Build Gear version 0.9.19beta released!

A new version of Build Gear has recently been released.

Build Gear is the open source build tool that is used to build the Ixonos Embedded Linux BSP for various embedded boards based on a range of different chipsets including TI OMAP/AM/DM, Freescale IMX, Intel Atom/Haswell, etc.. This build tool allows us to very effectively create and maintain clean cut modern Linux BSP firmware tailored to fulfil the requirements of individual embedded customers.

This release includes a couple of new features and some bug fixes.

One of the new interesting features is the introduction of a new command to create a software manifest which provides a detailed list of the software components involved in a particular build. This is a quite useful feature in case you need an overview of the licenses of the components going into your firmware. Actually, for most this is an important feature so that the BSP firmware can be legally approved before going to production.

For more details see the release announcement here

The Build Gear tool has been in beta stage for quite some time but it has now stabilized to the point where it is ready to move out of beta. Thus, it will soon be labelled stable and a 1.0 release will mark the final transition out of beta.

Expect more posts from me on this build tool and on how and why we use it to create the Ixonos Embedded Linux BSP platform solution.

Keep it simple!

Sweet and tasty approach to OpenCV and MinnowBoard

PC-esque cheap hardware is booming, and there seems to be no limit to the cool apps you can create on boards like Beaglebone, Rasperry Pi, or Minnowboard.

This obvious trend has had our attention for a long time now, plus we've got some customer cases going with the basic idea of migrating from expensive legacy systems to cheap off-the-shelf processing boards with huge capabilities in a meak form-factor.

Recently, some of our clients have expressed their interest in imaging systems, so we decided to whip up a small demo involving our "Ixonos BSP" small-footprint Linux distro and the industry standard OpenCV imaging library.

In this demo we used the MinnowBoard, Intel's small and low cost board which is based on Atom processor. The camera we used is a basic USB webcam from Logitech. Pictures below:

The Minnowboard with webcam watching candy drops

The camera setup allows the system to see some candy drops in this rather trivial pattern recognition demonstrator. The system acquires image rasters of the scene using v4l2 and OpenCV. Circle shaped patterns are detected using opencv function "HoughCircles", based on Hough Circle Transform. Code snippet below demonstrates simple circle detection using HoughCircles:

//circle detection
vector<vec3f> circles;
HoughCircles(detected_edges, circles, CV_HOUGH_GRADIENT,
             1, minSizeThreshold,  lowThreshold, lowThreshold/2,
             minSizeThreshold, minSizeThreshold + minSizeThreshold / 2);

printf("total circle count: %d\n",  circles.size());

After detecting all the circles, they are categorized according to color and statistics are printed to the screen.

Candy drops detected

  Another picture below illustrates a situation with some more candy drops.

More candy drops detected

Ilkka Aulomaa, SW Engineer - Ixonos
Kalle Lampila, SW Engineer - Ixonos