How to make your project build blazing fast using a build server farm. As the latest system software gets more and more complicated, the building time considerably grows.

This article, ARM: Tutorials and Hacks, is full of informations about howto hack an ARM. You'll find tons of tutorials and hacks.

ARM is by now as God - it is in everything: in our mobile phones, in our GPS, PDA or in our laptops. Let's see a list with 50 products that use ARM Linux technology.

Starter Kit is very useful to learn and develop software on ARM. I merged Starter Kit and OEM module information, because all OEM modules supplier will offer corresponding Starter Kit or evaluation board for design startup.

A flash memory is an essential component in an electronics device to store code and data. Every designer expects a perfect non-volatile memory to meet their requirements. The electronics devices are growing very fast, so we can find a variety of flash memories. However, the flash memories vary in timing, bus width, protocol, rewrite lifecycle, multi-level capability and native support of microprocessor. So the designers have to study the available products to select a proper device for their applications according to the storage purpose, interface and timing.

I heard once one guy telling one of his friends : "I'd give my right arm to know what's inside this portable device." He didn't know he was already holding an Arm in his hands.... since ARM designs the technology that lies at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. Learn more about this embedded processor.

We use the USB mass storage devices everyday, such as USB hard disk, USB stick, USB flash card reader, CD/DVD, mobile devices. Those devices are commonly found in our life, until I got the STM32 evaluation board from a local supplier.

The Network-Attached Storage or NAS was designed for the enterprise file sharing services. Now the consumer NAS (Network-attached Storage) has integrated many additional features including BT/eMule downloading, digital media server and video surveillance.

Hacks for RKE are so easy to find on the web that the following question arise: Are you sure that using a Remote Keyless Entry (RKE) as car security system, your vehicle is still safe? A Remote Keyless Entry is a system designed to theoretically permit or deny the access to the cars.

Cheap Surveillance Camera System [DIY] is another project I am working on. I plan to build a low-end surveillance camera with lowest BOM cost. The camera module is made up of a LPC21XX microcontroller, a serial camera. The image information that comes from the camera is encoded in JPEG, which can be stored directly into a SD card.

DIY: soldering BGA ICs on PCB in your garage/lab without professional facilities. It is a headache to have a BGA IC mounted on the PCB if it is a small project. Today I want to share something about soldering.

This article offers open source software (oss) for FAT over MMC SDC. We have many options of open source TCP/IP stack implementations. However we don’t have enough choices for open source FAT file system over popular MMC/SDC, because of commercial reasons. Most of the popular flash cards are covered and protected by patents and copy rights. For an experienced engineer it is easy to hack the protocol, but this will bring legal problems if he releases what he found during the reverse engineering.

KiCAD a free and open source EDA tool was designed and written by Jean-Pierre Charras, a researcher at "Laboratoire des Images et des Signaux".
The EDA tools are usually under commercial licenses and very expensive. That increases the investment of electronics engineering and brings many other issues. One of my friends used the hacked EDA tools for his projects. Unfortunately, one of the tools was infected by CIH virus and all of his projects on the hard disk were in vain on that big day. It is important to get free (or low cost) EDA tools for electronics engineering.

How to select software or hardware floating point depending from your ARM Microcontroller.
Recently I started to collect the open source robot projects from the Internet. The SRV1 robot from Surveyor LLC seems to be very funny. The company hosts two open source projects, one is based upon 60MIPS NXP2106 ARM7 microcontroller, the other one is developed on 500Hz ADI Balckfin MPU.

Beagle board, an ARM Cortex OMAP3530 based and USB powered SBC, is a low-cost, high performance, low power development platform. It is only 3 inch square in size, and powered by a USB connection. It is possible to design a Linux based application with web browsing, or multimedia functionality without the large development board that is typically needed. The board is designed by Beagleboard.org community members and solely sold by Digi-Key.

After merging the code from different projects, some of which use open source compilers, I can build my own project with GCC for AVR. The first project consumes 12KB ROM and 1K RAM. I believe the RAM size can be reduced after some optimization. However AVR offers big enough memory size than my expectation. Now I am adding the OTA (Over-the-Air) command parser to the project.

OpenAVL is an AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location)open source project.The OpenAVL is one of my on-going open source projects. This project is written in ANSI C. The prototype board is made up of a low cost GSM M2M module (MC39i) from Siemens/Cinterion, a GPS OEM module from Leadtek and an AVR microcontroller (ATmega128L) from Atmel. It will be ported to Emcelettronica's IperSMS board, which has a PIC18 and a Telit M2M module. I will share my development experiences in these blogs.

GPS tracking systems are well known GPS based applications in daily life. Some applications can run independently, such as navigation, geo-tagging and passive track logger. The other applications have to connect to the complementary web servers as the backend sources of map tiles, local search services, landmarks sharing and routes planning.

Today GPS is involved in many location based services, more and more mobile equipment are integrated GPS feature inside. This article will cover GPS receiver module design based upon existing chip-set, component and firmware/software sources. I will prepare extra article for GPS system design, which cover mobile platforms, system programming, back-end web integration and etc. I will try my best to delivery mentioned content on open source projects.

Simulavr and GDB

Simulavr and GDB are parts of WinAVR project. Simulavr simulates AVR running, offers socket connection to the GNU debugger (GDB) over TCP port 1212. The software developer interacts with GNU debugger front end , which communicates with simulavr. Theoretically, AVRStudio from Atmel has a built-in simulator, and can load WinAVR code for simulation. However AVRStudio always prompts me a system fatal error and exits.

To invoke Simulavr, type following command in one DOS command session.
simulavr –d atmega128 –g

The command stands for simulation of ATMEGA128 and waiting for a GDB connection. You will see the ATMEGA128's registers are listed on screen. Some of the registers are not fully implemented in the simulator, which are marked as TODO. The simulavr will display invalid access to register in case the user code try to access the unimplemented registers.

To use GDB, goes to the source directory, open another DOS command session, and type