Class at GEC Trichur, Blackfin experiments
Class at GEC Trichur, Blackfin experiments
2006-03-19T06:10:00
SPACE Kerala is conducting a 2 week long class on GNU/Linux administration and networking for engineering college teachers at GEC Trichur - such classes have already been conducted at many other colleges and I am sure this will go a long way towards strengthening Kerala's position as the Free Software `capital' of India. Unlike places like Bangalore where GNU/Linux is popular mostly with the `elite' programming community, there is more of grassroots level involvement in Kerala thanks to the activism of organizations like the FSF and SPACE. I had a chance to take a class on `Embedded Linux' as part of this program yesterday - as I wanted to make it interesting for the audience, I did some research at linuxdevices.com and came up with some really cool stuff, for example:
I had wanted to show an amazing video of the Linux powered robotic arm swiftly locating the teats of the cow and gently attaching the milking tube with absolute precision (some kind of optical sensing magic) - but there was some problem with the colour settings on the projector and what appeared on the screen was blurred beyond recognition. I should have spent some more time on general issues concerning deployment of Linux in embedded applications, but quickly jumped onto demonstrating the Blackfin Stamp board - this was a disaster and I got to add another thoroughly boring class to the growing list of boring `Linux' classes I have taken :-( The only good thing which came out of the lecture was that I finally found time to work with Jesslyn's Blackfin board and do some experiments - here is a list of things which I have noted down. I am now trying to make `uboot' boot my own `led blinking kernel' rather than the uClinux kernel!