NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano (NVIDIA X1 CPU) platform is one of the most popular embedded systems for any application that involves video processing. The standard development environment for it is a Ubuntu based system, whilst this is fine for simple development and prototyping, it is not really ideal for a serious production ready embedded device based …
Category: Tech Blog
Introduction to OpenCL on Embedded Systems
Our interest in exploring OpenCL came from a customer who wished to accelerate their image processing on a CPU (NXP i.MX8MN) that doesn’t include a dedicated Image Signal Processing (ISP) engine to perform the task. So a software route is the only option. NXP themselves provide a simple toolkit (SoftISP), but it is rather limited …
Supporting NAND on SpiStack via the LS1012A’s QuadSPI Controller
We’ve recently provided software support to Analogue & Micro who are developing hardware derived from NXP’s Layerscape FRWY-LS1012A reference design. What we find interesting about this reference design is that for storage it uses an innovative SPI memory known as SpiStack Flash. Essentially it’s a single chip with a quad-SPI interface, but inside are two …
Diving into the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Boot Process
The NVIDIA Jetson has become one of the platforms of choice for experimenting with Vision based AI, Robotics, Machine learning and a host of other subjects. It’s marriage of high performance Arm cores with NVIDIA’s own advanced GPU engines makes it both incredibly powerful and very accessible. The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is one of …
An overview of OpenSBI
Thanks to BeagleBoard.org, we’ve recently received a pre-production beta version of the BeagleV StarLight development board. It’s an affordable Linux platform that’s truly open source with it’s software, hardware design and RISC-V instruction set architecture all made available under free and open licenses. When we booted the board for the first time we noticed some …
An overview of PSCI
If you boot a 64-bit kernel on an ARMv8-A platform, you’ll probably notice some output relating to PSCI. In this post, we’re going to explore what this is and why it’s there. The Power State Coordination Interface (PSCI) is an ARM standard that describes a software interface for power management between an operating system (not …
Rust for Embedded Systems
Rust is modern programming language first designed by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla Research in 2010, it focuses on performance, safety and especially safe concurrency. It guarantees memory safety without garbage collection or a runtime.
5 Serial Automation Gotchas
Automated tests that make use of interactive consoles are commonplace. Whether it’s a Linux console over a serial port or a proprietary CLI over a network socket – they require little in terms of hardware yet give access to lots of functionality. However writing a reliable automated test can be more challenging and time consuming …
Flattened uImage Tree (FIT) Images
You’re probably familiar with the steps required to boot Linux from U-Boot: you first load several binaries into memory, perhaps a device tree, a kernel, maybe even an initrd. You then invoke a command such as bootm or booti with arguments providing memory addresses for the binaries you’ve just loaded. However there is a much …
Yocto Security Hardening: Security Flags
In our internet connected world, which relies on a growing volume of software – it’s crucial that new products are created with security in mind. Yet much of the software we create or depend on is written with memory-unsafe languages such as C and C++ – It’s a worrying fact given that 70% of all …