Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Android Tablet Review: Augen Gentouch 2

Android Tablet Review: Augen Gentouch 2

Soldierknowsbest reviewed the Augen Gentouch 2 (same as Augen Gentouch 78 ??), one of the first Android tablet available (Cost around 150 USD). Basically, his advice is to avoid it, the device is terrible: poor touch screen (resistive), no multitouch, navigation requires to use external buttons, Android Market not working, some dodgy battery usage… On the hardware side, Augen Gentouch uses Telechips 8902 @ 600 Mhz, 256MB DDR2, 2GB Internal Storage, Wifi etc…

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Quick guide to install Samba/CIFS in Linux

Quick guide to install Samba/CIFS in Linux

You may want to install Samba/CIFS in a Linux host to share files with other Windows computer or to use as a media server with a networked media player. If samba is missing, install it in the host machine (foomachine):

Create a new smb user:

Start / check status / restart samba service:

To make samba service run automatically at startup:

Type \\foomachine\foouser  in Windows Explorer and type the username foouser and the password to access your Linux files. To add other directories to share with samba, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf Resource: http://www.cpqlinux.com/samba.html

ArmSoM CM5 - Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Script to convert Twitter RSS feeds into text

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 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Media Player based on SMP8653 – Magic Box HDP500

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 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Embedded Software Books

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 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments on Android STB – WebTube HD

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:

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Enabling swap in embedded systems

Enabling swap in embedded systems

If your embedded system running Linux does not have enough memory, you can enable swap to get more memory. However if your platform does not have MMU (Memory Management Unit) as is the case for Sigma Designs EM8620 series, it won’t support swap, so forget it. If your platform does have MMU, as is the case for many newer platforms such as Sigma Designs SMP8630, SMP8640 and SMP8650 series, you can enable swap support. First you’ll have to make sure swap support is enabled in your kernel:

and swapon/swapoff is enabled in busybox. So for example if you have an IDE harddisk with the second partition configured as swap. (Use fdisk to create a partition and mkswap /dev/hda2 to initialize the partition), you can enable the swap as follows:

If you get out-of-memory killer kernel error, you can change the “swapiness” to avoid oom-killer to kick in.

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products