Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

Nerves project triage on BeagleBone Black

Published at March 10, 2017 · Piotr Król · 6 min read

Recently one of my customers brought to my attention Nerves. It aims to simplify use of Elixir (functional language leveraging Erlang VM) in embedded systems. This system has couple interesting features that are worth of research and blog post. First is booting directly to application which is running in BEAM (Erlang VM). Nerves project replace systemd process with programming language virtual machine running application code. Concept is very interesting and I wonder if someone tried to use that with other VMs ie....

Categories: firmware os-dev

nRF51822 programming with OpenOCD under Linux

Published at January 22, 2017 · Kamil Wcisło · 8 min read

Some time ago we bought BLE400 from Waveshare as probably one of the cheapest option to enter nRF51822 market. As our readers know, we prefer to use the Linux environment for embedded systems development. Because of that, we’re following the guide for using Waveshare nRF51822 Eval Kit: icarus-sensors. Kudos due to great post that helped us enter nRF51822 and mbed OS land under Linux. BLE400 is pretty cheap, because it hasn’t got integrated debugger/programmer....

Categories: firmware iot

Zephyr initial triage on Nucleo-64 STM32F411RE

Published at January 14, 2017 · Piotr Król · 7 min read

As I mention in previous post Zephyr RTOS is an interesting initiative started by Intel, NXP and couple other strong organizations. With so well founded background future for this RTOS should look bright and I think it will quickly became important player on IoT arena. Because of that it is worth to dig little bit deeper in this RTOS and see what problems we faced when trying to develop for some well known development board....

Categories: firmware iot

Failure of ECC508A crypto coprocessor initial triage with SAM G55 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit

Published at November 24, 2016 · Piotr Król · 7 min read

Some time ago (around August 2016) embedded community media were hit with hype around simplified flow for AWS IoT provisioning (1, 2, 3). I’m personally very interested in all categories related to those news: IoT - is 3mdeb business core and despite this term was largely abused these days, we just love to build connected embedded devices. Building this kind of devices is inherently related with firmware deployment, provisioning and update problems....

Categories: firmware iot

Starting with Nucleo-F411RE and mbed OS for command line enthusiasts

Published at November 23, 2016 · Piotr Król · 9 min read

When I first time read about mbed OS I was really sceptical, especially idea of having web browser as my IDE and compiler in the cloud seems to be very scary to me. ARM engineers proved to provide high quality products, but this was not enough to me. Then I heard very good words about mbed OS IDE from Jack Ganssle, this was still not enough. Finally customers started to ask about this RTOS and I had to look deeper....

Categories: firmware iot

Chromium GStreamer backed for i.MX6 research

Published at November 1, 2016 · Piotr Król · 3 min read

Recently I work on i.MX6 based project that requires video hardware decoding in web browser (best case in QtWebEngine, which is entire Chromium platform in Qt). Chromium After some research it appears that Chromium is not interested in providing external support for GStreamer-backed video hardware decoding. Truly going through all discussion related to this topic was very dissapointing. Typically Chromium developers just close thread when discussion started to be noisy and there mass of complaining people raised....

Categories: app-dev

SAMG55 + OLED1 Xplained Pro Hello World!

Published at October 20, 2016 · Piotr Król · 4 min read

AMG55 - recognition in the field If you are considering working on SAMG55 Xplained Pro board here you will find some basic know-how to quickly get you started. What you will need? In this example I will be using SAMG55 Xplained Pro with OLED1 extension board, and Atmel Studio 7.0 with Data Visualizer addon, wich requires Windows to work. This however should be similar for other board with EDBG debugger....

Categories: firmware iot

FWTS on ARMv8 platform (HiKey LeMaker version) from scratch

Published at July 25, 2016 · Piotr Król · 8 min read

This is second post from series about LeMaker version of HiKey board from 96boards Customer Edition family. Previous post focused on describing hardware part. In this post I would like to show how to setup firmware development and testing environment. This post highly rely on 96boards documentation, so kudos to 96boards and LeMaker for providing lot of information for developers. Obtain pre-compiled binaries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 wget https://builds....

Categories: firmware

Directory scheme for multiple projects

Published at July 5, 2016 · Piotr Król · 4 min read

How to keep clean organization while working on multiple projects ? Answer to this question depends on workflow and nature of projects itself. Below I would like to present my approach to manage sanity while having multiple projects going simultaneously. This would be Embedded Systems Consultant view and will mostly show directory organization, but I think it can be adopted to other programmers workflow. Directory organization Usually I have up to 10 projects from external customer running and ~3 internal....

Categories: miscellaneous

Powering on LeMaker HiKey (ARMv8)

Published at May 19, 2016 · Piotr Król · 4 min read

Embedded Systems Consultants have chance to live in interesting times. ARM expansion touch server market and UEFI coming to non-x86 platforms. Firmware gaining its importance and because handling real development is harder and harder lot of things starting to happen in open source. Big players trying to address security and virtualization issues, what leads to really interesting features in recent SoCs. Couple weeks ago I decided to recover my knowledge about UEFI and take a look how it is implemented for architecture that have its momentum - namely ARM in its 8 version (ARMv8)....

Categories: firmware

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