Embedded Systems

So as part of my IAESTE placement with PC Engines, I’m investigating the possibility of them making a new board based around the AMD Fusion series of APU’s (CPU+(something else, usually GPU) on single die) and for that board to work with the Open Source Coreboot BIOS. This is my story. Disclaimer I am not a hardware guy, and have never done any pre-OS x86 hardware programming. This will bore the pants of anyone who is an x86 expert, but hopefully some will find it useful and will contribute to the Coreboot project. ...

My lil-NAS has plenty of space but is maddeningly underpowered. I came across a permissions issue where, depending on how the files in question got there, they would not be accessible to my windows boxes because they were owned by root (I have no doubt that its my fault!) So, first attempt was nice and easy. $chown -R smbusr:smbusr * But this was taking a horrific amount of time, so I thought “There must be a better way”. ...

As part of the whole New Years Resolutions plan, I’m gonna get started on the OSS development thing. The Gist: Cross Platform Mobile application to collect international data on cell reception. The Gimmick: While services that do this exist, they assume even circular propagation of the signal. Granular reception maps that tell you where to head to to get more bars. The Detail: Low level should be relatively simple; the Android, Blackberry and Iphone API stacks allow easy reading of the current cell ID, RSSI, and GPS Co-ords. Upload those three values over XML (or Something), Web service plugs that into a MySQL server, which is then aggregated, and displayed on the Web, and can be queried by the mobile app. The Potential: While its unlikely that its going to ‘blow up’ since there is relatively little incentive for the end user, since the Applications are going to be free, there will be some that will install it for the sake of it. There is the opportunity to license the data gained service providers but the aggregated data will be made available online in open formats. ...

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ' I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection. I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’ ...

Last week or there abouts, there was a big buzz around the interwebs revisiting Dan Kaminski’s OzymanDNS tool, a perl based toolkit for tunnelling TCP traffic over DNS requests (technically its TCP over SSL over DNS but whos counting) That was originally released mid-2004. I never really found the true source of the new hype surrounding a “old” project (it may have been HAK5’s episode 504 that demonstrated the tool, mubix has put the write up in at room362) ...

Afternoon folks, I’m supposed to be studying but dont have the heart to, so I’m documenting a recent project from Uni. The remit was to be able to parse RS232 data coming in from a GPS unit and reformat it for a LCD display. I dont have the part numbers handy but I was programming on a 18F series PIC that supported C. Most of the ancillary code is more platform dependant, such as working with the PIC interrupts etc, so for the purposes of this code snippit, assumme that a NMEA sentence (I used RMC and some RMB, but never really finished that bit) stored as a character buffer, and a structure, as defined, to store relevent data in. ...