Posts Tagged ‘Embedded’

Feb

2013

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.

Tags: Embedded, Enclustra, FPGA, Germany, Nürnberg, partners, safety, security, Zynq
Posted in Events, News | No Comments »

Jan

2013

January 28th, 2013
Booting Mars ZX3 eCos binary from RedBoot over TFTP

We’re continuing our series of posts on using eCos and RedBoot on Enclustra’s ZX3 Zynq module – this time with a practical scenario which you might find useful.

It’s a typical case — you’d like to load binaries of eCos apps with RedBoot via TFTP; how to get going on that?

We assume that you have RedBoot running on the board and have an eCos binary ready to roll. If not, see the instructions on our github on how to compile those and use them with the board.

First you have to do is to set up a TFTP server so that you are sure your binary is available from the module. On a Debian Wheezy installation (and probably any other Linux distro) you might use the instructions from Timesys.

With one exception: if you do not have a ‘tftp’ file in ‘/etc/xinetd.d’ siply create one and paste the content from the site into it.

Now you should boot up RedBoot to the prompt. Of course by then it’s nice to have a console window (for example, minicom) with a connection to the board open.

If you had the Ethernet cable attached during boot you’ll probably get IP address via DHCP (if RedBoot is configured to use that, which it is by default) — this was the case in the example from the attached screenshot, where the board received an IP address of 192.168.1.27. You should be able to see the IP information as one of the first messages RedBoot prints to the console.

If a network connection wasn’t configured automatically during startup you should configure it manually with:

1	ip_address -l <xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx> (where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is IP address)

for a static IP, or

1	ip_address -d

to get an IP over DHCP (for example, it you forgot to plug in a cable before bootup).

The next step is to set a default server IP address (= where the eCos binary will be downloaded from) with:

1	ip_address -h <xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>

(where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the server IP address — in our case, 192.168.1.70)

You could use ping to check if the connection is configured properly. To do that use:

1	ping -h <xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>

(where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the host IP just like above)

Note that in RedBoot the ping program is not what you would normally expect in Linux or Windows — for example it does not show any progress or state messages. You have to wait until it exits, and if you interrupt it, you will see information about how many ICMP packets were received out of the 10 to be sent.

If the connection works properly, you can now download a test application from the TFTP server with:

1	load <name_of_application_binary>

(in our case, this was clock0, a standard eCos clock test).

With the default setting the board should use the TFTP protocol and the server IP set earlier, but if you want to change some parameter see the relevant section of the eCos documentation.

You should now see som information about entry point address ranges of the loaded binary.

To run the app you just loaded simply type:

And you’re ready! See the attached screen for the result.

Tags: ARM, Cortex-A9, eCos, Embedded, FPGA, Xilinx, Zynq
Posted in ARM, Bootloaders, FPGA, Open Source, Operating Systems, Zynq, eCos | No Comments »

Jan

2013

January 17th, 2013
eCos port for Enclustra’s ZX3 Zynq module ready

Last year we announced the beginning of the work to port eCos to Enclustra’s Mars ZX3 Zynq module.

While most of the work was complete after the summer, the tedious task of cleaning it up, writing appropriate documentation, and testing, testing, testing is always longer than you think.

Zynq is still a very exciting platform which we believe will gain more attention as time goes on, and an RTOS to run on the Processing System will be a good addition to the OSs it can run.

On the attached image you can see the RedBoot bootloader, which is a significant side-effect of the porting effort, loading an eCos test binary over TFTP. We’re excited to see other applications run on the Zynq with time.

The port is still undergoing review from Enclustra, but we agreed to open-source it now so that we can benefit from feedback from the community. Already after the port was first announced, we’ve had some very valuable comments, especially as to the usage scenarios, planned projects, hopes and fears associated with the Zynq.

Internally we have been testing and using the port successfully for quite a while, and it is definitely ready for evaluation purposes. It would also be quite interesting to see some benchmarking.

The code is available on our github – head there to check it out, use it in your new application and give us feedback, especially on the documentation and use scenarios.

Tags: ARM, Cortex-A9, eCos, Embedded, Enclustra, FPGA, open source, Xilinx, Zynq
Posted in ARM, FPGA, Open Source, Operating Systems, Zynq, eCos | No Comments »

Jun

2012

June 20th, 2012
Ant Micro porting eCos to Enclustra’s Zynq module – Mars ZX3

The connection between the two worlds of embedded and FPGA is becoming more and more apparent – all the more so with solutions such as Xilinx Zynq, which combines a general-purpose dual-core ARM with programmable logic allowing for dedicated processing in a single chip.

As a company active in both fields, we were quite eager to lay our hands on Zynq chips, to get the feel of the module and how it works in practice.

Following our visit to X-Fest in Oslo we were talking with Enclustra, the Swiss FPGA company and producer of FPGA modules to give us an early sample so that we can be one of the first few companies able to work with physical Zynq chips. They agreed to partially sponsor the port of the eCos real-time operating system for the module, and so, here it is:

The module is excellent, just as well made as the previous board we got from Enclustra, coming in the popular (and small!) SO-DIMM format. It allows you to integrate Zynq into your design quickly, with much less effort than to design from scratch.

The port is scheduled for release early Q4 2012. Go to Enclustra’s website for updates, other operating systems as well as to subscribe for the Beta program and get the boards for yourself. If you already decided to use Zynq or are leaning towards it, we can help you with integrating it into your own designs and products.

Follow our blog if you want to learn of our progress and let us know if you want to use eCos on the Zynq. A note on running RedBoot on the ZX3 module as an alternative to U-Boot will follow soon, so as always – stay tuned (and enjoy the summer)!

Tags: eCos, Embedded, FPGA, open source, partners, Switzerland, Xilinx, Zynq
Posted in ARM, FPGA, Open Source, Operating Systems, eCos | No Comments »

Jun

2012

June 14th, 2012
U-Boot for Colibri Tegra 2 pushed to github

In our post from over a year ago we published some patches to U-Boot which allowed us to use it with the Colibri Tegra 2 module from Toradex, the first widely available embedded SoM featuring an Nvidia CPU.

A long time has passed since then, and – as you can probably see if you follow the blog – we have been busy with lots of other things in the meantime. But as we have noticed that the the code lives on and has been put to good use, we thought it a good idea to include it on our github for more convenience and a clearer picture – the original manner of publishing of the code was the result of the haste which always accompanies work with hot technologies.

Our github fork of U-Boot shows how the necessary patches are applied in the proper order and might be helpful for people exploring how bootloaders are ported between different ARM modules and boards.

It is worth noting that those changes were performed before we got any CPU datasheets from Nvidia, using virtual platform tools that we are developing. This was a great example of a scenario where the appropriate tools really made a difference!

If you are interested in open source and new embedded technologies, follow us throughout the summer (the easiest way to do is through our twitter) – there will be a lot going on. One of the more interesting technologies we are already working with is Xilinx Zynq, be sure to come back soon for updates about that and other really interesting topics.

Tags: ARM, Cortex-A9, Embedded, Nvidia Tegra 2, open source, Xilinx, Zynq
Posted in ARM, Bootloaders, Open Source | No Comments »

Jun

2012

June 7th, 2012
SPI driver for OpenRISC eCos

After a short break, this week we are going to deal with SPI support for the OpenRISC eCos port,

To add the driver to the eCos build, the CYGPKG_IO_SPI package has to be added as follows:

1	ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_SPI

ECos requires that each device connected to the SPI bus is properly described. Our driver provides a macro for this purpose:

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CYG_DEVS_SPI_OPENCORES_SIMPLE_SPI_DEVICE(
name, // handler name of the device
bus, // SPI bus, numbering starts at 0
cs, // CS line, numbering starts at 0
polarity, // polarity (1 or 0)
phase, // phase (1 or 0)
freq, // maximum SCK frequency measured in hertz
cs_to_tran, // minimum delay between CS signal and start
// of the transmission, measured in microseconds
tran_to_cs, // minimum delay between the end of the transmission
// and the release of CS signal, measured in microseconds
tran_to_tran // minimum delay between transmission of consecutive
// bytes, measured in microseconds
);

For example, to add a m25pxx flash memory, fairly common on FPGA boards, connected to bus 0 chip-select 0, we can describe it as follows:

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CYG_DEVS_SPI_OPENCORES_SIMPLE_SPI_DEVICE(
m25pxx_spi, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1000000, 1, 1, 1
);

It is worth noting that eCos already has a driver for this memory type. To use it you have to add the CYGPKG_DEVS_FLASH_SPI_M25PXX package:

1	ecosconfig add CYGPKG_DEVS_FLASH_SPI_M25PXX

And connect the SPI device to it:

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CYG_DEVS_FLASH_SPI_M25PXX_DRIVER (
m25pxx_drv, 0, &m25pxx_spi
);

Note: Get the relevant code from our mirror of eCos-openrisc on Ant Micro’s github account.

The eCos provided by Ant Micro now supports:

UART
SPI
Ethernet
SDIO

Stay with us for more updates about OpenRISC, FPGA and open source in embedded systems.

Tags: eCos, Embedded, open source, openrisc
Posted in OpenRISC, eCos | No Comments »

May

2012

May 14th, 2012
SD controller driver for OpenRISC eCos

[If you are unfamiliar with the OpenRISC architecture or just want some help on setting up your OpenRISC work environment, we recommend the great tutorial from our friend Sven-Åke, working for our partner, Realtime Embedded.]

This week we are going to deal with SD card support for the OpenRISC eCos port, enabling the developer to have easily replacable, persistent storage for the platform, a welcome addition to any system. SD card support is generally scarce for the OpenRISC so this should be a good reference implementation for SD support on other OSs.

The SD Host controller used in ORPSoC is the sdcard_mass_storage_controller project from OpenCores. We have written a driver for the OpenRISC eCos that connects itself to the disk layer and commited it to the main OpenRISC eCos repository.

Thus it is very easy to configure eCos to support a filesystem on the SD card out of the box. In the Open Source eCos version we can choose between two popular filesystems: jffs2 and FAT.

For example, to prepare an eCos build with the FAT filesystem support, the following lines are necessary:

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ecosconfig new orpsoc default
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_DISK
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_IO_FILEIO
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_FS_FAT
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_BLOCK_LIB
ecosconfig add CYGPKG_LINUX_COMPAT

Before compilation it might be a good idea to configure some options, especially the name of the disk device, which defaults to /dev/mmcdisk0.

Once we’re ready, just like in last week’s post, we issue:

1 2	ecosconfig tree make

getting a compiled eCos with SD support. Also here the API is POSIX-compliant, which makes writing programs manipulating filesystems on SD cards easy and straightforward. A good example can be found in: packages/fs/fat/current/tests/fatfs1.c.

Note that in addition to the opencores repository, we’re now mirroring it on our github account for greater availability.

Tags: Embedded, FPGA, openrisc
Posted in FPGA, OpenRISC, Operating Systems, Softcore, eCos | No Comments »

May

2012

May 13th, 2012
Xilinx X-Fest 2012 in Oslo – time for Zynq

Oslo is always a good and familiar place to visit, especially if it means bumping into some old friends from the FPGA world and making a few new ones on a Xilinx X-Fest. The one we attended was held in Sandvika in suburban Oslo on May 8, but you can still participate in several other places around Europe and the world if you wish – check the event website!

This year, X-Fest is dominated by the new Cortex-A9+FPGA hybrid – Zynq, with one track and most exhibitor’s booths dedicated exclusively to this technology. And rightly so!

The “Processing System + Programmable Logic” combination, a dual-core general-purpose CPU with the ability to delegate tasks which are computationally heavy and prone to parallelising onto a dedicated block synthesised within the FPGA is just brilliant. Sure, not all applications will benefit from this, but if you know what you are doing and are able to identify bottlenecks in your product, you can get your software to run some 10x faster.

It’ll be good to verify this claim in practice – after all, ground-breaking technologies are more often announced than functional – but this time it looks that Xilinx’s has really done a good job. There are limitations such as power-up time or the speed of the CPU (the dual-core Cortex-A9 is clocked only around 600 MHz for now, 800 MHz in future chips) but none of them seem to be deal-breakers.

We will see if the tools available allow the ecosystem to suck up ‘traditional’ software developers in addition to the FPGA guys, but it seems that Xilinx is aware of the fact that SW engineers require a different approach and are working with ARM provide tools necessary to facilitate the transfer from plain-ol’ CPU systems to a CPU+FPGA hybrid.

We have already been running the Zynq QEMU port out of curiosity, but this of course gives little feel of what the real stuff behaves like. However, with a bit of luck we will get our hands on physical modules as early as in June.

Follow our blog where we will describe our work with the Zynq technology and our thoughts on how useful it really is in practice. If you have ideas on how your applications can benefit from using Zynq or want to ask a question about it, be sure to leave a comment!

Tags: ARM, Cortex-A9, Embedded, FPGA, Xilinx, Zynq
Posted in ARM, Events, FPGA | No Comments »

Jan

2012

January 24th, 2012
Swedish Internet of Things Day in Stockholm

As a result of our continued interest in smart devices and the Internet of Things as well as cooperation with Swedish universities and research institutions, we were honoured with the invitation to participate in the creation of a new initiative – the Swedish Inernet of Things Centre, whose beautiful logo you can see above. The main actor behind the initiative, SICS, wants to give the project a kick-start in the form of a very promising event, the Internet of Things Day in Stockholm, on February 9.

