CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development

VIA Technologies has recently announced the VAB-600 Pico-ITX embedded board featuring WonderMedia WM8950 ARM Cortex A9 SoC clocked at 800MHz. VIA targets in-vehicle infotainment as well as mobile and healthcare applications for the board despite an operating temperature range between 0°C and 60°C.

VIA VAB-600 Pico-ITX Board (Click to Enlarge)

Here are the key features of this embedded board:

• SoC – Wondermedia WM8950 Cortex-A9 @ 800MHz  + Mali-400 GPU
• System Memory – 1GB DDR3 SDRAM
• Storage – 4GB eMMC Flash memory + 512KB SPI Flash for Boot Loader + microSD slot
• Video Output – Mini HDMI, on-board DVO (Digital Video Output) for TTL or LVDS display
• Video Codecs – MPEG2 MP@HL, MPEG4, H.264 BP/MP/[email protected], VC-1 SP/MP/AP, VP8 and JPEG/MJPEG.
• USB -  2x mini USB 2.0 host ports
• Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet (VT6113), 3G (SIM card slot) and optional WiFi support (VIA VNT9271B6050 WiFi module shared with one USB port)
• On-board Connectors:
  • 2x COM connectors
  • 1x RTC battery pin header
  • 1x USB 2.0 connector
  • 1x SPI connector for programming SPI Flash ROM
  • 1x Keypad connector
  • 1x CIR connector
  • 1x Front audio pin header for Line-in, Line-out and MIC-in
  • 1x Front panel pin header for system power-on, reset and power LED
  • 4-wire resistive touch screen FPC connector (through VT1603A)
  • 1x pin header for 1 I2C pair and 8 GPIO
  • Optional battery charger connector with Smart Battery function
• Operating Temperature Range – 0°C to 60°C
• Operating Humidity – 0% ~ 95% (relative humidity ; non-condensing)
• Dimensions – 10cm x 7.2cm Pico-ITX form factor

The company provides board support packages (BSPs) for Android 4.0 and/or Embedded Linux (Kernel 3.0.8). Android 4.0 EVK is available for download here, but there’s nothing for Linux yet. Before downloading the file you’ll have to agree to a “Non-Disclosure and Recipient Acknowledgment for Short Term Sample Products Evaluation”, which I find a bit silly for a publicly available file…

VIA also offers a startker kit including VIA VAB-600 Pico-ITX board, VAB-600-A I/O card, VAB-600-C TTL Converter card, a 7” touch screen TTL panel, cables and a 18W AC adapter.

VIA VAB-600 Starter Kit (Click to Enlarge)

Sample units of the VIA VAB-600 Pico-ITX board are available now at an undisclosed price. Further information, including the board user’s manual and product brief, is available on VIA’s VAB-600 page.

Renesas announced a new automotive SoC called the R-Car H2 that features 4 Cortex-A15 cores together with 4 Cortex A7 cores (optional) in big.LITTLE configuration, as well as an Imagination PowerVR Series6 G6400 GPU. This SoC can optionally come with Renesas SH-4A, a real-time processing CPU core acting as a multimedia engine (MME) , and Renesas’ IMP-X4 core, a real-time image processing unit that enables developers to implement augmented reality application such as 360-degree camera views and image recognition.

This Renesas processor is a multimedia power house, as it can handle 4x 1080p video en/decoding, including Blu-Ray support at 60 frames per second, as well as image/voice recognition and high-resolution 3D graphics with virtually no CPU usage.

Renesas R-Car H2 Block Diagram

Here are R-Car H2′s specifications provided on Renesas website:

For development, Renesas provides ICE for ARM CPU, as well as an evaluation board including car information system-oriented peripheral circuits. The platform supports QNX Neutrino RTOS, Windows Embedded Automotive, and Linux.

Renesas R-Car H2 samples are available now, and mass production is scheduled for mid-2014. More information is available on on Renesas R-Car H2 page.

