ARM Community: Embedded - ARM Community

After a long three days at Design West in San Jose, my feet, voice and mind are finally back to normal from the action packed week. As always, it was enjoyable to reconnect with partners and introduce the Embedded Software Store to those unfamiliar with our e-commerce website. The week started off with a well-attended Internet of Things panel discussion.

IoT Panel Discussion
Will Tu (Director Embedded Segment Marketing, ARM®) moderated a panel discussion “Build, Borrow and Buy Software Strategies for the Internet of Things”.

The panelist brought a number of diverse perspectives:
Peter Abowd (Former Associate Director Software Engineering, Visteon) represented the mindset of the developerJoerg Bertholdt (Director of Marketing, MCU Tools and Software, Atmel), the semiconductor angleMaciej Halasz (Director of Product Management, Timesys) advocated for open sourceChristian ...

Recently our STMicroelectronics’ dedicated teams traveled to snowy Nuremberg to make the most of the show at Embedded World (EW) (check out some of ARM’s Andy Frame’s highlights)!

We welcomed EW 2013 visitors to a smarter world showcasing our leading embedded processing solutions based on an extensive microcontroller portfolio, from top performance high-end STM32 to Ultra-Low-Power devices.

ST teams were there to demonstrate and speak about Performance, Ultra-Low-Power, Energy Harvesting, Internet of Things, and ….to stand for life.augmented! For ST, life augmented represents making a positive and innovative contribution to people's life across the spectrum of sense, power, automotive products and embedded processing solutions. ST’s products improve people’s lives fr...

Do you have what it takes to develop the next great cape plug-in board for BeagleBone? If so, enter the BeagleBone Cape Plug-in Board Design Contest. If you’re among the top three contestants selected, you’ll receive $1,000, third party tools, an article about you and your design in production with CircuitCo.

Furthermore, if you’re among the next 5 entrants into the contest, you’ll get a BeagleBone or a BeagleBoard-xM for free, so hurry and submit your design today!

BeagleBone is a pocket-sized expandable Linux computer that can connect to the Internet and runs software such as Android 4.0 and Ubuntu. Thanks to generous I/O and ARM processing power designed for real-time analysis provided by the Sitara™ AM335x ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor from ...

As embedded developers’ time and travel budgets becomes even more precious, it can sometimes be a challenge to carve out time to attend trade shows or conferences to catch up on the latest tools, skills and technical training.

PSoC World Online 2012 is a place where you can learn new design skills, train for credit, browse the booths of PSoC customers and technology partners, and engage in live chat and Q&A throughout the conference with an All-Star assembly of architects and designers from inside and outside Cypress.

Join me and the nearly 10,000 other registrants for the free training conference directly from your home or office. I’ll be available throughout the day in the Networking Lounge and the Exhibit Hall. Just look for CY_John.Weil and send me a message.

PSoC World features more than six hours of in-depth technical training in Chinese, Japanese and English, with real-time broadcasts in all major geographies worldwide. Our Exhibit Hall includes hundreds of videos, demos and documentation you can zip up and download to your take-away event “briefcase.” ARM, Arrow, Macnica and other vendors will be available to help you simplify your supply chain, go wireless, or hel...

Designing a differentiated motor drive is a complex task. Often these drives are single-processor that combine constraints of real-time embedded designs such as limited memory size and processing time, with the complications that motors bring - electrical noise and faults. When you add functional safety and certification requirements - the new design, test, and documentation deliverables require a significant amount of additional effort.

Today’s systems are also more complex and more dependent on the electronic control of motoring operations that need to meet strict industry functional safety standards. Whether it is the motor in control of the power steering assist in a car, controlling the lift and doors of an elevator, or a directly connected to the drum of a front load washing machine without belts or gears, functional safety in motor operation is fundamentally important. A motor system designed with functional safety will have a lower level of risk from improper operation. When a failure does occur, whether it is a random or systematic fault, the functionally safe design will detect this fault and respond to minimize impact.

International functional safety standards are defined to ensure that functional safety techniques are detailed for a specific industry sector and that these techniques are consistently applied. IEC 61508 is a basic safety standard which is the basis of all IEC and some ISO functional safety standards. It is u...

The Internet revolution has connected billions of PCs. There is now a second revolution in Internet connectivity. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is happening all around us. A wave of billions and billions of devices are being connected. Devices, as simple as a light bulb and as complex as a jet engine, become more manageable once they have become connected devices. By becoming connected, devices can be controlled from a distance. Their settings and operations can be changed based on input from other connected devices. They can transmit information about their status, for example their location, or whether they need maintenance. The value of connecting devices is coming to greatly outweigh the rapidly decreasing costs of interconnecting them.

Connectedness brings the option of computer control. Devices that were previously standalone are opening to the creativity of a new generation of programmers. We can now have apps for devices. This is opening an entirely new world to developers. With their creativity unleashed, they are adding exciting new functionality to what have often been rather dull, unconnected devices.

