WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) are considered the sensing technology of the future. Many experimental systems have been designed to create a WSN to collect environment data and accessed via a web-interface. But almost WSN are build on the special technology including the software and hardware. (more…)

As real-time capabilities are becoming relevant in main-stream desk-top Linux more and more, and new variants and ideas are popping up all over the Open-Source world, a notoriously incomplete, overview of the existing variants of soft-real time Linux is given in the article. Many of the variants are for special purposes, some are more general approaches that target every-day soft-rt demands, like… (more…)

In October, 2004 the authors of this paper announced a Real-Time Linux Kernel prototype on the Linux Kernel mailing list. The Real-Time Linux prototype introduced preemptible locking into the Linux kernel, and allowed task preemption to occur while tasks were executing within critical sections, resulting in a dramatic improvement in the Real-Time response of the Linux kernel. (more…)

Talk abstract: This presentation reviewed and discussed the evolution of the Linux embedded PowerPC software. Topics included a brief history, some programming tips, and product success stories. Members of the audience learned what — and what not — to do when trying to port to custom hardware, and where to look for help. (more…)

Talk abstract: This talk explored alternative ways to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) and introduces the concept of a Resource Kernel a means to provide OS-based guarantees. Shortcomings of Linux relative to QoS and Resource Kernel requirements were discussed, and alternative approaches to address them were reviewed. (more…)

Talk abstract: Linux has quickly progressed from an OS for PCs, a single device, to a “micro” operating system able to support thousands of different devices. Working with Linux in embedded form brings, of course, a whole new set of technical obstacles. These include: initialization and configuration of the system in the absence of a BIOS; reduced memory and/or filesystem space; porting and… (more…)

There is a strong tendency towards using modern Personal Computers for various tasks they are not designed for. This also includes audio and video processing. Audio and Video data is real-time data. It needs to be dispatched within predefined and fixed time windows to avoid perceivable lags and dropouts. (more…)

A deterministic response time is the most important and necessary feature in Hard Real-Time Systems. This is the main reason why some years ago it was unthinkable to implement Hard Real-Time Systems with the Java language, an object-oriented, interpreted language, mainly because Java uses garbage collection to implicitly deallocate dynamic memory; This is widely known as“the garbage collection problem''… (more…)

RTLinux does not support direct access to any kind of permanent massive storage system, and in particular IDE hard disks. When a RTLinux thread has to store data on the hard disk, it has to use the Linux services. The usual way of doing the transfer is by means of RTFifos: a rtl-task sends the data to Linux through an RTfifo, and then, a Linux process writes this data on the hard disk. (more…)

This paper describes a fixed-point arithmetic implementation of linear time-invariant digital filters in the C programming language, targeted for the use in real-time applications. FIR and IIR filters are presented in different configurations and representations, such as direct and transposed forms, as well as wave, state-space and normal forms. (more…)

Talk abstract: IBM researchers are successfully running Linux and X11 on a unique wrist watch, demonstrating the viability of Linux across all platforms — from large supercomputer clusters to the smallest intelligent devices. In this keynote presentation, Alex Morrow discussed IBM's far-reaching Linux activities and talked in detail about (and demonstrated on videotape) the incredible IBM Linux… (more…)

Scilab/Scicos is an open source project developed at the INRIA (Insitut National de Recherce on Informatique et on Automatique) in France which can be used to successfully replace other commercial and expensive software in solving mathematical and control problems. This software integrates a code generator for Scicos which has been modified and completed to automatically generate a code for the RTAI-Lab… (more…)

Talk abstract: Debian GNU/Linux is a natural choice as the basis for embedded Linux, due to its open development process, reliability and security, powerful package manager, and wide range of supported architectures. The Embedded Debian Project intends to create a Debian-based Embedded Linux that is scalable, supports a wide range of platforms, integrates embedded Linux related software from a… (more…)

Real Time applications involve time-critical tasks, which are to be run in a high precision scheduling environment always meeting the timing constraints. Applications which run on RT Linux uses a hard real-time kernel for tasks which needs real-time processing and the Linux OS for other non real-time tasks. (more…)

Talk abstract: Development of embedded systems is moving away from single-task / single-user applications running on specialized target platforms, towards a reduced general purpose OS running on PC-like hardware. This move is well represented by Linux based projects for embedded platforms and specialized minimum distributions. (more…)