Hi.

GPS tracker is nearing completion.

http://www.purplealienplanet.com/?q=node/5

This shows the tracker base station in combination with the Genesi Netbook.

I wasn't sure where exactly to put this entry, but I guess this is as good a place as any.

I've been working on a brand new GPS tracking solution (hardware/software combination) for some time now - almost ready for production!

The screenshot below shows the application running on the EfikaMX. It's a Qt application and is thus completely portable to any Qt supporting platform (runs already on Linux x86 and Windows and even on the Nokia N810).



The green circle is a geo-fence in case you're wondering. The screenshot is not as clear as it could be since it's running over VNC. The application allows for easy addition of vehicles and vehicle types, creation of geo-fences and much more.

I'm going to try yo integrate the server side hardware side into the EfikaMX itself - that would make a nice stand-alone, always on GPS tracking 'server' which should offer a nice energy efficient solution capable of tracking a multitude of vehicles.

Johan.

As some might remember, we posted some power usage statistics of the EFIKA 5200B a few years back, e.g., here:
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/12/opportunity-meets-preparation.html
and here:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1039
and also here:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=12563


Time to do the same for the Efika MX :-)

This is the first one:



This is for the board and screen - but no wireless. A quick calculation (P=UxI) tells us it consumes around 5.9 Watts.

This second picture:



shows the board + screen + wireless. Power consumption is around 6.5 Watts.

This last one:



shows the board with wireless, but without the screen, consuming barely 4 Watts.

And this brings us to an interesting fact: even though the clock speed of this little board is twice as high as the original Efika, power consumption is, for the bare board, about the same.
On the other hand however, as soon as we add a display, the power consumption is about half of that of an an original Efika with a graphics card (and no display, or wireless)!

In other words, this clearly shows some of the technological developments that have emerged in the past years, especially in the field of power efficiency.


Johan.

Some early results:

The crypto-stack performs roughly 2 to 3 times faster on the i.MX515 than on the 5200B.




Thanks to Peter for running the application on his system, since my development board seems to be broken.

These results are preliminary, but promising. More later.


Johan.

The development board is almost here. I thought it would have arrived yesterday, but FedEX took their time to clear the package for the rest of Finland. No matter, I spend some time yesterday to get my ARM development environment up to date:

- Latest GCC and binutils for cross compilation
- QEmu with a Debian Lenny distribution for testing (used to be Etch)

Result: the cryptographic stack is running just fine inside the QEmu emulator. Can't wait to get the performance results on the real thing :-)


Johan.

Since Konstantinos Margaritis proposed to port his libfreevec to i.MX515 (http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/project/imx515/729), I think we could do some things together and add acceleration for cryptographic operations to libfreevec.