Nokia Developer Day 1 Summary – Chiang Mai

I’ve just attended the first day of Nokia Developer Day (6-7 December 2011). The focus was on software development for Nokia’s feature phones with Java or Web Apps (HTML/CSS/Javascript) and most of the time was spent on workshops to get started for developing for Nokia feature phones such as the S40 series. Introduction to Ecosystem Business Updates During the first 15 minutes, an “Introduction to Ecosystem Business Updates” was given by Jirapat Janjerdask, Head of the Ecosystem Developer Experience at Nokia Thailand. He gave an overview of the ecosystem for features phones including the brand, developer & publisher, mobile brand, mobile operator and consumer. One interesting statistics was that there are 10 millions app downloads every single day. He also talked about the new Nokia Asha 300 and 303 features phones available for 3000 to 4000 Thai Baht (100 to 130 USD)  that are capable of running applications that usually […]

Nokia Developer Day in Chiang Mai – 6-7 December 2011

Nokia Developer Day will take place at Kantary Hills in Chiang Mai, Thailand on the 6 & 7 December 2011. A Separate event will also take place in Khonkaen on the 8 & 9 December 2011. Here’s the agenda for the 2 days event in Chiang Mai: Day 1 – 6th of December: 08:45 – 09:15 – Registration 09:15 – 09:30 – Introduction to Ecosystem Business Updates 09:30 – 09:50 – Development possibilities on Nokia Platforms 09:50 – 12:30 – Introduction of Series 40 Java – Touch & Type with hands-on exercises. 12:30 – 13:30 – Lunch 13:30 – 16:00 – Series 40 Web Apps for the next billion with hands-on exercises. 16:00 – 17:00 – Social Media Marketing Training 17:00 – Q&A Day 2 : 7th of December 08:45 – 09:15 – Registration 09:15 – 10:00 – Overall business direction 10:00 – 12:00 – Introduction to Qt Quick (QML) […]

ARM NEON Tutorial in C and Assembler

The Advanced SIMD extension (aka NEON or “MPE” Media Processing Engine) is a combined 64- and 128-bit single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set that provides standardized acceleration for media and signal processing applications similar to MMX, SSE and 3DNow! extensions found in x86 processors. Doulos has a video tutorial showing how you can exploit NEON instructions in assembler, how to modify your C code and provides the compile options for gcc to enable NEON during the build. Abstract: With the v7-A architecture, ARM has introduced a powerful SIMD implementation called NEON™. NEON is a coprocessor which comes with its own instruction set for vector operations. While NEON instructions could be hand coded in assembler language, ideally we want our compiler to generate them for us. Automatic analysis whether an iterative algorithm can be mapped to parallel vector operations is not trivial not the least because the C language is […]

Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources – AnDevCon II

The second Android developer Conference (AnDevCon II) took place about 10 days ago. Karim Yaghmour of OperSys published the presentation slides he used during his two Android presentations. The first presentation was Embedded Android Workshop, the same presentation he did at Android Open 2011. The second presentation “Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources” slides can be found below. Those 48 slides cover the following: AOSP’s limitations: Rigid, closed development model, excludes many things… Tearing AOSP apart Forks: Cyanogenmod: After-market handset firmware with custom launcher and lots of tweaks and mods… Replicant: 100% open souce with FDroid marketplace. MIUI: Closed source with UI enhancements. Ports: RIM Playbook:  OMAP4 Tablet based on AOSP. Bluestacks: Android on Windows 7. Alien Dalvik: Android SDK + Meego SDK integration. Mods: XDA Developers. Melding with “Classic” Linux Stack: Rationale: Lots of available stacks in Linux, Android does not provide everything. Road blocks: File system, Bionic C […]

Using Buildroot For a Real Project – ELCE 2011

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Free Electrons, shows how they used buildroot for a specific project at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: Buildroot is a nice, simple and efficient tool to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems, such as the ones found in many industrial systems or highly dedicated systems. Buildroot allows to automate the process of building a cross-compiling toolchain, building the root filesystem with all userspace components, building a Linux kernel image and a bootloader image. Based on experiences of a specific customer project, Thomas details how Buildroot can be configured and used to quickly produce nice, fast and efficient embedded Linux systems, but also how the target application development and debugging can be done based on Buildroot. You can also download the presentation slides. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as […]

Developing Embedded Linux Devices Using the Yocto Project – ELCE 2011

Presentation entitled “Developing Embedded Linux Devices Using the Yocto Project and What’s new in 1.1” by David Stewart, Intel, at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. 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 are described from the latest release of Yocto (1.1). At the end of the talk, developers should be able to start their own embedded project using the Yocto Project and use it for developing the next […]

Linaro Android Tutorial with the Pandaboard

Zach Pfeffer, the tech lead of the Linaro Android working group, gave a tutorial about Linaro Android at Linaro Connect Q4.11. During this tutorial, attendees were shown how to download a recent build for the pandaboard, how to make a bootable SD card image using the linaro-android-media-create command and how to boot the board with it. The full setup was composed of a Pandaboard connected to a HDMI monitor with a keyboard and mouse connected to the board as well as serial to USB cable to connect to the development machine. He also used an SD card reader to generate the bootable Android image. The images are available at Android Linaro Build Service. There are quite a few build named after the supported board (e..g panda for pandaboard, snowball for ST Ericsson Snowball etc..) and the kernel version (tracking = latest linaro kernel, staging = stable linaro  kernel). Then an […]

Ubuntu Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEB) Tutorial

Ricardo Salveti, tech lead of the Developer Platform working group, gave a tutorial on the Ubuntu Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEBs) during Linaro Connect Q4.11. He first described the list of available images: nano – minimal rootfs (command line) with apt/dkpg support ALIP – nano + X11 + browser Developer – nano + development tools Ubuntu Desktop – clone of Ubuntu with Linaro modifications. and how the builds are made available via nightly builds and hardware packs. Linaro aims at making Ubuntu the reference Linux distribution for ARM. This goal is valid for Cortex A processors, but for older ARM core (ARM9/ARM11) other distributions will have to used such as Debian. For example, Raspberry Pi board (ARM1176) will support Fedora optimized by Redhat. He then gave further details on Offspring the Linaro build system based on live-build scripts used for Debian. The source code is retrieved either via git (http:/git.linaro.org) or launchpad […]

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