The Weather Outside Is Frightful (Or Is It?)

Newer TS-7600 Product Available. The TS-7600 or TS-7700 are the new and improved versions of the TS-7500 series! Recommended for new designs.

Blistery cold weather is starting to sink in, which ought to ignite an instinctual desire to get your house in order and monitor it so the water pipes don’t freeze and burst. So, we’ll take a timely look at a project setting up some temperature probes in various areas, reading them, and reporting in a custom dashboard. A true home automation expert would take things further by setting up relays to turn on heat tape or even maybe some actuators to control water flow. Maybe next year, but for now, we just want to be able to monitor important areas of our home (in this case a cabin in Montana) and understand temperature patterns over time for better planning. As with most projects, there is more than one solution, especially if it depends on what you have on hand. At the time, the list of things in hand were as follows:      Home

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Example C Code for Reading ADC Inputs on i.MX28 Based Embedded Systems

Let’s take a quick look at what it takes to read from the ADC inputs of a i.MX28 based embedded system using example C code provided by Technologic Systems. Now, while this can be generically applied to many i.MX28 based embedded systems, we’ll be working with a TS-7680. Right, let’s get started!

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Practical Guide to Getting Started with the TS-7600

This practical guide gives us an opportunity to take a relaxed approach to getting started with the TS-7600 single board computer paired with the TS-ENC750 enclosure with TS-752 baseboard. We’re going to take a look at how to make our first connections, talk about the Linux environment, and setup the network. These are usually the first things we do before starting development. In the grand scheme of things, this is just a friendlier extrapolation from the official TS-7600 manual, so be sure to keep it handy for more advanced topics and specific details. The only assumption being made is that you’ve purchased the TS-7600 with a development kit, including the pre-programmed microSD card and TS-ENC750 and TS-752 baseboard. Right then, let’s get started!

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Practical Guide to Getting Started with the TS-TPC-7990

Introduction

The goal of this practical guide is to get you through the basic steps of getting your TS-TPC-7990 up and running so you can begin development. It’s mostly an extrapolation of the official TS-TPC-7900 Manual, but provides a more practical and casual approach in setting up connection, networking, and general development environment.    Home

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Collaborative Digital Signage Project

Real-Time Company Announcements and Information Using Multiple Touch Panel PCs

Abstract

This project aims to improve the communication of company events, key performance metrics, and collaboration through several strategically mounted touch panel computers (TPCs) throughout the building. It also serves as an inspirational digital signage application for potential customers using our TPCs. Skimming through the technical details, you’ll find the screens are powered by our very own TS-TPC-8950-4900, a 10” resistive TPC running Debian Linux, a fullscreen, kiosk-mode browser, and a custom node.js web app.

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Our Research in SLC NAND Endurance on EECatalog

Update Since publishing, EECatalog is no longer. We’ve moved the original article to our own blog: SLC NAND Secrets Exposed.          Home

This whitepaper is the result of many months of effort, working together with our customers in the field, in troubleshooting and coming up with an “smoking gun” explanation and solution for a decrease in SLC NAND flash endurance. It’s valuable information for any embedded system users who rely on their data and filesystem to be free of corruption. Be sure to read the full whitepaper atSLC NAND: Secrets Exposed at EECatalog.com (WayBack Machine Archived Link).

While you’re at it, you may want to take a look at our related articles, featuring the solution we came up with for the decreased flash endurance,XNAND2: NAND Device Driver for Todays Lower Endurance SLC NAND,and how to further prevent data loss,Whitepaper: Preventing Filesystem Corruption in Embedded Linux.                               Home

Demonstrating the TS-SILO Power Reserve Solution

Eliza Nelson, our Field Applications Engineer, takes some time during the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) inMinneapolis to show us a demo on the new TS-SILO super capacitor, power reserve solution. In the video, a TS-7680 equipped with onboard TS-SILO gets it’s power feed mercilessly taken away in an ever lasting loop every minute or so. Thanks to the TS-SILO, it has time to gracefully shutdown each time. Power is restored, the TS-SILO gets fully charged again in under a minute, and power is ripped away again. Enjoy the video!

New! Linux v4.9 Download. The Linux v4.9 kernel with long term support until 2023 is now available for download. Refer to the manual for details.

Practical Guide to Getting Started with the TS-7400-V2

Introduction

This guide aims to get you through the basic steps of getting your TS-7400-V2 up and running so you can begin development. It’s mostly an extrapolation of the official TS-7400-V2 Manual, but provides a more practical and casual approach in setting up connections, networking, and general environment.

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grow-sd: Script for Resizing SD Card Partitions Using sfdisk

The purpose of this example script, which we call grow-sd, is to demonstrate a use case for using sfdisk, or what I like to call ‘scripted fdisk’, to modify a partition on an SD card provided by Technologic Systems. This is useful when your production SD card image, originally copied from a 512 MB SD card, is being written to a much larger capacity SD card, and you want the additional storage space. Keep in mind, the script itself is specific to Technologic Systems’ embedded boards, and only applies to those images which are shipped with four partitions (ie. TS-7350). However, this script also generically demonstrates and example usage of sfdisk. We thought it’d be helpful to publish in hopes it would be useful. Feel free to modify it to fit your requirements.

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How To Compile the Mainline Linux Kernel v4.9 for TS-4900

embedded-linux-ts-board

Here’s a quick how-to guide straight from one of our engineers on how to compile the mainline Linux Kernel v4.9-rc1 and install it on the TS-4900. Support for the TS-4900 in the mainline kernel image (v4.9 and up) is a pretty big deal for us, and we’re excited about it. A big shout out to our friends at Savoir-faire Linux for their hard work in making this happen!

Step 1: Install the Toolchain

We need to install the toolchain from Ubuntu or Debian Jessie by running the following command:              Home

apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf build-essential lzop u-boot-tools libncursesw5-dev -y

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