Open Source Engineering with Linux & GNU

FTDI adds touch capability to its open source platform

2012-02-06T14:31:42Z

Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) has added a touch control input/output application boards for its Vinco development module, writes Richard Wilson.

The Vinco Touch Key applications board, which the supplier calls a shield mates with the Vinco motherboard, and incorporates a STMicroelectronics STMPE821 8-channel general purpose input/output (GPIO) capacitive touch key controller IC.

The shield has 8 touch keys which employ a capacitive sensing technology, responding to physical input stimulus from the user. It also has a set of 4 push buttons and 5 GPIO-controlled LED indicators. ]]>
Access to the Vinco pulse width modulation (PWM) interface is also available on the header pins. The shield requires a 5V supply, which can be drawn from an external supply or through the Vinco motherboard connections.

"The new Touch Key shield demonstrates the Vinco platform's ability to utilise the Android Open Accessory initiative, so that devices using the Android operating system, such as tablet PCs, can control items of external hardware through a human machine interface (HMI), over USB," said Dave Sroka, global product director at FTDI.

The shield is supplied in a 55.4 mm x 68.6 mm form-factor, the established format of the Arduino Duemilanove and Uno boards.

There are free software libraries, drivers and source code. An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) includes a code editor, 'C' compiler, assembler and debugger.

The FTDI Vinco Touch Key shield is available at a cost of $33.75 for single units.

More information is available for download at:
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/Modules/DS_Vinco.pdf

Raspberry Pi number 1 goes for £3,500 on eBay

2012-01-16T08:45:06Z

The Raspberry Pi project is almost a perfect example of open source engineering story. Well, it has started in popular fashion - a £20 Raspberry Pi computer sold for £3,500 on eBay last week, writes Steve Bush.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which intends to sell its educational computers directly, auctioned 10 of its beta production board on eBay.

]]> As executive director Eben Upton pointed out in a video on the Foundation's website, this limited auction was aimed at: computer collectors, benefactors intending to donate to the foundation - which is a charity, and software development firm's wanting hardware before full-production boards are released later this month.

In a move that may cause priority arguments amongst collectors in the future, Raspberry Pi number 1 was actually the tenth auctioned, with number 10 going first for the relative bargain price of £1,900.

Number 7 was bought by an anonymous benefactor for £989 and donated to the Computer Museum at the Centre for Computing History in Suffolk.

Set up by a group of high-flying techies, the Foundation aims to inspire a generation of programmers by putting competent low-cost hardware into the hands of children and teenagers, much in the way that Sinclair computers did in the 1980s.

"We have parts in stock for our first 10,000 units, and expect to be in volume production by the end of January," said Raspberry Pi Foundation executive director Eben Upton.

The computer, Raspberry Pi, is intended to cost under £20, is based around a 32bit ARM11 system chip which plugs into a TV through HDMI or analogue video, and will run some Linux distributions, Python, Iceweasel and KOffice amongst other open-source applications - a slight setback is that Ubuntu is not yet supporting the hardware.

Most importantly for the Foundation, unlike PCs and smart phones, Raspberry Pi can be programmed by the user as soon as it is switched on, tempting them to explore computer science.

Read the original news story >>

ARM releases Development Studio 5 Community Edition for Andorid

2011-11-30T09:26:46Z

For small firms, ARM has released Development Studio 5 Community Edition, a free version of its reference software development toolkit, writes our technology editor Steve Bush.

Known as DS-5 CE. "the new edition is dedicated to the Android application developer community and helps them create native software for compute intensive tasks that can run up to 4 times faster than Java code," claimed the firm. "DS-5 CE includes limited, but essential functionality from the premium DS-5 toolkit to help solve common Android application developer pain points." ]]>
It permits development of Java and C/C++ code in the Eclipse development environment, and there is a tailored version of the Streamline performance analyser for compatible Android development platforms.

"Streamline captures detailed, system-wide performance statistics from a variety of sources which helps developers to locate hotspots in their code and isolate potential causes," said ARM. "Platform builders can add support for Streamline by integrating an open source driver available from the Linaro website."

"We have worked with ARM to ensure that DS-5 support is available as an easy to install add-on for Linaro Ubuntu images in the past and are working together to deliver a similar developer experience for DS-5 CE as part of our Android images", said Alexander Sack, platform technical director, Linaro.

DS-5 CE is available free-of-charge for use by individuals and organisations with annual revenue of $100,000 or less, and up to 10 employees.

