26. August 2009 by pilot.

It has been a hot month of August as I visited back home in Italy and even here in Germany, I mean… everything is relative!

Returning home after a few days off is typically a moment of (small) revelations. Things that had gone unnoticed, in the day to day routine, can stand out when the background changes. Yesterday morning for example, the satellite TV receiver was looking at me sad and lonely from the back of the living room!  It had been months since I had turned it on last.  Actually I just realized that the only user of the TV screen in my house for the last several months has been my 20 months old son. Not much of a user either, as he has only been watching Bamby II (in 15 minutes installments) before going to bed each night …

What happened to the news? I don’t trust the TV anymore… I check things on the internet.

What happened to the occasional movies? I hate the frequent commercial interruptions (even if less frequent here than in the US) so I mostly watch them off DVDs (on my wife Mac mostly) or streaming directly from the “media server” ( a Linux machine by the way…)

Speaking of PCs, I turned my attention to the “desktop” which is a Windows XP machine we keep in the office room. That one has been off for several months now as well. Last I remember using it was because of a printing job (we are not printing that much either… apparently, good for the trees). The cheap inkjet printer I bought last year (for Euro 59) is not natively supported by my Linux distro (Ubuntu), so I attached it to the XP machine making it probably the last and only useful application for it!?

All the action is now on the Linux media server and my (and my wife’s) laptop(s). While my wife is already on OS X, which covers pretty much all her needs, I am still running on a (company issue) crancky IBM laptop under Windows XP.

Could that last installation of Windows on my lap be replaced by something else one of these days ?

There are three critical systems I use every day on that laptop: Office, Outlook and MPLAB.

The copy of Microsoft Office I use is so old and basic that I am pretty sure it could be easily and compatibly replaced by OpenOffice on Linux or similar package on the Mac.

The version of Outlook I am using is very old as well, and it was not a long time ago when we were using a completely different system. I am not sure why we did the switch to MSFT as I did not notice any advantage in the transition, at least there was none from a user perspective…

But it is truly MPLAB that seems to be last bastion of Windowsness…

Now I heard rumors that that might be changing… well’ see… perhaps next year, I will be writing a similar post and realize that I am now completely TV and Windows free and working on my shiny brand new and ultra-thin Mac Air !?

Posted in Linux, MPLAB | 1 Comment »

13. March 2009 by pilot.

Recently I get a lot of questions about Linux on the PIC32….

No, Linux is not available. The main problem is the lack of a true MMU (Memory Management Unit, the PIC32 has only an FMT, fixed mapping table), and most importantly there is not enough memory. Even the tiniest of the tiny (micro/nano…) Linux kernels is 600k bytes compressed. Decompress it first in a couple of megabytes of RAM, than add a couple more to give it room to work, and … game over!

The good news is that most of the requests are coming from developers that are really interested in re-using Open Source code more than running a true Linux system in miniature. Besides, most of them are looking for real time operation, something Linux was never meant to deliver.

As I mentioned in the previous posts, the open source code re-use is actually the easy part, using the MPLAB C32 compiler (a derivative of the GNU gcc) we have inherited a solid GNU compatible set of C libraries. If the project you want to use does not require calls to the OS kernel, and most embedded code would not,  then 90% of the problem is already solved. Just download the project, include all the source files in MPLAB and hit F10 (Make).

But sometimes we need a little more help. Sometimes it would be really nice to have a complete RTOS, and a POSIX compliant one, so that we can re-use code that does rely on “some” Linux kernel calls. In those cases they tell me, you might want to take a look at UNISON from the guys at ROWEBOTS.

The Unison SoC RTOS is available for the PIC32 providing a feature set based on Linux and POSIX in a tiny tiny space… Check it out and let me know!

Posted in Linux, PIC32 | No Comments »

5. January 2009 by pilot.

The Xiph.Org Foundation offers an open source alternative to the omni-present MP3 audio compression: it is called Ogg Vorbis and promises same if not better performance but it is royalty-free and license free. From their web site, like in all open source project you can download the full C source code for all the tools you need to convert and play back Ogg Vorbis files/streams on most operating systems

Like most open source projects, the code is based on the assumption that you will use the classic GNU Toolchain: gcc compiler, linker, standard GNU libraries, to compile and link your application. Now as you might know the PIC32 toolchain happens to be GNU compatible … Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Linux, PIC32, Tools, AV16/32 | No Comments »

4. April 2008 by pilot.

For some reason I used to think that Linux was destined to be a hot topic among embedded control developers, so I have been disappointed last summer, at the MASTERs (the 11th), when a couple of enthusiastic colleagues decided to try and offer a short class on Linux tools for Microchip products. The class was great, I learned a lot in that single hour and I came out with a great desire to learn more about developing code in Linux, but the attendance (statistics) turned out pretty discouraging.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Linux, Tools | 2 Comments »