Need for user interfaces with more complex information
With conne...

I’ve been in the embedded x86 business for many years. During this time, I came to like the openness and flexibility offered by embedded PC technology. Consequently I also like the latest ARM processors working in a more PC-like way. Not because of the PC-like functionality itself, this is nothing new. I like them because they deliver it in a very attractive ultra-low power envelope. This opens up a load of new windows for completely new applications. End customers of embedded hardware also like this new technology very much. They like the power savings and the lightweight system designs. They like endless ‘always on’ mobility. They like the long term availability of over 10 years. So they like the range of benefits that we were never able to deliver in this specific PC-like ultra-low power configuration before. Consequently we expect customers will definitely like to adopt this new technology very quickly. But how quick is quick and what is the most efficient way?



Re-use standard form-factors for PC-like ARM technology...

If you've ever walked into a local bookstore in China or Taiwan, then you've probably noticed that nearly everything's wrapped in plastic. Not just special collector's editions, mind you, but all the everyday books and magazines, too. I guess I can see the reasoning: either buy it or don't. But for me, shrinkwrapping is not the right avenue to display something. How do I know if I want to spend money on a book if I can't read a bit of it first? I prefer to explore a little, be sure something's worth reading, before I commit.

I mention this because it reminds me of how most 32-bit MCU vendors promote their development tools. Designers are often forced to pay thousands of dollars up front, for evaluation tools, before they can explore features first hand, on the bench. They're made to pay a lot of money before they can play, and that's pretty much the same as making me buy a book before I can read it.

Take a fully-featured test drive
For most designers, it's usually not enough to compare data sheets, review benchmarks, and attend a sales presentation. A device may look good on paper, but how does it perform in a real-world application? Most often, the best way to figure that out is by giving the device a test drive using some sort of design tool. ...

The Internet of things (IoT) will provide consumers with an unprecedented ability to control and monitor a wide range of previously “disconnected” end products, as well delivering a generation of “Internet- aware” products with much more sophistication and intelligence. Additionally, it will offer manufacturers a great opportunity to improve customer experience for their products through remote diagnostics and repair, as well as delivery of customized support and maintenance. One thing that is common in the IoT is the pervasive use of microcontrollers, making the IoT a great fit for ARM® processor- based microcontrollers (MCUs).

Among wireless technology options for IoT products, Wi-Fi has unique advantages due to its ubiquity and native IP support. Additionally, the recent explosion of mobile and web apps provide an ideal way to interact with Wi-Fi technology, leveraging the near 100 percent attach rate in smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Why add Wi-Fi to home appliances?
However, manufacturers considering Wi-Fi could still struggle to imagine the exact use cases for adding wireless connectivity ...

Freescale’s Jim Trudeau highlights the creativity and innovation found in Freescale and ARM’s partnership and the amazing invention, Active Guitar Pickguard, discovered in the Freescale Kinetis Make It Challenge.

If you hang around primates with opposable thumbs long enough you’ll run into a tool. It’s not just us smart monkeys. Tool use is widespread throughout the animal kingdom among birds and beasts. Tools get things done. Elephants modify branches to use as fly swatters. Sea otters use stones as hammers. Octopi use coconut shells as armor. Birds craft twigs into tools. But there is something unique about the way we humans use tools. We don’t just swat flies, we innovate and we invent. As an illustration, I will show you how microcontrollers helped re-invent the gui...

Industrial automation designers often require popular industrial communications protocols, such as EtherCAT®, Ethernet/IP, PROFIBUS®, PROFINET®, POWERLINK and SERCOS III. Or perhaps they want to create their own communication protocol. Most of these industrial automation designs would require a microcontroller or microprocessor that’s connected through a host interface to an FPGA or an ASIC. Imagine eliminating the FPGA or ASIC and using one chip that contains all the industrial communications protocols you would need for your design.

I bet you’re asking, “How is this possible?” Using an ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor, combined with an on-chip Programmable Real-time Unit (PRU) interface, provides both master and slave communications functionality to enable these real-time industrial communications protocols. This type of architecture eliminates the need for an ASIC or FPGA and can result in an overall bill of materials cost reduction of as much as 30 percent!

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The rising complexity of embedded systems continues to drive the need for MCU architectures and development tools that abstract low-level design details and enable developers to quickly bring new products to market. In addition, the shorter lifespan of products on the market requires being able to introduce new products faster with each new generation. To succeed, you must consider not only how long it will take to develop a new product but also how quickly existing products can be adapted to meet the changing needs of customers.

For example, what most customers want today – typically called the sweet spot of the market – shifts every few months. To hold market share, you need the ability to create product upgrades and enhancements across MCU platforms to match these changing expectations. Consequently, even during the design of a new product, engineers already need to take into account what next-generation device requirements are going to be.

