CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

April 23, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

STMicro STiH416 Dual Core Media Processor and Linux SDK

STMicro announced STiH416 SoC for media players at CES 2012 with very few details, but we’ve still known that it is a dual core Cortex A9 @ 1.2 GHz coupled with a quad core Mali-400 manufacturer and an hardware video decoder supporting commonly used codecs such as H.264, VC-1, AVS and MPEG2. Yesterday they put out a press release about a STB development platform based on this solution, and I found out we’ve got much more information now. Key features include: ARM Cortex-A9, dual core CPU, SMP NEON SIMD engine yielding up to 6000 DMIPS ARM Mali-400 quad core GPU yielding up to 1600 Mpixels/s fill rate and supporting up to 1080p60 or 1080p30 stereoscopic 3D graphics Dual HD H.264/VC-1/AVS/MPEG2 video decoder or SVC video decode MVC video decode for 3DTV: supports up to 1080p60L/60R, 3D video formats Dual HD internet video decoding: real video 8/9/10, DivX, Xvid, MP4p2, Adobe […]

April 22, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

You-Get – Video Download Script for YouTube, YouKu, DailyMotion, and More

YouKu is the equivalent of YouTube in China, and earlier today I wanted to download a video from the service, so I’ve looked for an application or script that can do the job in Linux. I’ve finally come across you-get, a python 3 script that claims to be able to download videos from an impressive number of websites, namely: YouTube Vimeo Coursera Blip Dailymotion Facebook Google+ Google Drive Tumblr Vine SoundCloud Mixcloud Freesound JPopsuki VID48 Niconico (ニコニコ動画) Youku (优酷) Tudou (土豆) YinYueTai (音悦台) AcFun bilibili CNTV (中国网络电视台) Douban (豆瓣) ifeng (凤凰视频) iQIYI (爱奇艺) Joy.cn (激动网) Ku6 (酷6网) MioMio h NetEase (网易视频) (v.163.com) PPTV.com QQ (腾讯视频) (v.qq.com) Sina (新浪视频) (video.sina.com.cn) Sohu (搜狐视频) (tv.sohu.com) 56 (56网) Xiami (虾米) Baidu (百度音乐) (music.baidu.com) SongTaste I won’t try all, but just test it with YouKu and YouTube. First things first, let’s install it:

git clone git://github.com/soimort/you-get.git
cd you-get
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-setuptools
./you-get -V
make install

git clone git://github.com/soimort/you-get.git

cd you-get

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-setuptools

./you-get -V

make install

Time to go to youku.com and download a video:

you-get http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTQ1OTk3NTAw.html
Video Site: Youku.com
Title:      1 second boot QT app in linux-sunxi with  A10
Type:       Flash video (video/x-flv)
Size:       5.45 MB (5711001 Bytes)

Downloading 1 second boot QT app in linux-sunxi with  A10.flv ...
100.0% (  5.4/5.4  MB) [========================================] 1/1

you-get http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTQ1OTk3NTAw.html

Video Site: Youku.com

Title: 1 second boot QT app in linux-sunxi with A10

Type: Flash video (video/x-flv)

Size: 5.45 MB (5711001 Bytes)

Downloading 1 second boot QT app in linux-sunxi with A10.flv ...

100.0% ( 5.4/5.4 MB) [========================================] 1/1

Success! […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM

April 22, 2013May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Booting Linux in Less Than 1 Second in AllWinner A10 Devices? Yes! You Can!

threewater, a Chinese developer, has just posted a very interesting demo on linux-sunxi mailing list showing a device based on AllWinner A10 boot linux within 0.85s, and if you add a Qt app, the total time is just about 1.2s. This appears to be a custom hardware (EM6000), but we do know it’s based on AllWinner A10, comes with 512 MB RAM, and 4GB NAND Flash. On the software side, the device runs kernel 3.4 from linux-sunxi, with a customized version of uboot, a squashfs rootfs, and a Qt 4.7.4 app showing a gauge. Both the rootfs (7MB) and the kernel (2MB) have been compressed with LZO. All that boots from NAND flash for optimal speed. The 1.2 second time includes kernel + rootfs + app time, and the total time is a bit longer, but this is still impressive. Here’s the boot log:

[1.690000 1.690000] U-Boot SPL 2013.01-05984-g2120a27-dirty (Apr 17 2013 - 14:22:02)
[0.009000 0.009000] Board: EM6000
[0.012000 0.003000] DRAM: 512MB
[1.014000 1.002000] init startup v1.1
[1.016000 0.002000] mount usr data error 2
[1.158000 0.142000] Could not read calibration: "/data/etc/pointercal"
[1.166000 0.008000] Couldnt open tslib config file: No such file or directory
[1.175000 0.009000] QWSTslibMouseHandlerPrivate: ts_config() failed with error: 'No such file or directory'
[1.187000 0.012000] Please check your tslib installation!
[1.200000 0.013000] qt show

[1.690000 1.690000] U-Boot SPL 2013.01-05984-g2120a27-dirty (Apr 17 2013 - 14:22:02)

[0.009000 0.009000] Board: EM6000

[0.012000 0.003000] DRAM: 512MB

[1.014000 1.002000] init startup v1.1

[1.016000 0.002000] mount usr data error 2

[1.158000 0.142000] Could not read calibration: "/data/etc/pointercal"

[1.166000 0.008000] Couldnt open tslib config file: No such file or directory

[1.175000 0.009000] QWSTslibMouseHandlerPrivate: ts_config() failed with error: 'No such file or directory'

[1.187000 0.012000] Please check your tslib installation!

