EtherCAT, Power Architecture, real-time control – a picture is worth a thousand words

I mentioned earlier that we were working with Koenig on an industrial reference platform that we unveiled at Freescale Technology Forum. Well, we showed it and it was a very popular exhibit.

It combines EtherCAT master, EtherCAT slave, an inverted pendulum to demonstrate real-time control and QNX adaptive partitioning. The adaptive partitioning portion demonstrates how real-time control can be maintained even when a runaway application consumes all available CPU.

Rather than spend a thousand words describing the demo I thought I could send you to see a video that covers it off nicely.

Go to http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=052577903689DC97F9, click on the industrial tab and check out the EtherCAT on Neutrino video.

OK – so technically it is not a picture.

Freescale Technology Best in Show

After the keynote, the Prius was moved onto the show floor where it joined a smart energy demo on the i.MX25 complete with a Freescale based smart meter, a QorIQ demo showing performance increases possible as additional cores are turned on, QNX CAR on the i.MX51 and a real-time demonstration of the inverted pendulum and EtherCAT.

Once again, the Prius didn’t fail to impress and I am delighted to report that it took Best in Show as voted by attendees at FTF.

I am already scratching my head trying to figure out how we are going to top this one next year…

QNX at Freescale Technology Forum Keynote

This year QNX managed to get not one but two instances of our technology included in the keynote at FTF. If you have never seen an FTF keynote they are spectacular. Theatre really.

First up was the Toyota Prius running the QNX CAR infotainment platform on the i.MX51. The car was backstage during the first part of the keynote. When it was time, the walls opened up and the Prius rotated around front and the narrator took us on a voyage from Austin to Orlando.

Second up was the Smart Energy reference panel. This time it was incorporated into a multi-node system including a Freescale gateway, smart energy meter and appliances.

And the best part, Greenhills, Enea and Mentor were nowhere to be seen!

EtherCAT, Power Architecture and QNX

We talk quite a bit about our QNX CAR infotainment reference platform so you couldn’t be blamed for thinking our primary focus is automotive. In fact QNX has been serving the industrial market since its inception and industrial as a segment is still one of our largest.

We have been working with Freescale and Koenig Prozessautomatisierungs GmbH (KPA) for some time to bring a demonstration of EtherCAT master and slave on QNX on Power Architecture. This demo builds on the real time control of the inverted pendulum system we showed at ESC this year. It adds an EtherCAT master on the QorIQ P2020 and an EtherCAT slave running on a PowerQUICC processor working with a KPA EtherCAT PCI card.

I won’t reveal the exact details of what the system does but will say that it will be featured in the Freescale booth next week at Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando. If you are going, please stop by and check it out.

Renesas SH77722 now runs QNX CAR

At Telematics Update Renesas will be showing the 77722 running QNX CAR. This will be the first time QNX CAR has been seen on the SH architecture in North America. Users of QNX CAR can now develop on their choice x86, ARM and SH4.

The SH77722 (also known as the SH-NaviJ2) is the second-phase product in the SH-NaviJ Series with a 32-bit bus for the DDR2 SDRAM memory interface that allows the implementation of higher-speed advanced graphics functions along with two-screen displays for supporting a a wide range of applications.

Telematics Update starts tomorrow and runs until Thursday. Come see QNX CAR in the Renesas booth and then wander over to the QNX booth to check out the latest on the LTE Toyota Prius.

Remote Update and QNX CAR

Red Bend Software is a company that has been working in the mobile handset space for quite a few years. They have technology that allows them to compare two different software images, extract the delta between the two images, create a download package  and install it on a device remotely. This is great technology for mobile devices as air time costs money.

QNX and Red Bend have been working together to bring this technology to automotive. As we move to the connected vehicle, the ability to upgrade software in the car without bringing it into the dealership will have appeal to all. Need an upgrade – no problem – it’s already happened and you didn’t need to do anything.

To prove this out QNX and Red Bend will be showing this capability in the QNX booth at Telematics Update. We have worked together to create a delta file between the QNX M4 and M5 builds of QNX CAR. The delta file between the two builds is less than one fifth the size of the full image. That’s 20% of the bandwidth that would have been needed otherwise.

Come see us at Telematics Update – this is just one of the new things we’ll be showing off.