CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development

Massimo Banzi announced the Arduino Yún, the first of a  family of Wi-Fi products combining Arduino with Linux, at the Maker Faire Bay Area. The company used the name Yún (云), meaning “cloud” in Chinese, as the purpose of this board to allow connection to web services directly from Arduino.

Arduino Yun Specifications:

• MCU – Atmel ATMega32u4 @ 16 MHz (same as the one used in Leonardo board) with 2.5KB SRAM and 32KB flash
• SoC – Atheros AR9331 MIPS-based Wi-Fi SoC running Linino, Arduino’s own Linux distribution based on OpenWRT. It’s the same chipset as in TP-Link WR703N router.
• Storage – microSD card slot
• USB – micro USB connector + full USB host port
• Connectivity – Ethernet + Wi-Fi
• 14 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs)

Arduino Yún ATMega32u4 can be programmed as a standard Arduino board by plugging it to your computer with the micro USB connector, or via Wi-Fi.

The company explains that during Yún first boot, it acts as an Access Point, and creates “Arduino”  Wi-Fi network. So you can simply open its configuration page into your browser, and set-up the Wi-Fi network name, security type, and password.

Arduino created a Bridge library which delegates all network connections and processing of HTTP transactions to the Atheros chip running Linux, so you can link the Atmel MCU to Linux, launching programs and scripts, passing them parameters (sensor readings for example) and reading their output with your own sketches. Since Linino is a customized version of  OpenWRT, shell and Python scripts are supported out-of-the-box, and you can install open source software and tools that are already working in OpenWRT.

Over one hundred APIs will be available thanks to Temboo, and developers will have access to  multiple platforms such as  Twitter, Facebook, FedEx or PayPal, from a single point of contact.

Arduino Yún should be available at the end of June for 69$.

Via Greg Kroah-Hartman

Last year, H6 Android Netbook featured AllWinner A10 Cortex A8 processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB Flash, and came with a 10.1″ display with 1024×600 resolution, and people who tried did not seem very satisfied with their purchase. This year however, we should get more better hardware thanks to devices like N70-A and N70-B, respectively powered by AllWinner A20 with 1GB RAM, and AllWinner A31 with 2GB RAM, that both come with a 13.3″ display (1280×800).

There’s also N101-A model powered by AllWinner A20, but it comes with a 10.1″ display with 1024×600 resolution.  All models are available with 8, 16 or 32GB flash, feature Wi-Fi 802.11n and Ethernet connectivity, a 0.3MP front camera, an SD card reader, 2 USB ports, 1 HDMI output, as well as mic IN and headphone jacks. For some reasons, AllWinner A20 models runs Android 4.2.2, but AllWinner A31 still runs Android 4.1.2.

You should be able to load Linux on AllWinner A20 based model in the near future, including 2D/3D hardware acceleration, and Linux should run with AllWinner A31 without GPU acceleration, at least until Ubuntu 14.04 (Tyrannical Turtle?) is released, or another OS taken advantage of libhybris is released.

There’s no information about pricing or availability at this stage, but according to Padhz, we should now more at Computex on June 4-8, 2013, in Taipei, Taiwan.

Via Liliputing

Android mini PCs ( HDMI TV dongles) are great to make your TV smart, and you may expect to be able to play Android games on your TV easily. The reality is that the keyboard and mouse, or remote controls used with those devices, are not suitable for games, and most games do not play at all. Of course, OUYA and GameStick projects will take care of this, as well as the recently available Project SHIELD ($349) , but if you already have one of those mini PCs, you may not want to spend the money for another device. Luckily there’s a solution, and with some efforts, you can play many games, but not all, with a PS3 Bluetooth controller connected to your Android mini PC or Set-Top Box.

I decided to give it a try by buying “GOIGAME Rechargeable Bluetooth Wireless DoubleShock III Controller for PS3” for $16.60, which is a clone of Sony’s PlayStation 3 Dualshock 3 Wireless Controller, and costs about three times less. Today, I’ll start by showing pictures of the controller, then explain how I managed to play Dead Trigger in Tronsmart T428 Android mini PC, and SuperTuxKart in a computer running Ubuntu 13.04.

