A couple weeks ago I posted my new working environment: YADR + iTerm2 . I am still loving it, and in fact it gets better and better as one gets used to the shortcuts and the new functionality that was simply not there before! The problem is that due to all that many new shortcuts + the chances of you messing up when typing something wrong in vim, I keep finding myself in google or egreping my YADR tree very often. This post is therefore as much for myself as for anybody in the same situation as me: A compilation of shortcuts and useful commands that make my/your life easier. Continue reading
Category Archives: Development Tools
YADR – Rediscovering your terminal
During the last 3 week I have been back in the good old times of hardcore programming, this time against a bigger enemy: The Kernel! In the process I found this amazing collection of tools called YADR.
Setting up the environment for the Xilinx ZC702 (Zynq-7000 SoC) – ISE Design Suite (14.x)
About a month ago my group purchased the Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit, featuring the ZC702 SoC board. Far from being trivial, getting the SDK and the framework (ISE Design Suite 14.x + ARM Tools) to work properly in a stable environment is quite challenging. In this post I will go through the different alternatives, describing the pros and cons I considered. I will also propose a mixed set-up combining 2 virtual machines, as well as a step-by-step guideline for it. This configuration is actually the one I am using for programming the ZC702.
SerialSend – A scriptable serial terminal
For a long time now I have been working with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). One of my interest in this field has been improving the speed and the reliability of the serial communication among sensor nodes.
One problem I have always had to solve in one way or another when coming up with a new idea was testing it! Unfortunately, even when there are many serial terminals out there (cutecom, minicom, etc.), I found it very difficult to cover all my needs. For this reason, I decided to make my own serial terminal, keeping in mind that it had to be as configurable as possible, as well as easy scriptable. The product, serialSend.
Mount / Unmount Android System images
There are many reasons for wanting to unpack Android’s system image. The most obvious is modifying it. System.img is in the end an ext4 loop file system (such as the Linux system image), that can be mounted, modified and repacked in order to be burned afterwards in an embedded system. Android’s system image can be obtained from the google factory images.
Android Developer Tools – Fastboot
Fastboot is a protocol used to update the flash filesystem in Android devices from a host via USB. It is part of the Android Debug Bridge library (adb). The materialization of this protocol is the fastboot command, which we can make use of, to easily interface with the protocol. Since it is part of the adb library, before using it, we need to install the Android SDK and configure our environment to work from the command line. This post, will guide you through this process.
My Cellar Door 