CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

October 30, 2011October 30, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

MHL (Mobile High Definition Link) Turns Your Phone into a Set-Top Box, Game Console and more

MHL (Mobile High Definition Link) was introduced at Mobile World Conference 2011, some progress has been done since then. For now Two HDTVs are MHL compliant: the Toshiba WL800A and the Samsung UN46D7000. The Toshiba TV already have a firmware upgrade that provides MHL support, a firmware upgrade will come later for the Samsung HDTV. MHL provides market disruptive features that such as the ability to charging MHL compliant phones and tablets, control them with the TV remote through one simple MHL connector (micro-USB to HDMI). In the demo below, they show the phone connected to the Toshiba WL800A and being controlled with the TV remote control to play videos (including trick modes: pause, ffwd, etc..), play Android games and use a web browser. Once you install Google TV 2.0 in your phone (you’ll probably need Android 4.0) or tablet, you can get a great TV experience via your mobile […]

October 30, 2011October 30, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Run 2 OS Simultaneously on ARM (OMAP4) with Codezero Embedded Hypervisor

B Labs, a company specializing in ARM Virtualization, was at ARM Techcon 2011 showcasing Codezero, their Embedded Hypervisor to run multiple Linux OS such as Android and Chrome OS on ARM processors. The main purpose of running 2 operating systems is to separate home and enterprise operating systems in mobile devices so that enterprise data is safe. Charbax (ARMDevices.net) interviewed Bahadir Baldan, founder of B Labs, and showed a demo running 2 Android instances and another running Android and Linux in pandaboard. The overhead is 10 to 15% according to B Labs, so the performance hit is minimal. They have already managed to run 4 OS on quad core processors with good performance. They are not able to run Windows operating systems (e.g. Windows Mobile 7.5/ Windows 8) yet, because Cortex A9 processors lack virtualization extensions. This will however be feasible with Cortex A15 processors as binary virtualization will be available. […]

ArmSoM CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC

October 29, 2011November 17, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Google TV 2.0 For Android 3.1 Released

Back in August, Google released a Preview of Google TV Add-on for the Android SDK. Google has now announced a software upgrade for Google TV a software running on Android device (Smart TV / STB) such as the Sony NSX-24GT1 Google TV that bring web video (e.g. YouTube, Netflix and more) to the TV. Google admits the initial version of Google TV wasn’t perfect and they even asked partners not to show product with Google TV at CES 2011. Let’s see what improvements Google TV 2.0: 1. Keep it simple The interface is now much simpler. The new customizable home screen gets you to your favorite content quickly. And within “all apps” you can see all of your shortcuts, similar to your Android phone or tablet. 2. Make it easy to find something worth watching Search has been improved across the board for content from Live TV, Netflix, YouTube, HBO […]

October 29, 2011October 29, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Display Multiplication Table With A Command Line

If you forgot your multiplication table and happen to have a terminal window opened in Linux at the time, here’s the command to use: seq 9 | sed ‘H;g’ | awk -v RS=” ‘{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)printf(“%dx%d=%d%s”, i, NR, i*NR, i==NR?”\n”:”\t”)}’ Same thing using perl:

perl -e 'print join "\n", map {$a=$_;join "\t",map {$_."x$a=".$a*$_} (1 .. $a) } (1 .. 9)'

1	perl -e 'print join "\n", map {$a=$_;join "\t",map {$_."x$a=".$a*$_} (1 .. $a) } (1 .. 9)'

Here’s the output:

1x1=1
1x2=2	2x2=4
1x3=3	2x3=6	3x3=9
1x4=4	2x4=8	3x4=12	4x4=16
1x5=5	2x5=10	3x5=15	4x5=20	5x5=25
1x6=6	2x6=12	3x6=18	4x6=24	5x6=30	6x6=36
1x7=7	2x7=14	3x7=21	4x7=28	5x7=35	6x7=42	7x7=49
1x8=8	2x8=16	3x8=24	4x8=32	5x8=40	6x8=48	7x8=56	8x8=64
1x9=9	2x9=18	3x9=27	4x9=36	5x9=45	6x9=54	7x9=63	8x9=72	9x9=81