Goigame DoubleShock III Unboxing

I received the controller in the package below, which was *almost* not damaged…

Goigame Doubleshock III Package (Click to Enlarge)

The wireless controller comes with a silicon case, and nothing else, so you’ll also need to find a mini USB to USB cable to charge the device.

It does indeed look like a PS3 Dualshock III controller, but for some details such as the “P3″ key. I can’t compare the build quality to an original controller since I’ve never used one. The model number at the back is CECHZC2U.

I’ve also partially disassembled the thing for those of you who want to see its guts.

Click to Enlarge

(Click to Enlarge)

Playing Android Games with PS3 Wireless Controller

At the beginning, I though my controller was damaged because I failed to see it in the list of Bluetooth devices in both Linux computers and Android devices. But apparently, this BT device does not work that way, and won’t be detected at all in the list of devices.

The first thing to do in Android is to download Sixaxis Compatibility Checker, a utility that checks if your Android device and your controller are compatible, before you buy Sixaxis Controller app (~$2.50 US).

Launch Sixasis Compatibility Checker, and click on Start. This is check if your Android device is compatible, and if it is successful show the message below with the master address. The message tells you to use SiaxisPairTool in Windows or sixpair in Linux, but since all mini PCs run Android 4.x, we can just connect our PS3 controller to the mini PC via USB for the next step.

If you don’t get the message above, your device firmware is not compatible, you need to investigate, and possibly re-build the Linux kernel and/or required drivers in as explained in that post.

After having connected the controller to the USB port, click on Pair, make sure the master address is correct (the one detected previously), and click OK.

Disconnect the USB cable, click on Start again in the app, and click on the PS3 Button (original controller) or P3 Button (Clone).  LED 1 should be on, and the other 3 off, and the following message should show up in Sixaxis Compatibility Checker.

Click OK, and if you play around with the analog joystick and buttons of your controller, debug messages should be displayed in the app:

Client 0: DOWN - 19
Client 0: UP - 19
Client 0: DOWN - 19
Client 0: UP - 19
Client 0: DOWN - 20
Client 0: UP - 20

With the number changing depending on the key pressed.

Now go over Google Play, buy and install Sixaxis Controller app to be able to play games.

The user interface is very similar to the free checker, just follow the same instructions to pair your controller. You can then click on “Change IME”, and select Sixaxis Controller.

Now let’s try to setup the system to play Dead Trigger. Still in Sixaxis Controller, click on Preferences->GamePad Settings’, and Enable Gamepad as shown below.

I’ve also changed the “Analog Poll Rate” to the maximum, but I’ve not sure it affects playability at all.

You may also want to enable “Mouse Emulation”, or you’ll have to use your mouse to control the menu in the game instead of your controller.  I’ve done that, and selected the “START” key to toggle mouse, set the left stick to control the mouse, and assigned L1 and R1 as the left and right mouse buttons.

There’s also a “Touch Emulation”, which will be necessary in many games such as ShadowGun, but not in Dead Trigger, so I’ve skipped this part, which appears to be more complex as I understand you have to setup profiles for each games. Some people also mention the need to use Droidmote to be able to play more games on devices such as MK808.

Let’s start Dead Trigger. Press “START” once to toggle mouse emulation, and go to the setup menu to change the control scheme to “Free Move Pad”, and for my controller, I had to set the aim sensitivity for the game to be playable when turning left or right.

Finally click on Customize Gamepad to define the buttons used for firing, reloading, aiming, and more.. That’s it, start the game, press the “START” button on the controller again to disable mouse emulation, and kill’em all!

Sometimes, the analog sticks would just stop to work for a short, and/or appear to be stuck in position (which they weren’t). I don’t know the root cause of the issue. It could be a controller issue, a firmware bug, or Sixaxis Controller app bug.

PS3 Controller in Linux (Ubuntu)

Instructions to use the controller in Ubuntu are available in help.ubuntu.com.

I could install the tools:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:falk-t-j/qtsixa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sixad

and after connecting the controller via USB run the following command:

sudo sixpair

But the next step, where you disconnect USB, and run

sixad --start

would be unable to detect the device as I pressed P3 key. There seems to be issue with Ubuntu and my Bluetooth dongle, as Bluetooth often gets disabled.

