Archive for the ‘News’ Category

February 11th, 2013
Meet Ant Micro in Hall 4A at Embedded World 2013!


As every year, we are visiting Embedded World to talk to our customers, partners, as well as see — and possibly influence — whichever way the embedded world is going.

This year you can actually find us all over the place, as we’re involved with many activities that are in focus of EW 2013.

Most importantly, we’re co-exhibiting with our partner, Enclustra, in booth 4A-107 — there should be someone there at all times so if you can’t find us elsewhere, head to hall 4A. We’ll be more than glad to talk to you! We’ll be showing off our ports of eCos and Android on Enclustra’s Zynq platform as well as other cool things.

Look for the sign to the right!

You can also book a meeting with us at the SafeConect booth (4-109 in Hall 4), an initiative for safety and security in embedded systems we’ve been part of for quite some time now (see our previous post about SafeConnect).

If that’s not enough, we will participate in the International B2B meeting organised by several European clusters, where you can meet relevant persons in chosen companies who are willing to talk, exchange ideas and cooperate.

Lastly, together with our main Swedish partner, Realtime Embedded, we will also be presenting at the Virtual Platform workshop — stay tuned for additional information!

This will be a busy end of February but we’ll be very happy to meet you. Feel free to just come and see us but it’s even better if you call Michael at +48 504 631 956 and arrange a meeting.

October 26th, 2012
750K is OK for a crowdsourced parallel platform, but why not a million bucks?

This is a great day for the open source, open hardware and open funding community – it seems that the Parallella project by Adapteva that we wrote about earlier this month will reach its $750K mark, which was not so sure just several days ago.

I just bought myself this $99 massively multicore parallel computing platform as – by sheer coincidence – it’s my birthday tomorrow, which is when the campaign ends.

And I thought – OK, this is exciting, but would it not be better if they managed to raise a million dollars instead? I am certain Andreas and his team will do a wonderful job irrespective of how much exactly they manage to raise, but imagine the news! “A crowdsourced parallel computing platform gets $1M” – that would make my (birth)day.

Several weeks ago, at Embedded Conference Scandinavia which brought so many interesting developments for us that we did not even have the time to blog about it, I just happened to miss Andreas’ presentation about Epiphany, their impressive CPU. When I learned about this, I was quite furious – a collaboratively funded CPU was just what we at Ant Micro had been discussing several days earlier, an inspiring idea that someone would come up with sooner or later. Turns out it was even sooner than we had thought!

Well, I might have missed out on a cool presentation then, but let’s not miss out on this wonderful opportunity. Parallella is not just some crowdsourced project, it is an attempt to get several thousand parallel development kits out to people. Adapteva are doing a wonderful thing – telling the community that it’s their job to find the parallel computing paradigms of tomorrow.

So, without further ado – see the pitch, buy the boards – they’re worth it. Especially that the Epiphany computing clusters fit into Zynq-based devboards, and Zynq is another cool technology we’re also working with:

September 9th, 2012
Second office opened in Concordia Design

Ant Micro is growing, and the inevitable has come – since August we have opened another office, situated in a beautifully renovated printing house right in the city center.

The entrance to Concordia Design

Be sure to send us any post to the new address! We are keeping the second office and the formal company address will remain unchanged so don’t worry about invoicing and formalities, but the main activity of the company will be performed from the new one.

Our new home – Concordia Design, or more informally the Old Printing House – is a space dedicated for innovative businesses, with twenty-or-so companies which are encouraged to cooperate with each other. This seems to be more than just a slogan as several ideas, and one very concrete cooperation, have sprung up already since we moved in here.

This is a very good phenomenon and overall a very inspiring place, with lots of common spaces where you can bump into interesting people. The restaurant downstairs, Concordia Taste, is especially conducive to conversations over lunch.

The common space in Concordia Design

The building is not just a printing house by name – we actually have a printing establishment below the ground level, Concordia Print. Handy if you need some materials done and don’t have time to run around.