1x1=1

1x2=2 2x2=4

1x3=3 2x3=6 3x3=9

1x4=4 2x4=8 3x4=12 4x4=16

1x5=5 2x5=10 3x5=15 4x5=20 5x5=25

1x6=6 2x6=12 3x6=18 4x6=24 5x6=30 6x6=36

1x7=7 2x7=14 3x7=21 4x7=28 5x7=35 6x7=42 7x7=49

1x8=8 2x8=16 3x8=24 4x8=32 5x8=40 6x8=48 7x8=56 8x8=64

1x9=9 2x9=18 3x9=27 4x9=36 5x9=45 6x9=54 7x9=63 8x9=72 9x9=81

Source (in French): http://www.tux-planet.fr/afficher-les-tables-de-multiplication-en-ligne-de-commande/

October 28, 2011October 30, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

ST Micro 15 USD STM32F4-Discovery Cortex-M Development Kit

ST Microelectonics promote their Cortex-M series at ARM Techcon 2011 and especially the new STM32F4 series the most powerful cortex M4 MCUs. They also showcase a low cost development board called STM32F4-Discovery that they give away at the exhibition and that can be bought online for 14.90USD from distributors. The evaluation board is based on the STM32F407VGT6 and includes an ST-LINK/V2 embedded debug tool, two ST MEMS, digital accelerometer and digital microphone, one audio DAC with integrated class D speaker driver, LEDs and push buttons and an USB OTG micro-AB connector. A large number of free ready-to-run application firmware examples are available in the STM32F4-Discovery board firmware package to support quick evaluation and development. Key Features of the Development kit: STM32F407VGT6 microcontroller featuring 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F core, 1 MB Flash, 192 KB RAM in an LQFP100 package On-board ST-LINK/V2 with selection mode switch to use the kit as a standalone ST-LINK/V2 […]

October 28, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Freescale i.MX6 Quad-Core Benchmark Demo

Freescale is showcasing the performance of their Quad Core ARM Cortex-A9 i.MX6 Quad processor at ARM Techcon 2011. The Freescale i.MX6 reference design runs a demo in Android 3.x (Honeycomb) with four windows: JPEG Decoding Window Web browser rendering and scrolling HTML5 Fish tank CPU Usage real-time chart The 3 windows used for the benchmark are all using software processing (no GPU involved) to show to performance improvement by moving from 1 to 2 and finally 4 cores. The benchmark results are quite impressive as with one core JPEG decoding is about 0.6 frame per second and with 4 cores it can decode 4.2 frames per seconds while other windows also show performance improvement. Freescale says there was little modifications done to make the software work on four core and you don’t even need to have multi-threaded applications to take advantage of 4 cores as the OS will usually take […]

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

October 28, 2011February 22, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Qualcomm Fast Computer Vision SDK

Qualcomm introduced FastCV (Fast Computer Vision), a mobile-optimized computer vision (CV) library that includes the most frequently used vision processing functions for use across a wide array of Android mobile devices. FastCV provides computationally intensive vision processing APIs, with hardware acceleration and better performance on mobile devices. FastCV is designed for efficiency on all ARM-based processors, but is also especially tuned to take advantage of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors (Qualcomm S2 and above). That’s because FastCV for Snapdragon can offload processing onto various subsystems within the processor, whereas FastCV for ARM is limited to acceleration on the CPU. FastCV is the framework at the heart of Qualcomm’s vision-based Augmented Reality (AR) SDK, because AR is much more precise and useful when it’s based on camera input than on location-based estimates. Qualcomm anticipates that FastCV will be used to build additional frameworks that will allow developers of computer vision apps to build […]

October 28, 2011October 29, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

ARM Unveils 64-Bit ARMv8 Architecture

ARM has just disclosed the technical of the ARMv8 architecture (to selected partners), featuring 64-bit instruction set support, extended virtual addressing, and backwards-compatible 32-bit support, so that software designed for ARMv7 (Cortex-A family) cores will run on the ARMv8 architecture. Here are the key points of the press release: The ARMv8 architecture consists of two main execution states, AArch64 and AArch32. The AArch64 execution state introduces a new instruction set, A64 for 64-bit processing. The AArch32 state supports the existing ARM instruction set. The key features of the current ARMv7 architecture, including TrustZone®, virtualization and NEON™ advanced SIMD, are maintained or extended in the ARMv8 architecture. … In support of the introduction of the ARMv8 architecture, ARM is working to ensure a robust design ecosystem to support the 64-bit instruction set. The ARM compiler and Fast Models with ARMv8 support have already been made available to key ecosystem partners. Initial […]

Boardcon EM3562 Rockchip RK3562 SBC with 8 analog camera inputs