Steve Bush

MulticoreWare works with AMD on OpenCL multicore tools

2011-11-23T11:29:43Z

MulticoreWare has announced the beta availability of key OpenCL tools and libraries for download from its website, writes Richard Wilson.

The company has worked with microprocessor firm AMD to provide support for OpenCL in multicore design incorporating graphics procesors (GPUs) and CPUs.

"We have worked closely with AMD to produce the fastest and most developer-efficient way to delivering optimised code for heterogeneous multicore environments, with full support for OpenCL standards and portability across platforms," said Curtis Davis, co-founder, v-p of engineering and chief operating officier at MulticoreWare. ]]>
The intention is to allow developers to use these tools to take advantage of integrating a GPU with a CPU multicore systems for video and image analytics and gesture processing.

Global Memory for Accelerators (GMAC) enables development of code for CPUs and GPUs in a single pointer space, without requiring the developer to be aware of, or manage, the different memory domains and allocations.

There is a task manager for sequencing operations across both CPUs and GPUs, with resulting optimisation of memory accesses.

"By working with MCW to make key development tools freely available to developers worldwide, AMD is further advancing the role of heterogeneous computing and industry standards among the developer community," said Rao.

The tools are available on Microsoft Windows platform initially, with support for Linux and MacOS coming in the subsequent weeks. AMD and MCW are both committed to global, open standards, with on-going participation and leadership through actions with Khronos.

Google opens source code for Android 4.0.1

2011-11-18T08:24:52Z

How open is Google's Android? That's a subject of long and sometimes bitter debates, but it is "open enough" for the Mountain View search giant to release the source code for v4.0 - the 'Ice Cream Sandwich' release, which aims to unify smartphone and tablet code bases.

Well, after a lot of speculation around the exact due date, the code is now out.

To be precise it is releasing 4.0.1, which is the version that will ship on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone (pictured right).

Jean-Baptiste Queru announced the release on the 'Android Building' Google Group.
]]> We just released a bit of code we thought this group might be interested in. Over at our Android Open-Source Project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available. Here's how to get it: Follow the instructions at
http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html Check out the 'ics-release' branch:repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-4.0.1_r1 That's it!He goes on:

This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases. However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich. So, we haven't created any tags that correspond to the Honeycomb releases (even though the changes are present in the history.)

View the post >>

See also: Amazon releases source code for Kindle Fire's version of Android

MIPS uses Sysgo RTOS to secure Android and Linux

2011-11-11T08:32:46Z

We ran this one on the Eyes on Android blog, but this story may be of interest here, too...

MIPS Technologies is collaborating with OS developer Sysgo to port its embedded virtualization technology to MIPS32 processor cores, writes Richard Wilson.

Sysgo has a novel combination of real-time operating system (RTOS) and virtualization layer.

Its PikeOS RTOS is a hypervisor virtualization platform that allows several applications and operating systems such as Android and Linux to run securely in parallel on a single hardware platform.

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Porting the RTOS to MIPS32 allows CPU resources to be partitioned for different tasks, potentially eliminating the need for a dedicated security CPU in their system.

"It enables scaling of security across multiple applications and operating system instances," said Intrater.

"With PikeOS, we are addressing a new generation of embedded safety, security and reliability requirements across a range of markets," said Jacques Brygier, v-p of marketing, SYSGO.

"Compared to a conventional RTOS, the dynamic re-allocation of computing time enabled by PikeOS allows the best possible usage of CPU resources," said Brygier.

PikeOS is available now for the MIPS32 24K, 34K and 74K cores. Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support will be available Q1 2012.

OPEN Alliance SIG drives adoption of automotive Ethernet

2011-11-10T10:28:52Z

NXP Semiconductors claims to be the first automotive semiconductor supplier to license Broadcom's BroadR-Reach Ethernet technology for in-vehicle networking, writes Richard Wilson.

The supplier is bidding to establish BroadR-Reach as an open, de facto standard for in-vehicle Ethernet.

Broadcom, NXP, Freescale and Harman have formed an OPEN Alliance Special Interest Group (SIG) to drive the wide adoption of Ethernet in the automotive industry. ]]>

Major car manufacturers are designing with Ethernet for high-bandwidth in-car networks, alongside CAN, LIN, LVDS and FlexRay. BMW cars supporting Ethernet are already on the market since 2008.

