Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

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 disappointing. 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, which 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

PC Engines APU2 netboot Debian installation

Published at March 26, 2016 · Piotr Król · 3 min read

In previous post I described how to setup PXE server and boot Debian installer using it. I mentioned that provided setup is limited and some extensive configuration is needed to make it useful for real world example. Since that time I learned that there is chain command in iPXE, which give ability to use arbitrary TFTP server as boot file source. Using RPi PXE server For example by changing my test network topology from previous post to something like that:...

Categories: os-dev

PXE server with Raspberry Pi 1

Published at March 12, 2016 · Piotr Król · 4 min read

Recent days we get the announcement about releasing Raspberry Pi 3. Those of you who play with embedded systems or just try to make things probably still got good old Raspberry Pi (1). Because during time old platforms loose value as potential candidate for new projects I decided to sacrifice my old RPi and make test server from it. One of my customer required testing his software against PXE server with various configurations....

Categories: app-dev

Netcat - how to transfer files without scp or ftp

Published at March 12, 2016 · Piotr Król · 2 min read

One of my recent customers provided me hardware with custom Linux system. Distribution used on this hardware was very limited there was no developers tools, file transfer applications (like scp, ftp or even tftp) or communication clients like ssh. I had to deploy some firmware files to the system without modifying it. This was i386 machine. Of course I could compile something and add this software using usb stick or other stoarge, but what if I would not have direct access to hardware ?...

Categories: app-dev

Emulate Rapberry Pi 2 in QEMU

Published at December 30, 2015 · Piotr Król · 4 min read

In the process of planning system testing for one of my clients I found that someone from Microsoft published patches with BCM2836 support to QEMU mailing list. I thought it is very interesting, because if it is possible to setup emulated Raspberry Pi many use cases can be tested faster and in more automatic way. For example checking how application behave when running on more then one device at once, testing massive deployment process, stress testing and finally speed up debug-fix-test process....

Categories: app-dev os-dev

Using PlatformIO with TI MSP430 LunchPads

Published at December 8, 2015 · Piotr Król · 6 min read

PlatformIO is very interesting project that aim to solve very important problem of configuring deployment environment for embedded systems. IMHO good approach is to focus on modularity (various IDE can be used, even Vim) and simplicity (in best case 2 command should be enough to deploy first code). Recent years we have explosion of bootstrapping applications (ie.vagrant, puppet). Most of them seems to follow git-like command line interface and getting a lot of attention from programmers community....

Categories: firmware iot

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