Real-time embedded systems used to be hand tailored to fit requirements and constraints of applications. But the increasing complexity of applications and the rapid evolution of hardware make these practices unbearable to face nowadays industrial reality with very fast evolution of requirements. (more…)

As part of a Cambridge-Massachusetts Institute funded project a set of teaching resources is being developed around the ARM based Balloon Board microcomputer. The system is being designed to give students and academics a preinstalled system with support material and low cost hardware for control and data acquisition projects. (more…)

The Real-Time Driver Model (RTDM) is an approach to unify the interfaces for developing device drivers and associated applications under real-time Linux. The device models supported by RTDM will be introduced in this paper. An overview of the low and high level APIs will be given and the concept of device profiles for defining generic device interfaces will be presented. (more…)

This paper investigates the possibility of using standard, low-cost, widely used FireWire as a new generation fieldbus medium for real-time distributed control applications. A real-time software subsystem, RT-FireWire was designed that can, in combination with Linux-based real-time operating system, provide hard real-time communication over FireWire. (more…)

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…)

POSIX is a set of international standards whose main goal is to support applications portability at the source code level. It defines an operating system interface and environment based on the UNIX operating system. A series of POSIX Real-Time standards have been defined to support real-time applications portability. (more…)

A real-time virtual resource is an abstraction for resource sharing where the application task groups sharing a resource must meet timing constraints in the absence of knowledge of all the timing requirements of all the task groups, thus prohibiting a global schedulability analysis. (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…)

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…)

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…)