USB mode however works perfectly, and after installing the packages below:

sudo apt-get install libusb-0.1-4 xserver-xorg-input-joystick

I could control the mouse pointer with the controller, and play SuperTuxKart without issues in Ubuntu 13.04. It did not work with Ubuntu 12.04 and an earlier version of the game.

About one year after showing the first image from the camera module prototype, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the Camera board is now available for purchase on RS Component or Element14. Navigating either of these sites is a nightmare, but, if you’re lucky, you should eventually find the camera board for around $25 before taxes and shipping.

“Raspicam” features the following hardware specifications:

• Omnivision 5647 sensor in a fixed-focus module
• 5MPixel sensor
• Still picture resolution: 2592 x 1944
• Max video resolution: 1080p
• Max frame rate: 30fps
• Size: 20 x 25 x 10mm
• Connection by flat ribbon cable to 15-pin MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector S5 on Raspberry Pi computer board

The first thing you’ll have to do with the camera is to connect it to the CSI connector on your Raspberry Pi, just behind the Ethernet connector on model B. James explains it very clearly in the video below.

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Now that the camera is connected, you’ll need to update your Raspbian installation. Login to your pi, and run those commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This may take a little while. After completion, run

sudo raspi-config

and enable the camera module, as shown below.

Save the settings, and reboot.

Two command lines applications called raspivid and raspstill are available respectively to capture video and still images.

Some example s:

• Capture an image in jpeg format:

  raspistill -o image.jpg

• Capture a 5s video in h264 format:

  raspivid -o video.h264

• Capture a 10s video:

  raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000

You can use the arrow keys to scroll, and type q to exit. Read here for further details.

It’s also possible to stream the Feed to a Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows computer:

• Linux PC
  Install dependencies:

  sudo apt-get install mplayer netcat-openbsd

  and run the following command:

  nc -l 5001 | mplayer -fps 31 -cache 1024 -

• Windows PC
  Download MPlayer and Netcat.
  Start a command promt, and type the following type:

  [Path to nc.exe]\nc.exe -L -p 5001 | [Path to mplayer.exe]\mplayer.exe -fps 31 -cache 1024 -

• Mac OS X
  Download MPlayer.
  Run the following command in Terminal to view the feed using MPlayer:

  nc -l 5001 | mplayer -fps 31 -cache 1024 -

You may also want to view the feed directly from the Raspberry Pi:

mkfifo buffer
nc -p 5001 -l > buffer | /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video/hello_video.bin buffer

Raspicam source code is available on github.

Intel has launched Silvermont, a new microarchitecture for low power SoC targeting smartphones, tablets, and servers in data centers. Silvermont SoC will be manufactured using 22nm Tri-Gate SoC process, and the company claims 3x times more peak performance than current generation Atom processors, or 5 times less power consumption at the same performance level.

Silvermont will be used in Bay Trail, Avoton,  and Merrifield processors:

• Intel’s quad-core “Bay Trail” SoC is scheduled for Q4 2013 tablets, and variants of the “Bay Trail” platform will also be used in market segments including entry laptop and desktop computers.
• Intel’s “Merrifield” is scheduled to ship to customers by the end of this year, and actual smartphones will show up in 2014.
• Intel’s “Avoton” will be used in low power microservers, and provide full server product capability that customers require including 64-bit, integrated fabric, error code correction, Intel virtualization technologies and software compatibility.

Intel will provide support for Android, Linux, and Windows devices for their new Atom SoCs.

A 1h20 webcast is available online for further details about Silvermont. The technical overview starts at 21:50 (Slide 15), and I’ll give a summary of some of the most interesting points.

This new microarchitecture brings performance improvements thanks to:

• Out of Order Execution engine enabling better single-threaded performance.
• A new multicore and system fabric capable of delivering 8 cores.
• New IA instructions and core technologies

as well as better power efficiency:

• Wider dynamic power operating range
• Enhanced power management
• Fast standby entry/exit

The slide below clearly explains the different definitions between Architecture, Microarchitecture and SoC at Intel.