Via Embedded.com

As cars become more sophisticated, you’re now able to access all sort of data from your car and display this on a computer or tablet to diagnose problems or simply to create your own high-end dashboard. This morning, I’ve come across CARAPP APP327, a Bluetooth diagnostic scanner compatible with OBD2 standard (On-Board Diagnostic II), which could can just connect on an OBD2 connector if your car is recent enough. This has been around for many years (since 1996), but I had never heard about this technology until today.

OBD2 Connector (Left) – CARAPP APP327 Bluetooth Scanner (Right)

Wikipedia OBD2 page explains the OBD2 connector (16-pins) should be within 2 feet (0.61 m) of the steering wheel according to the standard, which also specifies the type of diagnostic connector and its pinout, the electrical signaling protocols available, and the messaging format. After you connect the Bluetooth adapter, you just need to install the applications needed for your platform (e.g. Android, Windows, iOS, etc…) which you can get from an installation CD, or download an application that supports OBD2 standard such as Torque Pro or Torque Lite for your Android device.

Torque Pro User Inteface

Let’s go back to CARAPP APP123 and its key features:

• Function – Read trouble codes, check trouble codes, display current sensor data, calculate fuel oil consumption.
• Wireless – Bluetooth with a transmission range up to 10 m
• Interface – 16-pin OBD2
• Software Platforms – Android, Win XP / Win 7 / PPC (Windows Mobile)
• Protocols Supported – ISO15765-4 (CAN), ISO14230-4(KWP2000), J1850 PWM, J1850 VPW, ISO9141-2
• Output Protocol – OBD2 @ 115.2Kbps
• Power – 12 V / 35 mA working current

The device can report the engine and vehicle speed, load values, the temperature of the cooling liquid, the fuel system status, short-term fuel adjustment, long-term fuel trim, the air flow rate, oxygen sensor voltages, fuel pressure and more. Since it follows OBD2 standard I would think it’s compatible with Torque Pro/Lite, but could not find specific demo videos for this particular device.

CARAPP APP12 costs $21 on Dealextreme, but other cheaper and more popular ODB2 Bluetooth diagnostic scanners are also available such as Soliport ELM 327.

FOSDEM is a 2-day (or 3 if you include Friday beer event) event where over 5,000 members of open source communities meet, share ideas and collaborate. It’s free to attend, and there’s no registration, so you just show up to attend. FOSDEM 2013 takes place on Feb 2-3 (yep, this week-end) in Brussels

There are 7 main tracks where sessions are organized:

• Operating systems
• Open source challenges
• Security Janson
• Beyond operating systems
• Web development
• Miscellaneous
• Robotics

There are also keynotes and devroom for a total of 488 sessions. Developers rooms that may particularly be of interest to readers of this blog are:

• Cross Desktop devroom – e.g. Wayland, gstreamer, razor-qt, Qt Project, Plasma Active, etc…
• Cross Distro devroom – e.g. Linux on Android, suse on ARM, ARMv8, systemd, etc…
• Embedded and mobile devroom – e.g. Baserock Embedded Linux, Guacamayo (Yocto), Nemo Mobile/ Mer project, arduino…

All in all that’s a lot of sessions, and even though I won’t attend, I’m going to select a few from the main tracks:

• Saturday 13:00 – 13:50 – Porting Fedora to 64-bit ARM systems by Jon Masters

This talk introduces the Fedora ARM Project and in particular the work we are doing to bring Fedora to emerging 64-bit ARM server systems.

• Saturday 15:00 – 15:50 – Open ARM GPU drivers by Luc Verhaegen

Where are we today, one year after the unveiling of the Lima driver. This talk will cover the Lima driver (ARM Mali 200/400), but also other open source GPU driver projects such as the freedreno driver (Qualcomm Adreno), open source driver for Nvidia Tegra, etnaviv project (Vivante GC) and cover the status for Broadcoms Videocore and Imaginations PowerVR GPUs.

