Embedded Press

Friday, June 23, 2017 Multi-Camera 3D Surround View systems are already established in many passenger vehicles. Demand for such systems now also grows for special vehicles like construction machines, harvesters, buses or military vehicles. In comparison to personal cars, these vehicles are produced in a rather moderate volume and have a high need for customization of the optical system. In this blog post, we present a customizable 3D Surround View Turn-Key solution based on the Toradex  Apalis iMX6 SoM  based on the NXP ®  i.MX 6 SoC, that can be quickly adapted concerning the specific requirements of the targeted vehicle. Please watch this video from Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany, where this system solution was presented: We also explain how to get familiar with the topic of 3D surround view, evaluating the solution via a step-by-step approach and finally how to come to a product meeting your specific needs. TES 3D Surround View Stitch...

Friday, May 19, 2017 You most likely have heard about the recent  WannaCry cyber attack . With IoT, there are more and more connected embedded devices, so security is a big concern. After WannaCry, requests about security peaked, especially among Windows CE/Windows Embedded Compact users. First of all, the good news: WannaCry is targeting x86 Windows-based PCs, the SW can’t run on WinCE/Windows Embedded Compact for Arm, so for this specific issue, there is no concern for devices running  WinCE  on any of our  Colibri and Apalis System on modules (SoMs). Further on, we ran some network tests against our standard images which did not show a vulnerability. We can’t grant that SMB implementation of Windows CE is not affected by some vulnerabilities. We don’t have the source code of that part. My suggestion is to disable SMB anyway if it’s not needed by your application, and that applies to any other service you may have active which is not needed, since that will ...

Thursday, May 4, 2017 Having found its way into everyone’s pockets on board of a shiny new smartphone,  Android has become the world’s most popular operating system . Constantly evolving to meet the demands of a global community of users, the OS is shaping the future of User Interfaces, influencing user habits and behavior. With Android now available for embedded devices, the industry can also tap into this global community: a short introduction into why Android is worth considering for your next embedded product was included in Antmicro’s  previous guest post for Toradex . Today we follow up with an announcement of Antmicro’s brand-new Android 7.1 demo image for Toradex  Apalis TK1  and the accompanying TK1 baseboard, bringing a familiar, cutting-edge UI experience to a small form-factor, high-performance Tegra ™  K1 solution, easy to embed in your product. At Embedded World, as every year, Toradex and Antmicro partnered up to present a demonstrator of t...

Tuesday, April 4, 2017 Every day, new heterogeneous multicore processors/System on Chips (SoCs) are launched in the market. The incorporation of microcontrollers and peripheral cores on SoCs is becoming a very common practice, look at the latest releases of NXP ® :  i.MX 6SoloX ,  i.MX 7  and the upcoming  i.MX 8  ( recently announced to be in the Toradex Apalis family ). Looks to me like something that happened in the past when the ADC (Analog Digital Converter) started to be integrated as peripheral functions on the microcontrollers, having the microcontroller core in an application processor, is solving several issues related to real-time control on Linux-based solutions.

Thursday, March 2, 2017 The flash storage is often a topic on our support channels. Toradex invests a lot of resources into making the storage as reliable as possible. Nevertheless, it is important to understand some basics of the underlying storage device. One of the most important things you have to know is that if the storage wears out, you can destroy your storage device by writing a lot to the built-in storage device. With this post, we want to give you a basic overview of potential issues flash storage can have. Let’s start with a short technology overview first.

Monday, February 13, 2017 Application processor usage continues to broaden. System-on-Chips, often powered by ARM ®  Cortex-A cores, are overtaking several spaces where small ARM ®  Cortex-M, and other microcontroller devices, have traditionally dominated. This trend is driven by several facts, such as: The strong requirements for connectivity, often related to IoT and not only from a hardware point of view, but also related to software, protocols and security The need for highly interactive interfaces such as multi-touch, high resolution screens and elaborate graphical user interfaces The decreasing price of SoCs, as consequence of its volume gain and new production capabilities

Thursday, January 19, 2017 Introduction Despite  OpenEmbedded / Yocto  being nice tools to generate your image, using the build system to compile and test tiny alterations applied to independent packages, although possible, can become confusing and slow. My suggestion to alter the kernel is to compile it separately, test all the changes made by the end of the project, and add the changes to OpenEmbedded/Yocto. To illustrate the process, we will add support to the inertial measurement unit  mma8653  accelerometer by  NXP  (formerly Freescale) to the kernel 4.4.14 used by the Toradex computer on module  Colibri VF61 . Procedure The first thing to do is to have OpenEmbedded and its prerequisites installed. You can follow  this article 's  prerequisites  and  installation  sections to do so. In order to find where and which kernel is being used for your target, you can first find the recipes for the kernels used b...