[1.200000 0.013000] qt show

If you just boot to […]

April 22, 2013May 11, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

How to Detect if an ARM ELF Binary is Hard-float (ARMHF) or Soft-float (ARMEL)

If some cases you may want to know if a library or binary built for the ARM architecture is using hard-float (armhf) or soft-float (armel). You can analyze ELF binary using readefl utility, so let’s have a try. First let’s install some armel and armhf files on a computer running Ubuntu by install gcc/g++ toolchain for armel and armhf:

apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabi  g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf

1	apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf

We now have armhf and armel libraries installed in /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lib and /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib respectively. Let’s check the output of readelf filtered with “FP” string for libm.so.6 for armel:

readelf -a /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/libm.so.6  | grep FP

Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3-D16
Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed
Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed
Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754
Tag_ABI_HardFP_use: SP and DP

readelf -a /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/libm.so.6 | grep FP

Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3-D16

Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed

Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed

Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754

Tag_ABI_HardFP_use: SP and DP

and armhf:

readelf -a /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lib/libm.so.6 | grep FP

Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3-D16
Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed
Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed
Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754
Tag_ABI_HardFP_use: SP and DP
Tag_ABI_VFP_args: VFP registers

readelf -a /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lib/libm.so.6 | grep FP

Tag_FP_arch: VFPv3-D16

Tag_ABI_FP_denormal: Needed

Tag_ABI_FP_exceptions: Needed

Tag_ABI_FP_number_model: IEEE 754

Tag_ABI_HardFP_use: SP and DP

Tag_ABI_VFP_args: VFP registers

Great, so there’s an extra line for armhf (Tag_ABI_VFP_args) that seems to confirm the library is hard-float. With readelf compiled from elftoolchain-0.6.1 (source code), the extra line will be a bit different: “Tag_ABI_VFP_args: AAPCS (VFP variant) AAPCS stands for ARM Architecture Procedure Call Standard. You can read more details on ARM website. There are also two other possible values […]

April 21, 2013May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

How to Use Libhybris and Android GPU Libraries with Mer (Linux) on the Cubieboard

You may have heard about libhybris, a library that cleverly loads Android HW adaptations and convert calls from bionic to glibc. One of the greatest achievement of this library is to allow Android GPU drivers to be used with Linux, and is notably used by Canonical, although they did not write it, for Ubuntu 14.04 which will be compatible with any recent Android smartphones or tablets. One way to get started with libhybris is to port a device to Ubuntu Touch, but this may take a while. However, I’ve found a faster and easier way to play with libhybris thanks to Martin Brook (vgrade) who wrote a tutorial on how to use libhybris with Mer on the Cubieboard. Mer is an open source mobile Linux distribution powered by Qt/QML and HTML5, that’s born from the ashes of Meego, and is now used in the upcoming Sailfish OS. You’ll need to […]

April 20, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Payter NFC Watch Can Be Used to Make Payments, for Identification, and More

The first time I heard about NFC was when it was implemented in Android 2.3, and the Google Nexus S featured it, but it’s quite older than that, as the initial specifications were published in 2006, and the very first phone to feature the technology was Nokia 6131. If you’ve ever been to Hong Kong, you may have used Octopus cards which are used for contactless payments for public transport and shopping. Those cards use Felica RFID technology which is part of NFC, and has also been included in some watches (since 2010), so you can easily pay for subway or bus by hovering your watch on the card reader. I’ve been wondering why I could not see more of those, and I think NFC may be a feature of upcoming smart watches, so I started to look for existing solutions this morning, and found Payper NFC Watch designed by […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025

April 20, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Watch and Record Live TV on Android or iOS Mobile Devices with Geniatech WiTV

If you’ve ever wanted to watch live digital TV on your tablet or smartphone, there’s now a solution. Geniatech WiTV is a tiny battery powered DVB receiver also acting as Wi-Fi access point in order to stream live TV to your mobile devices. You can use this device within your house or on the go, but it has to be within 5 to 7 meters from your tablet or smartphone to work properly. The specifications released are limited, but we still know the following: Frequency range – 177.5 – 226.5MHz (VHF); 474 – 858MHz (UHF) Digital TV standards – DVB-T Mpeg 2, Mpeg 4 and H.264; ISDBT oneseg 802.11 b/g/n WiFi Standard Support Micro USB for recharging Up to 3 hours of TV viewing (TBC) iOS devices must run IOS 5.0 or IOS5.1, and Android 3.0 or greater is supported. You’ll need to install SianoTV for Android or iOS, scan […]

April 19, 2013May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Mele Android Set-Top Boxes At China Sourcing Fair 2013

The Mele A1000 and A2000 based on AllWinner A10 have been relatively popular last year, and recently Mele A1000G Quad has been unveiled with AllWinner A31 quad core Cortex A7 processor, and there was talk about a Dual core version as well. Charbax has shot 3 videos at Mele stand at China Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong earlier this month, so I’ve got a bit more news to share. The first video shows the Mele A1000G Quad with a 2.4Ghz remote (which must be Mele F10 Fly Mouse). We don’t really learn much more than we already know, but we can see the device is action with a 3D game controlled with the “Fly Mouse”, and the new “Metro” style user interface. This STB is currently running Android 4.1, but an upgrade to Android 4.2 is expected in June. The device will be available in May for about $110 retail, […]

Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications