Category: Exclusive videos

Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 at Embedded World 2017

Posted by Charbax – March 20, 2017
Category: Wearables, Internet of Things, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Nordic Semiconductor, Embedded World

Nordic Semiconductor is showing various demos showcasing their nRF52 series microcontrollers, showcasing the nRF52840 specifically, which supports all the new features introduced in Bluetooth 5.0, while also adding 802.15.4 and Thread support to the Nordic platform.

World’s first ARM Cortex-M23 in Nuvoton M2351

Posted by Charbax – March 20, 2017
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Embedded World, Nuvoton

Nuvoton M2351 is a secure microcontroller platform powered by ARM Cortex-M23 core with ARMv8-M architecture, TrustZone technology, security technologies, peripherals and tools. The ultra-low-power 32-bit microcontroller works in low voltage range from 1.62V to 3.6V and can operate at up to 48 MHz frequency, with up to 512 Kbytes embedded Flash memory in dual bank mode supporting OTA firmware update and up to 96 Kbytes embedded SRAM. It is suitable for applications such as IoT secure connections, fingerprint authentication, EMV card reader, security alarm system, smart home appliance, wireless sensor node device (WSND), auto meter reading (AMR) and portable wireless data collector.

The M2351 series is equipped with 32 Kbytes Secure Boot ROM as root of trust, multiple firmware programming tools by In-System Programming (ISP), In-Circuit Programming (ICP) and In-Application Programming (IAP). In addition to TrustZone software protection mechanism, it also supports eXecution Only Memory (XOM), LDROM (user program loader) and multiple cryptographic hardware accelerators which are used to protect the core software and data assets on a microcontroller system. The M2351 series also integrates a 8 COM x 40 SEG controller with internal charge pump for segment LCD panel and provides high performance connectivity peripheral interfaces such as UART, SPI, I²C, GPIOs, USB and ISO 7816-3 for smart card reader.

As to Power efficiency, the M2351 series supports Brown-out detector, Power-down mode with RTC turn on, RAM retention less than 2.0 uA, deep power-down mode with RAM retention less than 1 uA and fast wake-up via multiple peripheral interfaces.

Security Features:
ARM Cortex-M23 TrustZone Technology
8 Memory Protection Units (MPU)
8 Security Attribution Units (SAU)
Implementation Defined Attribution Unit (IDAU)
2 KB OTP ROM with additional 1KB lock bits
Hardware Crypto Accelerators
CRC calculation unit
Up to 6 tamper detection pins
96-bit Unique ID (UID), 128-bit Unique Customer ID (UCID)

Zephyr Project, open source OS for IoT

Posted by Charbax – March 20, 2017
Category: Internet of Things, Exclusive videos, NXP, Embedded World, Linaro Connect

Matt Locke, Director of the Linaro IoT and Embedded Group (LITE) and Maureen Helm of NXP, one of the maintainers of the Zephyr Project which is a Linux Foundation hosted open source collaboration project, uniting leaders from across the industry to build a best-in-breed small, scalable, real-time operating system (RTOS) optimized for resource constrained devices, across multiple architectures. The Zephyr Project’s goal is to establish a neutral project where silicon vendors, OEMs, ODMs, ISVs, and OSVs can contribute technology to reduce the cost and accelerate time to market for developing the billions of devices that will make up the majority of the Internet of Things of the future.

The Zephyr Project is perfect for building simple connected sensors, LED wearables, up to modems and small IoT wireless gateways. Because the Zephyr OS is modular and supports multiple architectures, developers are able to easily tailor an optimal solution to meet their needs. As a true open source project, the community can evolve the project to support new hardware, developer tools, sensor and device drivers. Enhancements in security, device management capabilities, connectivity stacks and file systems can be easily implemented.

3of3 4K60p Panasonic GH5 handheld sample footage, testing 5-axis, autofocus in manual mode

Posted by Charbax – March 20, 2017
Category: Cameras, 4K UHD, Exclusive videos

Here’s my third attempt at making a sample footage at 4K 60p using the new Panasonic GH5, with the help of one Panasonic staff, he used what he thought could be the optimal settings in manual mode to try to demonstrate the 5-axis stabilization, the auto-focus always following and tracking my eyes and face automatically, focusing on devices that I hold. You can download the original 4K 60p 150mbit/s MP4 camera file here on Google Drive.

1of3 4K60p Panasonic GH5 handheld sample footage, testing 5-axis, autofocus in Program mode

Posted by Charbax – March 20, 2017
Category: Cameras, 4K UHD, Exclusive videos

Please try to ignore my big mistake in not controlling the Shutter speed in this video to prevent to the terrible flickering of the indoor LED lights once we enter the building. I am very sorry I didn’t try to adjust the shutter speed while shooting or before hand. I also tried but I couldn’t find any easy and fast Anti-flicker post processing options in a video-editor. So here it is, I publish this video as I filmed it anyway. You can still see the GH5’s performance in its 5-axis stabilization, auto-focus, color quality in 4K 60p mode. This video features Interview with Kevin Walker of Panasonic UK and Nick Driftwood a photographer who has been testing out pre-production GH5’s over the past 3 months and you can see some of his GH5 samples at https://youtube.com/driftwoodtv and https://vimeo.com/user2930807 I’m sorry I didn’t ask Kevin or Nick to help me adjust the Shutter speed while shooting this video when I should have better noticed the flickering in the viewfinder.

2of3 4K60p Panasonic GH5 handheld sample footage, testing 5-axis, autofocus in shutter priority mode

Posted by Charbax – March 19, 2017
Category: Cameras, 4K UHD, Exclusive videos

Filmed on Panasonic GH5 with manual settings (in shutter priority mode, 400-iso then trying to change the iso setting) filmed with Kevin Walker of Panasonic UK at The Photography Show in Birmingham UK. As this is my second time trying to use the camera, I have probably not set all the settings just right, and this was shot on a pre-production model with possibly a non-final firmware for now, please check back later as I will post other samples that I shot with the GH5 today using other settings as I was trying to achieve perfect auto-focus, perfect 5-axis dual image stabilization, perfect anti-flicker, perfect brightness, perfect colors and etc with the types of handheld always moving camera movements that I usually do in my video-blogging. Check back a bit later tonight as I will attempt to de-flicker the first 25-minute video that I shot with the GH5 in its more default P mode but where my shutter speed was set incompatible with the indoor lights flickering too much at the show. I will also try to upload a couple more samples that I shot on the GH5 in 4K 60p. You can download the original 4K 60p 150mbit/s MP4 camera file here on Google Drive.

ST booth tour: STM32L4, STM32H7, startups, students at Embedded World 2017

Posted by Charbax – March 18, 2017
Category: Wearables, Internet of Things, Speakers, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, STMicroelectronics, Embedded World

ST shows their best-in-class ultra-low-power STM32L4 microcontroller which delivers 100 DMIPS based on its ARM Cortex-M4 core with FPU and ST ART Accelerator at 80 MHz offering dynamic voltage scaling to balance power consumption with processing demand, low-power peripherals (LP UART, LP timers) available in Stop mode, safety and security features, smart and numerous peripherals, advanced and low-power analog peripherals such as op amps, comparators, LCD, 12-bit DACs and 16-bit ADCs (hardware oversampling). STM32L4 is available in these skews: STM32L4x1 (Access line), STM32L4x2 (USB Device), STM32L4x3 (USB Device, LCD), STM32L4x5 (USB OTG) and STM32L4x6 (USB OTG, LCD).

ST also shows their new STM32H7 platform, taking advantage of an L1 cache, STM32H7 can deliver the maximum theoretical performance of the ARM Cortex-M7 core, regardless if code is executed from embedded Flash or external memory: 2010 CoreMark /856 DMIPS at 400 MHz fCPU. STM32H7 supports AXI and multi-AHB bus matrixes for interconnecting core, peripherals and memories, 16 Kbytes +16 Kbytes of I-cache and D-cache, Up to 2 Mbytes of embedded dual-bank Flash memory, with ECC and Read-While-Write capability, high-speed master direct memory access (MDMA) controller, two dual-port DMAs with FIFO and request router capabilities for optimal peripheral management, and one additional DMA, Chrom-ART acceleration for efficient 2D image copy and double-precision FPU are also part of the acceleration features available in the device, peripheral speed independent from CPU speed (dual-clock support) allowing system clock changes without any impact on peripheral operations, even more peripherals, such as four serial audio interfaces (SAI) with SPDIF output support, three full-duplex I²S interfaces, a SPDIF input interface supporting four inputs, two USB OTG with dedicated power supply and Dual-mode Quad-SPI interface, two FD-CAN controllers, a high-resolution timer, a TFT-LCD controller, a JPEG codec, two SDIO interfaces and many other analog peripherals including three fast 14-bit ADCs, two comparators and two operational amplifiers. STM32H7 has 1 Mbyte of SRAM with a scattered architecture: 192 Kbytes of TCM RAM (including 64 Kbytes of ITCM RAM and 128 Kbytes of DTCM RAM for time-critical routines and data), 512 Kbytes, 288 Kbytes and 64 Kbytes of user SRAM, and 4 Kbytes of SRAM in backup domain to keep data in the lowest power modes, Security Authenticate and protect software IP while performing initial programming in production or firmware upgrades in the field.

This ST booth tour video at Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg also features several demos from the STM32 Fan Zone area at Embedded World 2017 featuring demos including a Gameboy emulator and a color LED light display system from students from the Thomas More college, Seavus smart Shopping cart, Bixi gesture controls in the car, Xped IoT systems and ST is giving away more than 5000 development boards at the Embedded World.

NXP i.MX8, ARM Cortex-A72, ARM Cortex-A53 and ARM Cortex-M4

Posted by Charbax – March 18, 2017
Category: Cars, Exclusive videos, NXP, Embedded World, Android

NXP i.MX 8 series of applications processors is a feature and performance scalable multicore platform that includes single-, dual- and quad-core families based on the ARM Cortex-A72, ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Cortex-A35 and ARM Cortex-M4 based solutions with advanced graphics, imaging, machine vision, audio, voice, video and safety critical applications also including its Vivante GC7000LiteXS/VX GPU. NXP i.MX8 supports Android, Linux, FreeRTOS, QNX, Green Hills, Dornerworks XEN and more with 10-year long term support for the chip provided by NXP.

BeagleBone Blue with System-in-Package Octavo Systems OSD3358

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2017
Category: Robots, Internet of Things, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Texas Instruments, Embedded World

BeagleBone Blue is as a new Robotics and IoT development board based around the Octavo Systems OSD3358 System-In-Package featuring a Texas Instruments AM3358 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8, 512MB of DDR3 and power management enabling easy and affordable customization and re-design of the PCB using Autodesk EAGLE. BeagleBone Blue has 2 cell (2S) onboard LiPo battery management with charger and battery level LEDs, 8 real-time software controlled PWM/PPM outputs for 6V servo motors or electronic-speed-controllers (ESCs), 4 PWM-enabled DC motor drivers, 4 quadrature encoder inputs, on-board sensors including a 9-axis IMU and barometer, a wide array of GPIO and serial protocol connectors including CAN, 4 ADC inputs, a PC USB interface, a USB 2.0 host port, a reset button, a power button, two user configurable buttons and eleven user configurable LED indicators. BeagleBone Blue can run Debian, ROS, Ardupilot, Graphical programming, Cloud9 IDE on Node.js and more to come. You can order the BeagleBone Blue for $79 at https://www.arrow.com/en/products/bbblue/beagleboardorg

Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2017
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect, Android, Ubuntu

Following the http://96boards.org/openhours/ session at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017, Lawrence King, Engineer, Sr. Staff/Mgr at Qualcomm Canada, talks a bit about the history of Dragonboard (since my video of an early Dragonboard filmed with him at Computex 2011) leading to the Dragonboard 410c, the ecosystem that is being built around it and some of what’s to come from Qualcomm with Dragonboard.

Nvidia Tegra X2 in Jetson TX2 Developer Kit, dual Denver2 + quad ARM Cortex-A57, Pascal GPU

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2017
Category: Set-top-boxes, Cameras, Robots, Internet of Things, 4K UHD, Development Boards, Cars, Exclusive videos, Nvidia, Embedded World, Android, Ubuntu

Nvidia Tegra X2 features two Nvidia custom Denver 2 cores, four ARM Cortex-A57 cores with Nvidia’s Pascal GPU (made of 256 CUDA cores) made on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET+. Nvidia Tegra X2 (codenamed “Parker”) delivers up to 1.5 teraflops of performance, about 50% more performance than Nvidia Tegra X1. Enabling Artificial Intelligence (AI), for building advanced robots, drones, smart cameras, portable medical devices, enabling the processing of complex deep neural networks on the edge of the IoT world. While X1 could do 4K at 30fps encode, 4K 10bit 60p decode, X2 can encode 4K H265 at 60p and decode 4K 12bit 60p. Memory bandwidth has more than doubled from 25.6GB/s to 58.3GB/s, you can buy the Nvidia Jetson TX2 Developer Kit for $599 at https://store.nvidia.com/store?Action=DisplayPage&Locale=en_US&SiteID=nvidia&id=QuickBuyCartPage

Cypress PSoC 6 dual-core ARM Cortex-M4 and ARM Cortex-M0+

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2017
Category: Internet of Things, Exclusive videos, Cypress, Embedded World

The Cypress Semiconductor PSoC 6 is a dual-core microcontroller featuring all Cypress’s peripherals and configurability of previous generations, to build low-power designs with a high degree of security, for IoT. Cypress PSoC 6 features ARM Cortex-M4 and ARM Cortex-M0+ cores, in an ultra-low-power 40-nm process technology, with integrated security features required for next-generation IoT. The architecture is intended to fill a gap in IoT offerings between power-hungry and higher-cost application processors and performance-challenged, single-core MCUs. The dual-core architecture lets designers optimize for power and performance simultaneously, alongside its software-defined peripherals. The two cores can achieve 22 µA/MHz and 15 µA/MHz of active power on the ARM Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M0+ cores, respectively. The dual-core architecture enables power-optimized system design where the auxiliary core can be used as an offload engine for power efficiency, allowing the main core to sleep.

The PSoC 6 MCU architecture provides a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with secure boot capability and integrated secure data storage to protect firmware, applications and secure assets such as cryptographic keys. PSoC 6 implements a set of industry-standard symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, including Elliptical-Curve Cryptography (ECC), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and Secure Hash Algorithms (SHA 1,2,3) in an integrated hardware coprocessor designed to offload compute-intensive tasks. The architecture supports multiple, simultaneous secure environments without the need for external memories or secure elements, and offers scalable secure memory for multiple, independent user-defined security policies.

Software-defined peripherals can be used to create custom analogue front-ends (AFEs) or digital interfaces for innovative system components such as electronic-ink displays. The architecture offers flexible wireless connectivity options, including fully integrated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0. The PSoC 6 MCU architecture features the latest generation of Cypress’ CapSense capacitive-sensing technology, enabling touch and gesture-based interfaces. The architecture is supported by Cypress’ PSoC Creator Integrated Design Environment (IDE) and the ARM ecosystem.

In this video, Cypress shows PSoC 6 using a wearable demo and the PSoC 6 pioneer kit. You can read more about PSoC 6 here: http://www.cypress.com/event/psoc-6-purpose-built-iots

Aiptek Pico Projectors: i70 (smallest), AN100 (smart), i120 (HDMI input), iBeamBlock (x86 stackable)

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2017
Category: Projectors, Speakers, Exclusive videos, Texas Instruments, Samsung, MWC, Android

Aiptek demonstrates how they are the world leader in TI DLP pico projectors offering a whole range of innovative portable, pocket and pico projectors including the following for their latest range of pico projectors: i70 world’s smallest bright mirroring projector, AN100 an affordable compact 100lumen Android Smart projector, i120 with dual HDMI (input and output), iBeamBlock with pogopins for x86 computer module, tablet touch module, powerback and the 400lumen 720p TI DLP TRP pixel projector. P800 Boombox projector with 360 degree boombox speaker 8 Speakers (40 Watt), 5″ touchscreen Smart Android projector with 4 hour battery at 800lumen 1280×800 for an all-in-one outdoor cinema device running on the Samsung Exynos 5260 Hexacore dual ARM Cortex-A15 and quad ARM Cortex-A7 with Mali-T624 GPU, 2GB RAM, 16GB Flash and MicroSD card slot. AN500VT is world’s first mobile interactive projector with an ir camera to be used with an IR stick to be able to interact with the projector directly on the wall. Aiptek i400 projects 720p with short-throw 400lumen, wireless and USB projection using their USB based codec for easy display mirroring from Windows/Mac computer or from iOS/Android. Aiptek is looking forward when it might be possible for them to also make 1080p and soon after 4K Projectors once the TI DLP 4K solution can be made to fit into a compact size which should be by late 2018. Aiptek iBeamBlock will have a 500lumen 1080p 0.33″ TI DLP module to come. Also driving the LED light from OSRAM, also looking into using up to 2000lumen laser source. Aiptek has been making and shipping the largest amount of TI DLP Pico projectors since 2008 you can watch a whole range of Aiptek videos that I have filmed since 2008 here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Charbax/search?query=Aiptek

Socionext SC2A11 ARM Server SoC is 24-core ARM Cortex-A53

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Servers, Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect, Socionext

Socionext shows their new SC2A11 ARMv8 server SoC featuring 24 ARM Cortex-A53 cores and their SC2A20 Interconnect bridge. SC2A11 is a highly integrated low-power server system suitable for edge computing which processes data at the edge of the cloud in the IoT era. Large amount of data can be processed faster in memory by adopting the 64bit ARMv8 architecture. Up to 1536 cores can be configured in a system for uses such as web serving, indexing, cloud computing.

Linaro OP-TEE open-source security for the mass-market

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect

Joakim Bech talks about Linaro’s work in OP-TEE (Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment) small OS-like environment that sits aside a rich operating system, for instance Android. The purpose of the TEE is to keep all secret credentials and data manipulation in the small TEE rather than in a larger rich OS that is often the vulnerable target of malware and hackers in general. In order to reach this goal, application software is architected in a way such that sensitive functions are precisely defined and offloaded to the TEE in the form of Trusted Applications.

Apache Ambari on ARM server

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Servers, Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect, ARM

At Linaro Connect Budapest 2017, ARM and the Linaro LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) team demonstrate Apache Ambari running on ARM servers. Apache Ambari is one of key Big Data components that provides an easy to use web interface to provision, manage and monitor Hadoop cluster and various other Big Data tools. In this demo Apache Ambari is running on 3 node cluster with Hadoop, YARN and Zookeeper, all on AARCH64 hardware.

