CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

May 17, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 70 Comments

74 USD AllWinner A10 Android 4.0 Mini PC

A cheap white brand Android 4.0 USB/HDMI Stick based on AllWinner A10 has started to show up in Chinese websites. Initially, I thought it was like a low cost version of FXI Tech Cotton Candy (which will start shipping this month), but as you can see in the image below, the HDMI port is female so you’d still need a HDMI cable. The hole next to the USB port should be for the power supply, so this device is apparently not powered via USB (TBC). Connect a wireless mouse and keyboard to the device, the power supply, and an HDMI cable to your TV, and you’ve got yourself a cheap PC running Android 4.0. Since this is based on AllWinner A10, you could also insert a microSD card with Ubuntu, Debian or your other favorite Linux distribution and have yourself a Linux PC. Here are the specifications of the device […]

May 16, 2012May 16, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Energy Micro EFM32 Tiny Gecko (Cortex-M3) Starter Kit Unboxing

I’ve been lucky recently, after winning a TI Piccolo controlStick last month, I’ve just received Energy Micro EFM32 Starter Kit (EFM32-TG-STK3300) based on EFM32 Tiny Gecko MCU. This development board include: EFM32 Tiny Gecko Cortex-M3 MCU 8×20 LCD A light sensor A touch slider A battery compartment SEGGER J-Link mini USB port 2 Button + 1 reset button 1 User LEDs 2 expansion ports. Lots of through holes to access the different pins of the MCU Today, I’ll just show the content of the kit and next time, I’ll post more about the things I’ve done with it. Here’s the package of the EFM32 Starter Kit. The 2 gecko eggs were not included… Actually, those are house geckos eggs which are smaller than real geckos. We’ve got those here as well, but there are very shy, whereas house geckos just run around the walls and ceilings all day. Well, it’s […]

May 16, 2012May 16, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Atmel Unveils AVR XMEGA C, tinyAVR ATtiny1634 and AVR UC3 L3/D4 MCUs

Atmel announced 14 new Atmel AVR microcontrollers divided into 4 families: AVR XMEGA C, tinyAVR ATtiny1634, AVR UC3 L3 and AVR UC3 D4. Atmel AVR XMEGA C MCUs Atmel AVR XMEGA C MCUs are 8-/16-bit general-purpose MCUs with Full-Speed USB, 12-bit ADC, up to 384 KB flash and 32 KB SRAM. They can support Atmel QTouch Library for implementation of capacitive buttons, sliders and wheels functionality. The AVR XMEGA C MCUs consume 700nA in sleep mode with RTC. There 8 new XMEGA C MCUs which target consumer, industrial and home automation applications such as thermostats with display, building and climate control, utility meters with RF and ZigBee connectivity. The smallest XMEGA C MCU (ATxmega16C4), which comes in 44-pin package and has 16KB device, is the cheapest AVR XMEGA device with USB provided by Atmel. You can find further information on Atmel AVR XMEGA C page. Atmel tinyAVR ATtiny1634 MCU Atmel […]

May 15, 2012May 15, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

MIPS Introduces microAptiv, interAptiv and proAptiv Cores

MIPS Technologies has introduced their new Aptiv generation of microprocessor cores divided into 3 families: proAptiv, interAptiv and microAptiv. proAptiv Core (equivalent to ARM Cortex A15 DMIPS/Mhz) The proAptiv core achieves a 4.4 CoreMark/MHz score which according to MIPS is the best score reported for any licensable IP core. It also achieves 3.5 DMIPS/MHz which is abnout the same performance as ARM Cortex A15. This core targeted at high performance applications such as smartphones, tablets, HD STB, automotive infotainment and residential gateways. proAptiv is recommended as an upgrade to MIPS32 74K/1074K cores. interAptiv Core (equivalent to ARM Cortex-R5 DMIPS/Mhz) The multi-threaded interAptiv core delivers higher CoreMark/MHz (3.2) than competing cores in similar die area and 1.7 DMIPS/MHz per core. The interAptiv is aimed at mid-range applications such as mainstream STB, digital cameras, mid-range smartphone, broadband CPE (Consumer Premise Equipment) and SATA/SSD controllers. microAptiv Core (equivalent to ARM Cortex-M3/M4 DMIPS/Mhz) The […]

