Free Electrons is a small (9 people) engineering company focusing on embedded Linux / Android, and open source software, which also happens to have ported several ARM SoC to the mainline kernel. From time to time, they also offer training sessions, and release course materials publicly. Their latest training is a 3-day course dealing with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, using BeagbleBone Black development board for lab sessions, and all materials have been released under a Creative Commons license. The training consists in: Understanding the Yocto Project Using it to build a root filesystem and run it on your target Writing and extending recipes Creating layers Integrating your board in a BSP Creating custom images Application development with an Eclipse SDK Three files are released: yocto-slides.pdf – Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded Training presentation slides (245 pages) give an overview of various build systems, before getting more details about the Yocto […]
CoAction Hero – Low Cost ARM Cortex-M3 Board Running Open Source CoActionOS RTOS
CoAction Hero is a tiny board based on an ARM Cortex-M3 micro-controller (NXP LPC1759), that makes use of CoActionOS ecosystem that includes the hardware, but also an open source RTOS allowing multiple app to run concurrently, and a graphical interface to communicate with the board. First, let’s have a look at the hardware specs: Micro-controller – NXP LPC1759 ARM Cortex-M3 processor @ 120MHz with 64kB RAM and 512kB Flash ROM. Storage – 1MB serial flash chip (pre-loaded with CoActionOS) Expansion port micro USB connector. 40 I/O pins are available on both sides of the board, and the board can be inserted in a breadboard. You can currently connect 2 modules to the board: Bluetooth and LCD device boards. CoActionOS RTOS will come pre-loaded on the board, and if you don’t want to, you don’t even need to know it’s there, and it’s use will be transparent. But let’s have a […]
Using ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Streamline with MK802II mini PC
MK802-II is an Android 4.0 mini PC powered by AllWinner A10 (ARM Cortex A8) with 1GB RAM and 4GB flash. Instructions are also available to run Ubuntu, or other Linux distributions. ARM Development Studio 5 (ARM DS-5) is software development tool suite for ARM processors that can be used for both Linux and Android debugging, and available in 2 versions: professional edition and community edition, the latter being free of charge. I’m writing about both today, because Bob Peng, Technical Marking Engineer for ARM China, recently wrote a blog post in Chinese [Update: An English version is now available] showing how to use MK802-II, preloaded with the required drivers and daemon, with DS-5 Streamline Performance Analyzer with is part of both versions. The community edition may be missing some features of Streamline however. Streamline Performance Analyzer allows you to: Find out which modules or functions to take up most of […]
ARM MCU Development in Linux with Energy Micro’s Simplicity Studio, Eclipse, and CodeSourcery Toolchain
Quite a few months ago, I received an Energy Micro EFM32 Tiny Gecko Starter Kit, but I haven’t done much with it. But recently I saw a tweet from EnergyMicro about Simplicity Studio supports for Ubuntu, and I know it can be problematic to find proper tools for ARM MCU development in Linux, so I decided to give it a try. The first part is about Simplicity Studio, and energyAwareTools which are specific to Energy Micro, but the second part deals with setting up Eclipse and CodeSourcery ARM toolchain for MCU development which should be reusable for other MCUs from vendors such as Texas Instruments, NXP and STMicro. I’ve used a PC running Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit with the instructions below. Installing Simplicity Studio and energyAwareTools in Ubuntu Simplicity Studio is part of the 4 steps of the getting started guide with EFM32 MCUs. It has been available for Linux for […]
Yocto Project Overview and Update – ELCE 2012
Last post about ELCE 2012 videos… David Stewart, manager of the Yocto Project team within the Open Source Technology Center at Intel, gives an introduction to the Yocto Project, as well as a status update at ELCE 2012. Abstract: The Yocto Project is a joint project to unify the world’s efforts around embedded Linux and to make Linux the best choice for embedded designs. The Yocto Project is an open source starting point for embedded Linux development which contains tools, templates, methods and actual working code to get started with an embedded device project. In addition, the Yocto Project includes Eclipse plug-ins to assist the developer. This talk gives a walk-through of the key parts of the Yocto Project for developing embedded Linux projects. In addition, features will be described from the latest release of the Yocto Project, v1.3. The talk will include demos of some of the key new […]
Canonical Announces Ubuntu for Phones
Canonical has just announced the Ubuntu for Phones platform that will allows users to have similar experience on desktops (Ubuntu Desktop), TVs (Ubuntu TV) and smartphones, avoiding the need to learn 2 different platform for the desktop and mobile devices. The user interface replaces the “Lock screen” with the “Welcome screen” (As shown in the middle of the picture above), which shows notifications and user data as you turn on your device. The user interface mostly eliminate buttons, and you can access features by swiping the edge of the phone. A swipe on the left edge will show the dash bar, giving access to most used apps and dash search, a swipe on the right edge will cycle through your opened apps, a swipe at the top will give access to notifications and allow changing settings right from there, and a swipe at a button will allow you to customize […]
Installing Android SDK on Ubuntu 12.04
The official instructions to install Android SDK do not appear to be really up-to-date for Ubuntu 12.04, so I’ll post how I’ve installed the Android SDK and Eclipse on Ubuntu 12.04. First download and decompress Android SDK for Linux:
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wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r20-linux.tgz tar xzvf android-sdk_r20-linux.tgz |
on 64-bit Ubuntu:
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apt-get install ia32-libs |
Sun Java is not part of Ubuntu packages anymore, so you’ll need to use openjdk instead
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apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk |
Now install the SDK
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cd android-sdk-linux/tools ./android sdk |
Android SDK Manager should show up. Use the default recommended packages and platforms, as well as any extra packages you may need, and click on Install x packages, accept all licenses and after installation is complete, the Android SDK is installed. Eclipse IDE is optional, but it’s the most widely used IDE to develop Android apps. You can install Eclipse as follows:
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sudo apt-get install eclipse-jdt |
Once both Android packages and platforms, and eclipse are installed, start eclipse:
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eclipse |
Then in the top menu, click on Help->Install […]
Android SDK Tools and ADT Revision 17 with VM Acceleration for x86 Emulator
Google has released revision 17 of the SDK Tools and the Eclipse plugin. This release brings new features and bug fixes in for Lint static checker, the build system, and the emulator among other things. Here’s what’s new for Lint in r17: Lint API Check – Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. You can use the @TargetApi annotation to specify local overrides for conditionally loaded code. New Lint Rules – Added over 40 new Lint rules for a total of over 80, including checks for performance, XML layouts, manifest and file handling. Ignoring Lint Warnings – Added ability to suppress Lint warnings in Java code with the new @SuppressLint annotation, and in XML files with the new tools: namespace prefix and ignore attribute. New Eclipse Lint UI – Improved HTML and XML reporting and Eclipse integration. Improvements to […]