Several hundred people are expected to attend, among them representatives of other companies and institutions that co-create the SIoTC – with Ericsson, Microsoft, KTH, Mobile Life, Stockholm University, Wisenet, Swedish ICT, Company P, Vendolocus and ourselves among them – which makes the SIoT Day a very interesting place to find connections and partners in IoT-related projects, as well as learn what’s ‘in’ in this pretty hot topic.

We’ll also be co-hosting one of the poster/demos during the 15.15 session, but more info on that later!

The full agenda
9.30 Welcome, Christer Norström, CEO of SICS
9.35 Why a consumer-oriented Internet of Things centre in Sweden?, Kristina Höök, head of the centre
10.00 Keynote by Bu Fanjin, deputy Chief Engineer of CEST, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China: China Internet of Things Plan 2011-2015
10.45 Keynote by Mike Kuniavsky, Orangecone, US: The Internet of people: integrating Internet of Things technologies is not a technical problem
11.30 Living with Internet of Things, Oskar Juhlin, Mobile Life
12.00 Lunch
13.00 Device software challenges, Adam Dunkels, SICS
13.30 Big data challenges, Ali Ghodsi, KTH
14.00 Finding values in big data, Jan Höller, Ericsson Research
14.30 Allowing everyone to create embedded systems, Steve Hodges, .NET Gadgeteer
15.00 A training app for the Swedish Olympic cross country ski team, Christer Norström
15.15 Coffee and demos

For more info, visit http://www.sics.se/Internet_of_Things_Day

Tags: Electronics, Embedded, Stockholm, Sweden
Posted in Events | No Comments »

Oct

2011

October 7th, 2011
Embedded Conference Scandinavia 2011 in Stockholm

Last year we wrote that ECS 2010 would gain a sure place in our event calendar and so it did – on 4-5 October we took part in the 2011 edition of Embedded Conference Scandinavia. This time we were able to see the entire event and participate in the handing out of the Swedish Embedded Award, a very nice ceremony accompanied by music, good food, and a little twist in the form of short poems in Swedish in honour of the award winners.

The prize in the Enterprise category was especially well-deserved, going to Comfort Audio AB for their extremely small digital audio receiver for use in hearing aids. Well done!

If you can read Swedish, you’ll find more info on the winners of the Embedded Award 2011 in all categories on the Award’s home page.

The organizers underline that the Conference was an even greater success that the one last year, with a 15% increase in the number of visitors. We certainly felt this year’s event to be even more beneficial than the previous one, we had a lot of interesting conversations with our friends from Halmstad and Stockholm and even managed to see a few of the talks.

Especially the one given by Jonas Bonn from SouthPole on the current state of OpenRISC Linux port was a great and insightful speech, a good summary of where the OpenRISC project stands with respect to Linux support in view of the port’s inclusion in the 3.1 Linux mainline kernel.

Other talks were also nice, although some did lack the level of detail that would make them interesting. To be fair, this is always hard to achieve if the knowledge of the audience in the field in question cannot be predicted.

Well, we should probably start preparing for next year!

Tags: Embedded, Stockholm, Sweden
Posted in Events | No Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘Embedded’

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

January 28th, 2013Booting Mars ZX3 eCos binary from RedBoot over TFTP

January 17th, 2013eCos port for Enclustra’s ZX3 Zynq module ready

June 20th, 2012Ant Micro porting eCos to Enclustra’s Zynq module – Mars ZX3

June 14th, 2012U-Boot for Colibri Tegra 2 pushed to github

June 7th, 2012SPI driver for OpenRISC eCos

May 14th, 2012SD controller driver for OpenRISC eCos

May 13th, 2012Xilinx X-Fest 2012 in Oslo – time for Zynq

January 24th, 2012Swedish Internet of Things Day in Stockholm

October 7th, 2011Embedded Conference Scandinavia 2011 in Stockholm

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email: contact@antmicro.com

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

January 28th, 2013
Booting Mars ZX3 eCos binary from RedBoot over TFTP

January 17th, 2013
eCos port for Enclustra’s ZX3 Zynq module ready

June 20th, 2012
Ant Micro porting eCos to Enclustra’s Zynq module – Mars ZX3

June 14th, 2012
U-Boot for Colibri Tegra 2 pushed to github

June 7th, 2012
SPI driver for OpenRISC eCos

May 14th, 2012
SD controller driver for OpenRISC eCos

May 13th, 2012
Xilinx X-Fest 2012 in Oslo – time for Zynq

January 24th, 2012
Swedish Internet of Things Day in Stockholm

October 7th, 2011
Embedded Conference Scandinavia 2011 in Stockholm