May 15, 2012May 22, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Intel Roadmap to 2015 and Beyond: 5nm Technology, Merrifield Mobile Processor, Microservers and More

Intel had their annual Investor meeting day on the 10th of May 2012 in Santa Clara where we would learn a few things about what’s ahead for Intel and the semiconductor industry. Paul Otellini, Intel President and Chief Executive Officer, started the meeting by giving some numbers about Intel results and showing opportunities existing for cloud and data center, personal computing, mobile devices and intelligent systems (for automotive, retail and communications markets). One interesting point was the tremendous growth in data Intel expects from 2,500 Exabytes per year (7 EB/day) today to 8,000 Exabytes by 2015 which the majority of the growth lead by Big data. He also boasted about Intel technology advantage. For example, Intel introduced High-K Metal Gate technology in 2007 and competitor only got it in products last year (btw Samsung Exynos 5 uses HKMG). They recently introduced Tri-gate technology and they only expect competitors to catch […]

May 14, 2012July 31, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Schematics Capture and PCB Layout in Linux with Kicad

Most schematics capture and PCB layout software run on Windows and are closed source. But if your favorite OS is Linux, there are a few open source software including Kicad and gEDA. There is also Cadsoft Eagle which can be installed in Linux with a free license for hobbyists and educational purposes, but is not open source. Today, I’ll focus on Kicad. I don’t really capture schematics, let alone layout PCBs, but I sometimes need to use this type of software to locate pins/components on the schematics and PCB and check some parts of the schematics that can affect software. So I will mainly give an overview of Kicad and write my experience trying to import another project (Beagleboard XM) to Kicad. If you want to learn how to get started with your own project with Kicad, you might want to have a look at Teho Labs Kicad Tutorial. In […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs

May 12, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

makeSD Script to Write Image to SD Card for Mele A1000 / AllWinner A10 Devices

Most images released for Mele A1000 (Ubuntu, Puppy Linux..) won’t fit in my SD card, and until now I had to manually partition the SD card, extract the data and copy it to the SD card. I’ve also noticed the size of the SD card slowly creeps lower overtime. I bought an SD card last week and fdisk reported 3901685760 bytes and this morning the same command reported 3898782720 bytes. That’s probably due to new bad sectors which I believe is actually normal for this type of device. The problem is that a backup of “last week” SD card done with dd might not be restored properly with dd since the SD card is now smaller. So I decided to write a shell script “makeSD.sh” that will do the following: Umount the SD card if needed Partition the SD card Copy uboot to the SD card Mount the image file […]

May 10, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

VWorks VLAB Powers Freescale Vybrid Virtual Platform

Back in March, Freescale announced their Vybrid solution featuring both a Cortex A5 processor and a Cortex M4 microcontroller, and they had prototypes running an unnamed virtual platform in order to speed up software development and possibly have the software ready at the same time as the silicon is. Always looking to learn more, I studied and wrote about virtual hardware platforms such as Cadence Virtual System Platform, Wind River Simics Virtual Platforms and the open source Imperas OVPsim simulator. It turns out Freescale does not use any of these solutions, but relies on VWorks VLAB instead, which still use the same standard (SystemC/TLM) as the virtual hardware solutions aforementioned. VWorks uploaded a demonstration of VLAB running a virtual platform for the Freescale Vybrid controller and showing how it can handle both ARM Cortex-A5 and Cortex-M4 cores. This demo of VLAB 1.7.0 is pretty interesting and showcases: Dual (virtual) display […]