CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

December 14, 2011July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Solid-Run CuBox: Open Source Platform for Android TV, Media Center and NAS Development

Solid-Run CuBox is a miniature open source development platform based on Marvell Armada 510 SoC (88AP510) and aimed at applications such as multimedia, set-top-box, network attached storage (NAS), thin client, digital signage, automation… CuBox measures 55mm x 55mm x 42mm (so it’s not a Cube) and consuming less than 3 watts. The device runs Android 2.2 or Linux 2.6 on an 800MHz Marvell Armada 510 CPU (ARMv7 architecture) with 1GB of DDR3 memory and a microSD slot. It also includes eSATA, USB, infrared, S/PDIF, HDMI and gigabit Ethernet interfaces. CuBox Developer Platform includes the following key features – Marvell Armada 510 SoC – 800 MHz dual issue ARM PJ4 processor, VFPv3, wmmx SIMD and 512KB L2 cache. 1GByte DDR3 at 800MHz 1080p Video Decode Engine OpenGL ES 2.0 graphic engine HDMI 1080p Output (with CEC function) Gigabit Ethernet, SPDIF (optical audio), eSata 3Gbps, 2xUSB 2.0, micro-SD, micro-USB (console) Standard Infra-red receiver […]

December 14, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

99 USD MIPS Android 4.0 Tablet Hands-on Video

Following the announcement of the 99 dollars Ainol Novo 7 Android ICS last week, MIPS’s Amit Rohatgi, Mobile Principal Architect at MIPS released a longer demo video of the device, showcasing the following: Angry Bird Game with framerate around 50 FPS. Kindle Reader Web Browser Rear & Front Camera Photo Gallery (transition are a little sluggish) Email (Exchange account) 1080p video playback both an the device and mirroring on HDTV via an HDMI cable He also explain that on of this friends could watch 3 full-length movies on a battery charge.

December 13, 2011December 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Adding a Project to Gitorious with a Windows Computer

If you are developing software in Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7, here are the steps to follow to push your project to Gitorious. Register and create a new project on Gitorious, if you haven’t done already. Install msysGit to have git on your Windows machine Click on “Git Bash” to start the command line Generate the SSH Key with “ssh-keygen -t rsa” and press ‘Return’ in every question. Go to your Gitorious dashboard, click on “Manage SSH Keys” then “Add SSH Key“, copy the content of “cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub” in Gitorious and click save Then go to your local project directory and follow the “getting started instructions” given in Gitorious, which should look like: git config –global user.name “Your Name” git config –global user.email “user@domain.com” git checkout master git remote add origin git@gitorious.org:your-project/your-project.git git push origin master Then wait until the code is pushed to the Gitorious server. If […]

December 12, 2011December 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Qt Quick QML Digital Signage Demo Part 2

Following up on Qt Quick QML Digital Signage Demo Part 1, I’ve updated the digital signage demo to support the following: Play 5 videos in a loop Display 5 pictures in a loop where the picture is changed every 5 seconds Use a (twitter) RSS feed for the scrolling text I initially planned to use QML to list the media files, but it is apparently not possible without using C/C++ and I may do it later on. So instead, I hard-coded the video and picture playlists in the QML files with the ListModel element. Videos are located in the video directory and pictures in the pic folder. An index is needed to scroll thru the playlist, but QML does not support global variables, so I created a JavaScript file (globals.js) to store the video and picture index: // Global variables in JavaScript file var iVideoIndex = 0 var iPicIndex = […]

December 12, 2011July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Design West Summit – 26-29 March 2012

UBM Design announced the schedule and pass pricing for Design West Summit (previously Embedded System Conference) which will now bring 7 summits in one location (San Jose McEnery Convention Center) on 26-29 March 2012: Embedded Systems Conference & Exhibition – Conference Dates: March 26 – 29, 2012. Exhibition Dates: March 27-29, 2012. (See Details below) Android Summit – March 28, 2012 – Everything Android from embedded design to Apps development. Android Certification Program Android Speed Training Android Fundamentals Course on the Expo Floor Android Conference Program Multicore DevCon– March 27 & 28, 2012 – Embedded multicore and multimedia. 7th annual Multicore Conference Courses Multicore Expo Floor Zone Multicore Fundementals Courses Keynote Addresses Industry Addresses Expo floor parties and giveaways BlackHat – March 29, 2012 – One-day conference focused on security in embedded systems. Security Fundementals Course Black Hat Summit Conference Courses Security focused presentations in the expo floor theater Keynotes […]

December 11, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

5th Linux BSP Release for Snowball Development Board

Igloo Community – the team developing for ST Ericsson Snowball Nova A9500 development board – has released the fifth version of the Linux BSP for the board and this version nearly fully support all features of the board. It can be downloaded at http://igloocommunity.org/download/linaro/images/20111209/. ChangeLog since last release: Based on Linaro Ubuntu 11.11 desktop filesystem Accelerometer and barometer support for all board revisions GPS support Enhancements to the default kernel config (NFS, /proc/config.gz support) Enhanced display support Add support for new connectivity module versions Main supported features: Based on Linux 3.0.0 and the Linaro Ubuntu desktop file system HDMI/DVI-D display support Graphics acceleration with the Mali 400 GPU Bluetooth support GPS support Ethernet and Wireless connectivity microSD card support Sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, barometer) Limited USB OTG host functionality Features to be included in future releases: Multimedia acceleration Better USB OTG host support Known issues: USB OTG host mode is […]

December 10, 2011December 12, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Qt Quick QML Digital Signage Demo Part 1

I’ve recently started to play around with Qt and since I’d like to do a digital signage player running on Raspberry Pi, I’ve decided to try to make a simple digital signage demo application to evaluate the development platform. In Part 1, my goal was to make a 3 zones layout with a video zone, a picture zone and a scrolling text zone. I would just play one hard-coded media in each zone and the video and scrolling text would have to continuously loop. I used Qt Creator to create a “Pigital Signage” application (or should it be Πgital Signage ?). To create the 3 zones I used the Gridview Element with 3 rectangles: Video zone: 600×432 Picture zone: 200×432 Text zone: 800×48 Displaying the image is very easy with the Image Element:

Image {
    source: "pic/phone.jpg"
}

Image {

source: "pic/phone.jpg"

}

The video playback was also supposed to be easy with the Video Element but it can […]

December 10, 2011December 10, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Renault R-Link In-Vehicle Infotainment System

During LeWeb 11 exhibition, Renault announced the R-Link, a 7″ touchscreen tablet that will equip Renault’s cars starting with the Zoe Electric car and the new Clio (Clio 4) in 2012 for a cost of between 500 to 1000 Euros. The R-Link features a 7″ resistive touchscreen display and comes with steering wheel-mounted controls and speech recognition to make sure the driver keeps an eye on the road. This tablet is said to be running a modified version version of Android 2.2 on a Texas Instruments ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at 800 Mhz. Renault says the R-Link covers all the car’s functions and data while offering access to a menu of useful and community applications already available on Smartphone such as Tom Tom GPS, Emails, an application finding available parking (Apila), public transport routes (Metro), multimedia applications to play music & video and display picture… At the time of its […]