Ethernet can offer cost advantages over other high-bandwidth automotive networking technologies such as LVDS, based on its ability to operate over single unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cabling. Not only is single UTP less expensive and lower in weight than shielded cabling, the technology is already in use by CAN- and LIN-based control systems, enabling BroadR-Reach to run over existing in-vehicle networks.

"We see Ethernet as the best choice for high-bandwidth in-vehicle networks and believe that BroadR-Reach is the superior technology in this field," said Rob Hoeben, director of marketing and business development for Ethernet at NXP Semiconductors.

NXP plans to create an automotive-grade product portfolio for the Ethernet physical layer based upon BroadR-Reach.

Open standards are better than open source - Synopsys

2011-10-27T09:57:04Z

Here's a recent article that may be of interest: an interview with Gabriel Lezmi, v-p European sales at Synopsys, which touches on open source software.

He tells Electronics Weekly about the rise and rise of IP and the importance of open standards rather than open source in the design software market.

In the interview we ask what impact is the open source revolution having on traditional design tool software?

Gabriel Lezmi replies: ]]> Software may have had some impact on open source a few years back, but today that is not the case in EDA.

In EDA, the focus is on making tools compliant with standards that are open rather than on developing tools that are open source.

Interestingly, the only successful implementation we are aware of in support of an "Open Source Revolution" in the EDA area is that of the SystemC reference implementation by OSCI. That effort was driven by, and strongly deployed in, European participant companies such as STMicroelectronics and NXP.Don't forget you can now leave comments on our News articles. Feel free to take up Gabriel Lezmi on this point!

Read the full article >>

Green Hills flies AVs with EAL6+ certified RTOS

2011-09-16T10:57:19Z

Read our full DSEi defence technology coverage >>

Green Hills Software has introduced an autonomous vehicle (AV) open platform for the development of secure software for autonomous vehicle developers to host their unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) applications, writes Richard Wilson.

The heart of the development system is the firm's INTEGRITY-178B real-time operating system (RTOS) which meets the software safety requirements of RTCA/DO-178B Level A for safety and total reliability, and the information assurance requirements of the US Government's EAL6+ Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) for absolute security. ]]>
According to the company, the platform is agnostic to the hardware, allowing platform providers to utilize the hardware architecture best suited for their environment.

Read the full article >>

RaspberryPi £15 ARM Linux computer due for Christmas

2011-09-01T07:23:21Z

The RaspberryPi Foundation, which aims to put computers in front of children for £15, has taken delivery of 50 engineering prototypes, and intends to get the final version to customers by the end of the year, writes Steve Bush.

Based in Cambridge and founded by six high-tech high-flyers, the foundation's aim is to cure the programmer shortage by inspiring people to take up computing in childhood - as Sinclair Spectrums and BBC Micros once did.

"In 1996, the average skill set of someone entering university was a couple of machine code languages and some hardware hacking experience. Now if we have someone that has written a web page we are lucky," Foundation founder and former University of Cambridge lecture Dr Eben Upton told Electronics Weekly in May.

]]>
"We can give you a 700MHz ARM, more graphical performance than an Xbox 1, the ability to plug in a 1080p Blu-ray, and a thing that is actually an exciting product for real-life adults," Upton told the Educating Programmers Summit, run by Codemanship recently. "It is not an educational toy, it is a thing that could replace your Apple TV."

According to the Foundation, on the day it arrived, the team booted Debian Linux on the Alpha hardware.

This said, Ubuntu is the Linux flavour favoured by RaspberryPi, but it looks like hardware resource greed is ruling it out for the moment in favour of Debian.

The 50 'Alpha' boards are around 20% larger than the intended final board which is likely to be the size of a credit card.

To validate the schematic, it is electrically identical to the final board, but has six layers rather than four and uses expensive blind and buried vias.

Original plans had the computer looking very much like a flash stick - a thumb-sized rectangle with a USB connector on one end, plus a DVI connector on the other end to hook up a monitor.

While the circuit will still fit in that size, the number of IO connectors found necessary has caused the shift to credit card size.

Alpha has an RJ45 network jack, dual USB, digital TV via HDMI, analogue TV through an RCA socket, plus analogue audio and a power socket.

"We can plug into DVI monitors, HDMI TVs, old analogue TVs," said Upton at the programmers summit. "Old analogue TV is the kind of thing we are going for, we want the 1980s idea of a box being a machine that turns your television into a computer."

