The next release of the community beaglebone BSP gets a Windows Embedded Compact 2013 image along with an Internet of Things (IoT) sample code using the M2MQTT library. The WEC2013 demo image on Codeplex now includes the M2MQTT client library built in. To show a real world IoT working example I have included a Visual Studio 2013 sample project. The Internet of Things has been getting a lot of press lately, but at its core it just remote communication with a network enabled device. Something we in the embedded world have been doing for years. It seems the marketing people just love to invent new terms for the same old things (SoT). I say this tongue-in-cheek of course, IoT can be much more and I am sure we will be hearing more in the months and years to come. So to use the sample do the following: Download the WEC2013 beaglebone release. Prepare the uSD card (see documentation on the Codeplex site) Make sure the WEC2013 Application Builder plugin is installed on your Visual Studio 2013 ho ...

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  As stated in my last post eMMC memory devices are quickly replacing native NAND memory on embedded devices. This can not happen soon enough in my opinion. If anyone has worked with native NAND and tried to get these working knows exactly what I am talking about. The BeagleBone Black utilizes a 2Gb eMMC memory part for local, on board, bulk non-volatile storage. On later rev C boards the part was upgraded to 4Gb with no change in the footprint. To fully support eMMC on the community BSP several modifications had to be made. Several drivers (SDHC, SDMEMORY and FATFS) had to be modified as well as the boot code. Support for sector mode addressing (eMMC parts greater than 2Gb) was also added. The sdmemory driver needed some tweaks but for the most part the sdmemory library included with WEC2013 and WEC7 works as-is. This library handles the commands issued to the SD/SDHC/MMC/eMMC device and is also responsible for detecting which flavor of device is connected, among other tasks. The SDHC also needed m ...

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eMMC support is now added to the Beaglebone BSP on Codeplex. eMMC memory is the modern day replacement for bulk NAND memory typically used on embedded devices. eMMC memory, sometimes called managed NAND, has several advantages over traditional NAND memory like: 1. A standard SD bus interface. 2. Expandable capacity using the same hardware footprint. 3. Security features. 4. Indirect memory access. For these reason, as well as several others, eMMC memory is quickly replacing native NAND memory in most all embedded devices. Each eMMC device contains a smart controller which handles internal memory management functions. Things like wear leveling, error detection and corrections are now done on the device. These are tasks that use to be done on the host processor in the flash management layer and were the source of much frustration. As the NAND devices got bigger the ECC (Error Correction Code) algorithm had to change to support different geometries. This led to constant code changes and updates. Also, beca ...

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