• Saturday 16:00 – 16:50 – ARM support in the Linux kernel by Thomas Petazzoni

Based on the speaker’s experience of getting the support for the new Armada 370 and Armada XP ARM processors from Marvell into the mainline Linux kernel, this talk will detail the most important steps involved in this effort, and through this, give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support.

• Sunday 11:00 – 11:50 – Firefox OS by Jonas Sicking

Firefox OS is the next product being developed by Mozilla. It’s an open source OS based on the web and following the principals which have made the web a success. A phone running recent builds of Firefox OS (it’s not a finished product yet) will be demoed, and  the technologies and ideas behind Firefox OS will be discussed.

• Sunday 12:00 – 12:50 – systemd, Two Years Later by Lennart Poettering

The systemd project is now two years old (almost three). It found adoption as the core of many big community and commercial Linux distributions. It’s time to look back what we achieved, what we didn’t achieve, how we dealt with the various controversies, and what’s to come next.

• Sunday 12:00 12:50 – Aldebaran Robotics and Open Source by Dimitri Merejkowsky

How Aldebaran Robotics is using open source on their NAO robot.

• Sunday 13:00 – 13:50 – ROS: towards open source in robotics by Morgan Quigley

This talk will provide an overview of the Robot Operating System (ROS), an open software integration framework for robots.

• Sunday 14:00 – 14:50 – Vroom! Free Software in your car by Jeremiah Foster

This talk describes how the automotive industry has moved to embedded Linux and Open Source to develop the next generation of In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and how it has met the challenges along the way.

• Sunday 16:00 – 16:50 – UEFI SecureBoot by Cathy Malmrose

What, why, when, where and how SecureBoot changes the way we build F/LOSS

Audi is currently showcasing an autopilot car at CES 2013, and more specifically “Audi Piloted Parking” which allows you to get out of the car before your enter the parking, run an app on your smartphone, and tap somewhere to let the car park itself, as you go shopping or attend a meeting. Once you’re done with your business, walk by the street, run the same app, and call your car back, sit on the driver seat and drive home.

The car is said to use 12 ultrasound sensors to navigate and avoid obstacles, and it can park itself using those sensors, as well as sensors in the garage & road, and information provided by the parking computer(s) to let it know where a parking space is available. The car is able to make turns on its own and knows how to maneuver around the garage with external laser sensors. All of this is still experimental, as PCWorld reports that people could not walk by the vehicle as it parked, because they may interfere the garage sensors.

It’s not only for parking, as Audi also achieved to drive an experimental car up to Pikes Peak on autopilot on 2010, completing the 156-turn, 12.42-mile Pikes Peak circuit in just 27 minutes.

Audi recently obtained a license from Nevada to operate self-driving autonomous cars, and you may see auto-piloted cars on the roads, or at least in parkings, within the next decade.

Thanks to Connolly.

There’s a Bentley GT concept car at CES 2012 to demonstrate QNX CAR 2.0 platform that provides dual screen support with the dashboard and an infotainment display for the automotive industry. Under the hood, the platform features TI DLP technology, and TI OMAP5 and Jacinto processors running QNX Neutrino RTOS.

Bentley GT Concept Car Featuring QNX CAR 2.0 dashboard and user display

Texas Instruments and QNX uploaded a video demo of the concept on YouTube. They explain that they switched their platform from HTML5 to native OpenGL for optimal performance using Storyboard Suite from Crank software, and they can now show 3D maps smoothly on the platform. The 1080p user display is curved to be more user friendly (better touch angles). You must have certainly heard about touchscreens before, but maybe never heard about “pretouch”. Pretouch is a feature of the system that detect when you hand comes close to a control virtual and pops up a virtual menu. The dashboard shows virtual instrument clusters, that shows the tachometers, and other car system information, as well as directions if you are using GPS navigation.