The source of the 700MHz ARM-based application processor, which includes graphics and video processing, had initially to remain a secret.

Now the foundation has revealed it to be the Cambridge-designed Broadcom BCM2835. Upton currently works for Broadcom in Cambridge.

To give some idea of the performance available from this silicon, the Raspberry Pi has posted a video on its blog of the Alpha board running the fast-paced 3D-rendered game Quake 3.

Playing games is the bait that the Foundation thinks got the Spectrum generation into programming.

"There is an energy barrier at the start of the learning curve," said Upton in May. "With the Spectrum or the BBC Micro, even if you only wanted it to run a game, you turned it on and it immediately said 'BASIC' and you could write
>10 print "Hello world"
>20 goto 10.
A lot of us got sucked in by that and became programmers."

128 or 256Mbyte of system RAM is package-on-package mounted on top of the application processor.

The target price of £15, which is actually a more international valid $25, includes 128Mbyte.

"For $35 we can also add to that another 128Mbyte of RAM and we can add a network connection," said Upton. "Based on feedback we have received on-line, most of our business will be here."

Completing Alpha's chip line-up is LAN9512 chip from SMCS which provides the two 480Mbit/s USB connections and 10/100 Ethernet

Read the full article >>

Wind River releases the graphical Linux 4, Update Pack 2

2011-08-19T08:41:26Z

Wind River has announced the immediate availability of Wind River Linux 4, Update Pack 2 - with graphics support to the forefront.

"As deeply embedded devices become more connected and complex, there is an increasing move towards richer graphics and more sophisticated user interfaces across a wide range of industries. We're rising to meet this need with the industry's first commercial embedded Linux to provide a pre-integrated hardware-through-middleware graphics stack for multiple hardware platforms," said Paul Anderson, vp of marketing and strategy for Linux products at Wind River.

]]>
Other features of the release highlighted by Wind River include:
•       Web 2.0 Cross Web Development Toolkit (to enables developers to debug, deploy and test directly on targets using HTML/Javascript and web page rendering languages)

•       Qt Development Toolkit (optimised for embedded development, intended to increase productivity, reduce costs and shorten time to market)

•       New security features (including strongSWAN, an open source VPN solution that improves IP security; and a new SEEdit feature that gives users simplified language for creating and editing the security policies).

•       Workbench enhancements and new tools for Linux developers

The company says Linux Standard Base (LSB) certification assures compatibility with all LSB-compliant third-party applications.

"Wind River's introduction of a fully integrated graphics stack delivers significant benefits to customers and enables important open source technologies for the industry," said Vasu Jakkal, senior marketing manager of low power embedded software, Intel. "With Intel's Embedded Media and Graphics Driver, the latest release of Wind River Linux will give device manufacturers across a wide range of market segments the technology they need to rapidly build secure, reliable, graphics-optimized next-generation devices at a lower cost."

Green Hills launches Autonomous Vehicle Open Platform

2011-08-18T08:31:48Z

Here's a story from our sister site Flight Global about a new open software platform from Green Hills Software's Integrity Security Services. It's aimed at enabling developers to more easily program applications for the control and management of autonomous vehicles.

Andrew Doyle writes:

The Autonomous Vehicle Open Platform is designed to provide a secure, reliable and safe software foundation for autonomous vehicle and unmanned control system developers to host their unmanned autonomous system applications.

]]> The Autonomous Vehicle Open Platform is designed to provide a secure, reliable and safe software foundation for autonomous vehicle and unmanned control system developers to host their unmanned autonomous system applications.

As a UCS industry working group continues to design standards by which unmanned platforms are certified for use in an operational environment, Green Hills said it is investing its own resources to ensure its tools and real-time operating system integrate into that framework.

"Our ISS AV Open Platform provides a reliable foundation to all autonomous vehicle and UCS developers, reducing cost and time-to-market without compromising or sidestepping the demanding high-assurance software requirements that are expected from an operating system or cryptographic toolkit," said Dan O'Dowd, CEO and founder of Green Hills Software.

>Read the full article >>

GPL licensing issues surround Android

2011-08-17T10:36:49Z

Here's an Open Source-related story from our new Android blog, Eyes on Android - Android could be badly bitten by GPL licensing

A story on SlashGear suggests submerged issues about Android's licensing are becoming ever less subterranean... Google challenges Lodsys but Android faces legal firestorm over source sluggishness

Basically, it says that not all Android parties have been playing the Open Source game by the Open Source rules. The website makes the point that some Android OEMs may be keen to have 'Open Source' kudos without fully bothering about their side of the bargain...