Key factors to consider when choosing an MCU include: design reuse, software code compatibility, performance and power, advanced algorithmic-code compatibility, inte...

A significant challenge for embedded systems is how to provide a reliable, yet cost-effective way to remotely update firmware when adding new features or providing software revisions. This is especially true when your embedded system is located far from easy access (which is often the case for products that embed wireless communication) or is in an environment prone to power interruptions. Embedded systems are also very much driven by cost, so there are rarely excess on-board resources available.

While solutions exist for easy updates wirelessly, the ability to reliably upload the entire operating system had, until recently, been just out of reach. Very efficient code generation was required to store smaller firmware images that enabled a backup should the wireless update be interrupted by intermittent power or deployment.

A new solution from Synapse for SNAP OS
Synapse Wireless has a long history of providing easy to create applications via Python scripts that users can upload wirelessly to their modules. We provide intelligent, wireless control and monitoring technology for machine-to-machine communication based on the I...

From refrigerator compressors to industrial pumps, micros that combine an ARM® Cortex™-M3 core with motor control firmware can help engineers rapidly create the optimum, low-energy motion control design.

In a world where we all want to cut costs and improve our green credentials variable speed BLDC motors play an increasingly important role. With suitable electronic control for adjusting their speed, power and torque according to demand and operating conditions, they not only cut energy costs and reduce carbon emissions but also help minimise acoustic and electrical noise. Can’t hear your washing machine or dishwasher? Then thank a variable speed motor (and some very clever drive electronics).

Designers are looking to capitalise on these benefits at the same time as building differentiating features into their products. But resources aren’t getting any more plentiful, time-to-market isn’t getting any shorter and end users don’t expect to pay more. A key issue for designers, therefore, is the software development/re-use trade-off to create the optimum system. Which is why ARM processor-based platforms with the flexibility to choose complete software control, majority hardware control and everything in between make things significantly simpler.

Toshiba ARM Cortex-M3 pro...

With the rise of advanced graphics on smartphones and tablets, users are demanding higher quality and faster response times from all user interface displays including industrial products. The simple segment displays for human interface are quickly becoming the minority in all but the lowest cost applications.

Adding an LCD controller to your next design
When choosing a high-performance LCD Graphics controller, designers should consider bandwidth use cases for example how often will the information be refreshed, the use of colors (number of color and depth,) software support that allows a variety of panels to be used and choices of multiple effects to be implemented quickly and easily in the design.

To meet this growing demand for quality displays, NXP has included a high-performance LCD Graphics controller on a number of new ARM Cortex-M3 and ...

Have you ever developed a great product, and then wanted to add additional features after it was completed or perhaps differentiate your product line? A scalable platform, such as the ones from Texas Instruments (TI), enables ARM® developers to toggle between product lines to add on additional features without having to completely rewrite code saving development time and cost.

What could a developer develop with a scalable platform? As an example, say a refrigerator has a screen that offers simple human machine interface (HMI) touch screen panel that would allow family members to develop their grocery list, adding or deleting items as the week goes. That’s a great start and could be developed on the ARM Cortex-A8 processor-based Sitara™ ARM microprocessor platform. Then a developer could take that interface on the refrigerator a step further and add intelligence to allow the refrigerator to automatically quantify existing groceries and alert the homeowner if items in the refrigerator are running low or expired, as wel...

Most real-time operating systems (RTOS) that support ARM processors use preemptive scheduling for real-time response. This is due to the fact that ARM processors are commonly used in consumer electronics, medical devices, and industrial control, all of which require at least some degree of real-time performance. But while preemption delivers responsiveness by enabling high-priority tasks/threads to use the CPU immediately as soon as they need it, in many cases this can add unnecessary overhead and actually reduce system throughput. Recent Computer Science research (see below) has shown that “Preemption-Threshold Scheduling” (PTS), introduced by Express Logic in 1997 in our ThreadX RTOS, can reduce context switch overhead, while still meeting all real-time schedulability deadlines.


In ...

Are buttons and switches dead? Probably not, but the headlong rush to adopt touchscreens for tablet PCs and smartphones shows that we humans love the flexibility that a dynamic, virtual display provides.

And it’s not just the latest ritzy portable consumer electronics devices that are benefiting from the adoption of touch technology. In many other applications touch sensors are enabling products that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to realise.

Applications mushroom, size grows
Makers of industrial PCs, which often must operate over extended periods in dusty, grimy environments, were early-adopters of touchscreen control. Replacing physical keypads, switches and keyboards simplified maintenance and reduced the number of potential points of failure considerably.

Other, less obviously hostile, environments are now seeing a similar approach being used to bring new functionality to familiar applications. The typical urban high street may seem more benign than a sheet metalworking shop but the small children or late-night revellers who frequent it can both have damaging effects on sensitive electronic equipment that is unprotected.

Touc...