The system comes with standard features such as media player, climate control, etc.. as well as a full duplex video conferencing system with 7kHz audio. In the last part of the demo, they showed that you can get information and control your car with your smartphone, and open/close windows, open the doors, and even horn, although they did not dare to demonstrate the latter at CES 2013.

OMAP5 Jacinto 6 processor (DRA74x) is the latest automotive SoC by Texas Instruments. Jacinto 6 is based on the OMAP5 platform, and features 2 ARM Cortex-A15 cores, multiple Imagination Technologies POWERVR SGX544-MPx graphics cores, and adds TI C66x DSP for software defined radio and advanced audio processing. High-definition surround view cameras, multiple concurrent HD displays, USB 3.0, PCIe2, and SATA are all supported by this SoC, and it also adds automotive peripherals such as CAN, MOST Media Local Bus (MLB), Ethernet AVB, PCI Express and dual external memory interfaces.

QNX, Linux, and Android are supported on the platform. The DRA74x “Jacinto 6″ processor will sample in mid-2013 and is expected to be available for production by the H2 2014. You’ll need to be an “high-volume automotive manufacturer” to buy it though.

You can get more information by reading QNX CAR 2.0 product brief and TI Jacinto 6 technical brief.

VIA Technologies has announced the VIA VAB-800 Pico-ITX board powered by a Freescale i.MX537 (ARM Cortex A8) processor clocked at 800MHz or 1GHz depending on the requirements, with 1GB DDR3-800 SDRAM and support for eMMC Flash with a capacity of up to 64 GB. The VIA VAB-800 is an industrial board that can operate in a wide temperature range and targets high-end industrial and in-vehicle embedded applications.

VIA VAB-800 (Click to Enlarge)

Here are the specs of the board:

• Processor – Freescale Cortex-A8 single core iMX537 @800MHz
• System Memory – 1GB DDR3-800 SDRAM, using 128M x16 memory devices
• Flash – eMMC Flash, up to 64GB
• Graphics  – Supports two independent, integrated graphics processing units: an OpenGL® ES 2.0,  3D graphics accelerator and an OpenVG™ 1.1 2D graphics accelerator
• Ethernet – SMSC LAN8720A 10/100 PHY transceiver with HP Auto-MDIX support
• Audio – Freescale SGTL5000 low power stereo codec with headphone amp
• HDMI – Silicon image SiI9024A HDMI transmitter
• CAN – TI SN65HVD1050 EMC optimized CAN transceiver
• USB – Hub SMSC USB 2.0 high speed 4-port hub controller
• Onboard I/O
  • SATA I connector with voltage select jumper
  • SATA DOM power supply connector
  • 2 x COM connectors with power supply (one supports 8-wire, another supports 4-wire)
  • 2 x Single-channel, 18/24-bit LVDS connectors
  • CMOS sensor connector for BT.656 camera module
  • RTC battery connector
  • Front audio pin header for line-in, line-out and MIC-in
  • JTAG connector
  • 2 x Boot flash select pin headers
  • Miscellaneous pin header for 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB device port, 2 CAN bus ports, system power-on and reset
  • Miscellaneous pin header for 1 SDIO port, 4-wire resistive touch screen interface, 1 I2C pair and 8 GPIOs
  • 5V DC-in power connector
• Back Panel I/O
  • VGA port
  • 2 x USB 2.0 ports
  • Mini HDMI port
  • RJ-45 LAN port

• Watch Dog Timer
• Power – 2W typical, 5W max.
• Operating Temperature – 0 ~ 60°C (-20°C ~ 70°C for option)
• Operating Humidity – 0% ~ 95% (relative humidity ; non-condensing)
• Dimension:  10 cm x 7.2 cm (Pico-ITX)

The company provides Android 2.3, Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows Embedded Compact 7 (through third party) BSPs for the board.

VIA VAB-800 Pico-ITX board samples are available now. You can find more information on VIA VAB-800 page.