SlashGear's Chris Davies writes: ]]> Google's own legal budget is unlikely to be helped by news that just about every Android OEM has fallen foul of the GPL v.2 license, by failing to release the source code their devices rely upon. More than just the genial formality that many dismiss it as, FOSSPatents reports, in not coughing up the code those manufacturers have legally voided their position as distributors of the underlying Linux software Android is based upon.

"4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance" GPL v.2 license

To correct that, each manufacturer would need to renegotiate licensing with the original rights holders, an eye-watering task when you consider the number of contributors involved. In the meantime, each one is free to stage a legal complaint and seek the sort of injunction we've seen applied against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Europe.SlashGear goes on to say that the Tablet side of Android is another point of issue, with Google itself being tardy in releasing the source code for Honeycomb releases.

"Unfortunately, no matter how many patents Google acquires through its $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola, the collective actions of it and its manufacturing partners have opened up another potentially huge avenue of lawsuits," concludes Davies.

Read the full blog post >>

Note, however, that others are much more sceptical over this Android-GPL issue. TechEye.net, for example poo-poohs the story. Nick Farrell writes:

Bradley Kuhn, who is the executive director of the SFC [Software Freedom Conservancy], said that while he was deeply dismayed that Google, Motorola and others haven't seen fit to share a lot of the Android code in a meaningful way with the community, this failure to share software is an affront to what the software freedom movement seeks to accomplish.

However, as he sees it, there are no GPL nor LGPL violations present. If someone has evidence to the contrary, they should send it to those who do GPL enforcement.

Read the full post >>

Video: What counts as Open Source Hardware?

2011-08-15T10:33:13Z

I know we concentrate largely on Linux in this blog, but its remit is a lot wider - open source hardware as well as open source software.'Open Source Engineering' in the widest sense...

Well here is an interesting video from the excellent David Jones and his EEVblog on the topic of Open Source Hardware, and just what exactly is meant by the term - see EEVblog #195 - Open Source Hardware Explained

He summarises two essential elements of open source hardware...

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Give away all the manufacturing and design files, such as original PCB and schematic files, to enable the recreation of your project and the creation of derivatives.

Give complete freedom to people to do what they like with the hardware, including using it commercially and competing with your original design.

Microsoft goes open source with Gadgeteer electronics

2011-08-04T12:42:49Z

We can file this one - at a push - under open source engineering, even if - given this involves Microsoft - no Linux is involved.

The Redmond giant has has announced the official launch of Gadgeteer, a set of electronic parts designed to be plugged together to build prototypes or working electronic devices. Remote controlled cars and cameras are given as possible examples.

It is aimed squarely at "hobbyists, electronic enthusiasts and educators" and Microsoft says it does not require any specialist electronics knowledge or soldering. The idea is to make it simple for anyone to quickly design and build their own devices.

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Note that the Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core Libraries are available under the Apache 2.0 open source license and the source code can be found on the http://gadgeteer.codeplex.com website.

".NET Gadgeteer is a powerful platform that lets you build sophisticated devices really quickly - even if you don't have much experience," said Steve Hodges, principal hardware engineer, Microsoft Research Cambridge.

"It started out as an internal tool at Microsoft Research Cambridge, but its appeal to people outside the lab quickly became evident. The open source release will make this powerful technology available to others, including the hobbyists, teachers, researchers and developers who have given us such positive feedback to date."

GHI Electronics LLC - an embedded systems provider - is the first company to come to market with a .NET Gadgeteer-compatible module: the FEZ Spider mainboard and starter kit (pictured above, which combines this with modules such as a digital camera, a touch screen, Ethernet and SD card sockets, push buttons, and LEDs). This is priced at $249.95.

In detail, the FEZ Spider kit includes:

FEZ Spider Mainboard
Display T35 Module (3.5" with touchscreen)
USB Client DP Module (with USB cable)
Camera Module
2x Multicolor LED Module (DaisyLink)
2x Button Module
Ethernet J11D Module
SD Card Module
USB Host Module
Extender Module
JoystickModule
10cm IDC cables (included with modules).
Additional cables:

Microsoft says other companies that plan to provide additional mainboards and modules for the .NET Gadgeteer platform in the near future include Seeed Technology, DFRobot and Sytech Designs...