Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Digital Signage: Implementing a smooth scrolling text

Digital Signage: Implementing a smooth scrolling text

Many digital signage hardware feature scroll text. However, in many cases the scrolling text is either not smooth, sometimes teared or very slow. It may depends on the performance of the hardware used but also on the implementation of the software. Once easy way to implemented scrolling text is just to redraw the text again and again at different position. However, this is very slow and yields poor results unless maybe you have a Truetype accelerator or similar hardware font accelerator. The next step is then to convert the text into pixmaps. This can either be done in the digital signage manager software (Windows PC/MAC or Linux based) or the digital signage player. Doing so in the latter makes it much more flexible. So you may create 2 pixmaps whose width and length match the region to be displayed, you write the text on those 2 pixmaps, then simply move […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Samsung Galaxy Tab – Android Tablet Teaser Video

Samsung Galaxy Tab – Android Tablet Teaser Video

Samsung will announce their new tablet Samsung Galaxy Tab on the 2nd of September 2010 at IFA in Berlin. Hopefully, this will be the first of many high quality Android Tablets coming to the market. This tablet features a 7″ multi-touch screen, Android 2.2, video calls (with a front camera), full web browser, HD Video playback… It is rumoured to use an ARM11 (S5PC110) running at 1.o GHz Here’s the teaser video first, and we’ll get more info and next week when it will finally be unveiled.

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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

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 […]

Intel Arc Graphics Technology
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:

Khadas VIM4 SBC