.txt rm 759251.rss iconv -f utf-8 -t UCS-2LE cnn.txt > cnn-utf16.txt cp cnn-utf16.txt /var/www/html/livepics/cnn.txt The resulting text file looks like: Twitter / CNN CNN: BREAKING NEWS: Military: Last U.S. brigade combat team leaves Iraq; 56,000 troops remain. Fifty-thousand set to stay past August 31. CNN: NY Gov. David Paterson […]

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Media Player based on SMP8653 – Magic Box HDP500

Magic Box HDP500 manufactured by gmini (apparently a Russian company)  is a new media player featuring the 500-Mhz SMP8653 chipset from Sigma Designs. It does not use Android OS yet, and as far I know no company has yet released SMP8653 Android based products. Having said that,  it comes with most of the connectivity you would expect from a decent set-top box: USB connector (device: USB storage,host: laptop/PC connection), Audio/Video Composite ouput, Component (YPbPr)  output, HDMI and optical digital audio output and and Ethernet port. On the software side, it is a full featured 1080p media player,  with video, music and picture galleries, Internet Radio, UPnP support… It could also be used as a NAS with the USB host connection to your PC. The missing features are: no support for digital TV (e.g. DVB-T, DMB-TH), no Wifi support, no web applications/web browser, no movie download (BT/Emule),  no Real media video […]

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Embedded Software Books

I’m often asked what useful books software engineers should read when they start to work on embedded systems. So here’s a list of books I would recommend as starters. First, nowadays many embedded systems are written in C (although lower end systems using 8-bit MCU are still likely to be written in Assembler), so software engineers had better make themselves very familiar with C/C++ and GNU tools (gcc, libtool. automake…) with a focus on embedded systems (e.g. interrupts handling, real-time capabilities, volatile variables, processes and threads’ stack handling, , cross compilers…).  Programming Embedded Systems: With C and GNU Development Tools, 2nd Edition is just the right book for that purpose. It deals with embedded Linux and eCos and provides useful examples. You may also read part of it online Once you start developing embedded systems you are likely to write device drivers at some points. Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Android STB – WebTube HD

Here’s another Android Set-top-box that may come to the market soon. I do not have much information on this product, except it’s made by mnex – a Korean company. (Update: although the youtube video says otherwise, the design seems to belong to Innodigital (See Webtube HD details). The video below shows it supports Android web browser, Youtube, Google maps and interestingly an application market especially designed for TV (TV Application Market). Apparently, they control the box with a normal remote control, no track ball or touch pad, nor do they seem to have support for wireless mouse and/or keyboard. The demo looks good, although a bit sluggish. See for yourself:

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How to Generate CVS Changelog Automatically

There is a perl script called cvs2cl.pl provided by Red-Bean You can get the latest version thru cvs: cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/usr/local/cvs co cvs2cl/cvs2cl.pl Copy the script in a directory that belong to the path e.g.: cp cvs2cl.pl /usr/local/bin Then just checkout your project and run cvs2cl.pl to generate a ChangeLog that will look like: 2010-01-18 developer1 * app/cnxapp/Makefile: Added support for SMP8652 target 2010-01-17 developer2 * app/cnxapp/cnx_download.c: Added HTTP resume support [Bug 1250]: Fixed potential buffer overflow … where developer1 and developer2 are the linux usernames of the developers, app/cnxapp/Makefile, app/cnxapp/cnx_download.c the files that have been modified, and the comments correspond to the messages input during cvs commit. cvs2cl.pl also have other options such as XML output, date selection etc… Just type cvs2cl.pl –help to get the full options.

Khadas VIM4 SBC