Resources for SMP865x SMP8652 SMP8653 SMP8654 SMP8655 SMP8656

Less than a year ago, Sigma Designs released the SMP8652, a secure media processor “designed to provide the optimal price/performance configuration for thin client applications, which include IPTV set-top boxes, digital media adapters, and hybrid cable/IP thin clients.” SMP8652 provides cost savings compared to the SMP863X series, due the integration of functions such as Ethernet and USB – that allowed them to skip PCI support in their new chip – and better performance (500Mhz MIPS24K CPU). SMP8650 series processors also use the MRUA and DCCHD SDK that need to be purchased as for the previous generation of chips. [ad#Google Adsense – Wide Banner] You can also purchase more SDK from Sigma for SMP8652: Adobe Flash Lite Qt/Webkit Integration Java VM Some DRM SDK (e.g. Microsoft DRM)… As for SMP8630 series, SMP86520 series processors also have a MMU (as most of new chips nowadays) so that you won’t come across the […]

Replacing tabs by spaces in vi

In order to have code formatting consistency, we may choose to use only tabs or only spaces in the source code. We chose to only use spaces since that makes sure the code will be properly formatted in any text editor. In order to create 4 spaces while pressing tabs in vi, edit your vi settings: vi ~/.vimrc and add the 3 lines below to your config file set tabstop=4 set shiftwidth=4 set expandtab The next time you’ll use vi, pressing the tabulation key will create 4 spaces. However, in some cases, e.g. Makefile, you may still need to use real tabs. Just press Ctrl+V then tab to create a real tab.

ArmSoM CM5 - Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC

Digital Signage Players in Hong Kong and China

I’ll show a few digital signage applications based on Sigma Designs EM8620 and SMP8630 series that are currently used in Hong Kong and China. Bus Digital Signage SinoCDN is a Hong Kong company providing broadband media delivery solutions. SinoCDN  currently provides a digital signage solution for Hong Kong – China cross boarder buses called IPAD. Their solution is based on EM8623L Sigma Designs and allows content update thru Wifi at the border between China / Hong Kong. If you’ve ever been at the Hong Kong / China border (Lok Ma Chau) and seen some Wifi access points whose names starts with sinocdn, they are used for this purpose. Digital Signage & POS (Point-of-Sale) Heng Yu Technologies is another Hong Kong company specialized in the manufacturing of “customized input and display technology for the industrial markets” They provide point of sales and advertizing platform based on several Sigma Designs platforms, including […]

Linux LAN Port Scanner

Just a short post to show how to scan the open ports of a remote machine on the local network: sudo nmap -sS 10.10.10.123 Starting nmap 3.81 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2010-04-28 16:00 HKT Interesting ports on 10.10.10.123: (The 1660 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered) PORT    STATE  SERVICE 69/tcp  closed tftp 139/tcp open   netbios-ssn 445/tcp open   microsoft-ds MAC Address: 00:50:FC:B1:E9:70 (Edimax Technology CO.) Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 25.252 seconds

Installing Android in your PC

In case you want to checkout Android but do not have any devices to do so, you can simply install it in your PC. In this blog entry I’ll show how to install Android in VirtualBox with a computer running Windows XP, but this could be installed in any OS supported by VirtualBox or other virtual machine (e.g. VMWare). If you don’t have it yet,  download VirtualBox for your OS and install it first. The first thing is to download Android-x86 ISO file. While it is downloading you can add a new Virtual Machine to VirtualBox. After you click on the “New” icon, click on Next  and enter your machine name. e.g. Android, and select the Operating System:  Linux and version: Other Linux. Click on next to select the memory size: Click on next to select to create a new hard disk: Then basically select Next for the following steps […]

Software Documentation with Doxygen

This is a good practice to always have up-to-date software documentation. However, there can be discrepancy between the source code and the documentation over time and maintenance may be an issue. This is where Doxygen,  a “Source code documentation generator tool”, may be handy as it will automatically generate documentation based on the comments in the source code. In order for Doxygen to work, all developers will have to follow the same source code format in all source files,which is in itself also a plus since it will make the code and especially comments in this case more consistent. We’ll just show to quickly generate html and pdf documentation using a sample program we’ll call cnxapp. So here’s the code for this “application”   #include <stdio.h> /** Function1 description @param iArg1 First param description @param iArg2 Second param description @return 0 – Success -1 – Failure */ int function1(int iArg1, […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs

Sigma Designs SMP863X Resources

SMP8634 / SMP8635 “Secure Media Processors” from Sigma Designs are used in our set-top-box and digital signage applications. In order to develop for that platform, an SDK must be purchased directly from Sigma Designs. There are different version of the SDK, once is mainly compatible with EM862X MRUA SDK and the newer one DCCHD is not, but offer a few more features. However, as for EM8620 series, the Linux kernel is open source so companies need to release the source if they modified it in their products. For example, you could download the GPL source released by Netgem – http://www.netgem.com/en/supportLinux.php for both Linux and utilities used in their NetBox HD. This is only the GPL source for your reference, after that there are also sigma linux drivers (not released by sigma) and not GPL, and the MRUA/DCCHD package that needs to be purchased from Sigma Designs. Contrary to EM8620 series […]

Setting up a time server (RFC 868)

This blog entry explains how to configure a time server as defined in RFC 868. not to be confused with NTP which is a newer protocol. This type of server is to be used with rdate as you’ll see below. Edit/ etc/xinetd.d/time and set disable = no. Make sure the lines below are present and uncommented in /etc/services time            37/tcp          timserver time            37/udp          timserver restart xinetd: /etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd restart The time server will be started automatically each time the PC boots up. To test the time server, in your device use rdate (part of busybox): To set the date: rdate -s IP_ADRESS_OF_TIME_SERVER To print the date in the console: rdate -p IP_ADRESS_OF_TIME_SERVER Check the date by typing date

Boardcon Rockchip RK3588S SBC with 8K, WiFI 6, 4G LTE, NVME SSD, HDMI 2.1...