If you haven’t already (or have and enjoyed it), we invite you to visit us to discuss new and exciting projects or just chat over a cup of coffee.

If you like the pictures in the post, they originate from the website of the building’s architect, and you can see more of them there – http://mariuszwrzeszcz.pl/index.php/pl,projekt,11,132,1

May 9th, 2012
OpenRISC Ethernet driver for eCos RTOS

We have been maintaining the eCos real-time OS for openRISC for some time now, but what has been an obstacle to use it in a wider array of applications was the lack of suitable driver support enabling the construction of a platform featuring a richer set of interfaces.

In a series of posts, we have decided to amend this situation by writing, contributing and showing how to use drivers for some essential peripherals for ORPSoC.

The first peripheral we are going to work with is Ethernet.

We have written drivers to support OpenCores ethmac Ethernet controller (http://opencores.org/project,ethmac). It is already commited to main OpenRISC eCos repository which we’re maintaining.

The driver for the Ethernet controller will be automatically added to the eCos build if we select any network stack. We can pick from the following:

– TCP/IP stack from OpenBSD
– TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD (including KAME IPv6)
– Lightweight TCP/IP stack: lwIP (note: originally created by Adam Dunkels at the Center for Networked Systems at SICS, with whom we cooperate)

For example, in order to build eCos with the FreeBSD stack, the following steps have to be taken:

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ecosconfig new orpsoc default
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_NET
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_NET_FREEBSD_STACK
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_FILEIO
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_ETH_DRIVERS

Before we proceed to compilation, we need to do some additional configuration of the driver and the network stack. The most important configuration options are of course the MAC address of the Ethernet controller itself as well as the IP address (either static or dynamically allocated via DHCP) of the device. The configuration can be done in two ways: either using the GUI program, configtool, or via editing ecos.ecc.

When we are done, we should issue:

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ecosconfig tree
make

which results in a compiled eCos with Ethernet and TCP/IP support. The nice thing is that the network services API in eCos is POSIX-compliant, so the networking programs look and work just like Linux ones. It is best to look at some examples, residing in the packages/net/common/current/tests/ directory – especially ping_test.c and server_test.c are worth noting.

Note: the code described in this post is available here.

May 3rd, 2012
Ant Micro becomes Freescale Alliance Member

In the last post we wrote that April was a very interesting month with lots of things happening.

And so it was – thanks to the help of the wonderful people at Freescale Semiconductors Nordic AB whom we had the pleasure of meeting again at SEE (a short relation of the event will hopefully follow) we could complete our Freescale DAP application process, thus confirming our expertise in working with Freescale ARM and PowerPC products.

Freescale Alliance Member logo

So, without further ado, we are proud to announce that we are now officially a Freescale Alliance Member, one of the two such in our country. We provide third-party support (software and hardware design services) to companies using Freescale products locally as well as in Germany and the Nordic countries.

See also our description at Freescale’s website.

April 29th, 2012
Swedish Internet of Things Centre application filed

April came and went blazing fast due to how much was going on, both internationally and here at Ant Micro. One of the highlights of the month was the putting together of the Swedish Internet of Things Centre application, which is now filed and waiting for a green light – we’re keeping our fingers crossed!

The consumer-oriented IoT centre, with joint participation of universities, research institutes, municipalities as well as large and small companies is undoubtedly a fantastic idea but is facing a strong competition from other great projects. Undoubtedly whether or not we are one of the lucky 20, it is certain that the expression of the will to cooperate between so many partners in this interesting field is a good thing in itself, and cooperation within the consortium is already taking place.

When it comes to the project itself, Ant Micro has declared a 500 000 SEK contribution in kind, delivering it’s know-how in virtual platforms for new Internet of Things devices. We are hoping that with our input we can share in the realization of the vision of service-oriented IoT systems. And after the very positive reaction to our presence at the IoT day we were encouraged to participate all the more.

You will be able to track the results of the project at SICS’ and Vinnova’s site.

 

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