SoC based on Silvermont will support 1 to 8 cores, and multicore SoC will feature modules with:

• Two cores
• Coupled second-level cache (up to 1MB)
• Dedicated point-to-point interface (IDI) to SOC providing independent read and write channels, higher bandwidth, lower latency, and OOO transaction support

Frequency and power management can be adjusted per core.

New instructions are available to improve performance (Intel Core 2 64n ISA + Core Westmere SSE4.1, SSE4.2, POPCNT), and security (Westmere AES-NI, Intel Secure Key), and news technologies such as Real Time instruction tracing, Intel VT-x2, and support for McAfee DeepSAFE will be embedded in the new SoCs.

One of the most interesting part of the presentation is the comparison to competitors.

It’s probably safe to use the “Small” competitor is ARM, and the “Large” competitor is AMD.  We already knew that AMD is not the best when it comes to power consumption, but what’s interesting is that Intel seems to vastly outperform current ARM big.LITTLE SoCs and Tegra 3 (4+1 companion core) when it comes to its power/performance ratio of its future SoCs. This chart is obviously biased since it’s there to show how good Intel microarchitecture is, but that still probably means Intel will be a serious competitors in the tablet and smartphone space, as long as they can also compete on price/performance and price/power ratios.

They also show very good performance and power improvement over the Saltwell microarchitecture both for single-thrreaded and multi-threaded use cases.

Peak to peak used the maximum frequency available, iso-power shows the performance improvement over the same power level, and iso-perf shows the difference in power consumption for a given performance metrics. STW stands for Saltwll, SLM for Silvermont. 1C1T = 1 Core 1 Thread, 2C4T = 2 Cores, 4 Threads, etc…

Going back to Intel vs ARM, they show how the Intel Dual Core Silvermont SoC outperforms ARM Quad core SoCs both in terms of performance and power consumption.

and a tablet comparison with expected results from Silvermont SoCs.

The benchmark used is SPECint*rate_base200, but the ARM tablets used are not described, and we just know they are similar configurations (e.g. number of cores, RAM, etc..), as the Silvermont solution.

We’ll probably need to wait for actual hardware at the end of the year to make a fair comparison, but the results provided by Intel look very promising.

You can download the presentation’s PDF for more slides.

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.

In case you are wary of having drones, such as RC helicopters, quadrotors…, flying around your house and invading your privacy, DroneShield can help you detect consumers’ drones by using a Raspberry Pi, a microphone and FFTW library, a C library for computing the discrete Fourier transform.

The device will capture the audio with the microphone, analyze the noise spectrum of the drone flying around, and search for an entry in a signature database, and if a match is found the device will then send an email or SMS to inform you of the “invader”.

There are complex challenges to overcome, or limitations, with this method, as any background noise will affect the detection, and drone emitting little noise or flying at high altitude won’t be detected. Spectrum analyses should however help avoid false positives such as a loanmowers and leafblowers as those emit a different kind of noise.They also need to gather more signatures to store in their database for this device to be more useful, and plan to rely on the community, but I haven’t found links and/or instructions to do so yet.

Currently, they have a working prototype (DroneShield V0.0) on a laptop, and they’ll port the code to the Raspberry Pi (DroneShield V1.0). FFTW library supports x86 SSE/SSE2/Altivec SIMD instructions, as well as NEON instructions on ARM, which are not available on the ARMv6 processor (Broadcom BCM2835) used in the Raspberry Pi. I don’t know the processing power required to do real-time FFT, but there could potentially be performance issues on the Raspberry Pi.

They give hints, but do not commit, that they may release the source code for V0.0 and V1.0, as well as the hardware documentation for V1.0 after the indiegogo campaign.

You can get a DroneShield fully assembled by pledging $69 on Indiegogo, alternatively you can pledge $59 to get a box with all parts needed, and do the assembly yourself. Delivery is expected in August 2013. This is very much an “American thing”, and there does not seem to be an option to ship this internationally.

The next step, DroneShield V2.0, will be to build a specialized hardware, possibly based on ARM Cortex processor, and at a cost close to $20.