With ARM servers getting into Datacenter, Linaro has been collaborating with ARM and ARM vendors in making sure Big data components work well in AARCH64 architecture. Porting and Building Apache Ambari on AARCH64 is one of the efforts the team has been working on apart from porting, building and benchmarking Hadoop, Spark, Hive, HBase and other Big data components. The team chose to showcase Apache Ambari as a high level component due to it being very intuitive, easy-to-use Hadoop management web UI backed by its RESTful APIs. Ambari provides a dashboard with metrics for CPU, Storage, memory utilization and also metrics for HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive etc for monitoring Hadoop Cluster. It also provides step-by-step wizard for managing Hadoop Clusters (like adding nodes, taking down nodes, doing rolling upgrades, etc).

As of today, Ambari is officially supported only on X86 servers. The work team has done is to patch Ambari to work on AARCH64, which involved patching various dependencies like phantomjs, leveldb, leveldbjni java libaries, etc. Linaro is also part of ODPi organization (odpi.org), which has been working on standardizing Big Data. Ambari is part of ODPi’s operations specs. The collaboration helps in speeding up upstreaming process since ODPi also has some of same maintainers as of ASF.

The work done for this demo is a PoC running in ARM lab (working on Linaro Dev Cloud at the mean time) and yet published.

This video features Eugene Xie ARM Principal Software Engineer & Tech lead of Workloads team of Enterprise Software, BSG, Ganesh Raju – Tech Lead, BigData team and Naresh Bhat, Cavium assignee to Linaro for BigData.

ARM Cordio-N NB-IoT as ARM shipped 100 Billion chips

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Internet of Things, Exclusive videos, MWC, ARM

ARM announces that 100 Billion ARM Processors have shipped. And in this video, ARM talks about their acquisition of Swedish Mistbase and British NextG-Com to enable ARM’s new Cordio-N NB-IoT narrowband IoT communications standard.

Arrow Dragonboard 820c Extended 96Boards, the Enterprise Edition Oxalis NXP ARMv8 Layerscape LS1012A

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect

Arrow shows an early prototype of their upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 based extended edition 96Boards and they are showing their first Enterprise Edition 96Board named Oxalis. Based on NXPs latest ARMv8 Layerscape LS1012A Processor running at 800MHz, this board delivers up to date connectivity with two USB-3.0 ports, SATA, 2x Gigabit Ethernet and PCIe.

Arrow also has a whole bunch of other new development boards such as the Meercat, an i.MX7 based ARM Cortex-A7 board with ARM Cortex-M4 and the Chameleon, the first Intel / Altera FPGA based 96Boards. You can read Arrow’s article about maker’s experiences with the 96Boards here.

Also check back in the days to come as I will be filming Arrows presenting their latest 96Boards at the Embedded World in Nürnberg 14th-16th February, you can get your free pass here.

Robert Wolff featured in this video is the comunity manager at 96Boards hosting the weekly 96Boards Open Hours.

Freedreno enables Linux distros on Dragonboard 820c 96Boards

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect, Android, Ubuntu

Rob Clark, maker of the open source GPU driver Freedreno shows off his latest Freedreno open source GPU working on an upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 based Dragonboard 820c development board, one that is going to use an expanded 96Boards specification to add PCI-E and Gigabit Ethernet ports among other things to the development board. This Freedreno and 820 board provides a significant jump in performance for the GPU, possibly 4x to 5x between the Adreno 306 in a Dragonboard 410c and the Adreno 530 in a Snapdragon 820 based board. The availability of the Freedreno open source GPU driver on Qualcomm based development boards means that these development boards can run all sorts of Linux distributions, including Debian, not just Android. You can read more about the Dragonboard 820c here.

Linaro shows Video Playback Verification with Robot framework and OpenCV

Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2017
Category: Set-top-boxes, Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect

The Linaro Digital Home Group (LHG) recognizes the need for automated video testing software in Linaro’s automated validation architecture (LAVA). In LHG they have started looking at the open source Robot Framework generic test automation framework and OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision). The demo at Connect (BUD17) shows some of the first steps of how to automate the verification of video playback using open source test projects that can be implemented as part of the Linaro Continuous Integration (CI) framework.