Technical Articles

Gateworks' technical articles cover software and hardware topics related to Gateworks rugged and industrial SBCs. For the latest Gateworks news, please also view our News Page for product press releases and announcements.

Customizing Android & Yocto Splash Screens

May 19, 2016

Customizing Android & Yocto Splash ScreensHave you ever wanted to replace that ugly default logo or animation that is shown when your system boots up? Now you can with custom splash screens!What is a Splash Screen?The logo or image displayed on screen during the boot process of an embedded system3 Splash Screens can be Customized:BootloaderLinux KernelOperating SystemWhy are Splash Screens Important?Splash screen are displayed immediately conveying proper operation and responsiveness to the userReplacing the splash screen logo with a company logo will effectively brand a product for customer deploymentReadmore on the Gateworks Software Wiki:Customizing the Splash Screen

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LCD Touchscreens for Gateworks SBCs

May 12, 2016

Gateworks offers a LVDS connector on the Ventana Family of Single Board Computers to allow the connection of a LCD touchscreen display. LCD Displays are a great fit for control panel applications as well as Digital Signage. The displays work with Android, OpenEmbedded Yocto, Ubuntu and more. The LVDS connector has all the necessary pins for the display signaling as well as I2C for touchscreen control. Gateworks offers a 7-inch LCD Display with a PCAP Touchscreen. This display is great to get started in development as well as for production projects. All of the cables, adapters and LCD can be …

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New Software Release: OpenWrt 16.02

May 9, 2016

Gateworks would like to announcethe release & support of OpenWrt 16.02 on the Ventana and Laguna family of Single Board Computers. This OpenWrt release falls under the Designated Driverrelease of OpenWrt. OpenWrt isa Linux operating system that Gateworks uses for networking centric tasks, wireless access points, router functions, IoT and more. Please review the below updates and highlights and update to OpenWrt 16.02. OpenWrt 16.02Updates and Highlights: General: Moved to git for SCM of choice Gateworks System Controller drivers Feeds bumped to 2016-02-17 Updated to latest wireless drivers (backports-20151218) IEEE802.11 adhoc throughput increased for HT rates (iw 4.3) Bump to …

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Gateworks Product Change Notification

April 6, 2016

Gateworks has world classcustomer support. Part of this supportincludes keeping customers up to date with any changes to the single board computers that Gateworks designs and manufactures. Customers expect to be notified of any changes so they can be prepared properly. Gateworks provides it’s Product Change Notification (PCN) service to notify the customer of any of the following: A new revision of anystandard product single board computer. GSC Firmware Updates Pre-Built Firmware that is shipped on standard product single board computers. Hardware Errata Gateworks has a page on their Wiki site dedicated to PCN notices as well as a mailing …

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Linux Wireless AP Configuration

March 3, 2016

Configuring wireless in Linux can be complex. A very common question is how does one configure an IEEE802.11 radio as an Access Point (AP) from the command line interface (CLI). This question is difficult to answer due to evolving wireless technologies. Several tools have been created to aid in configuring these devices, but are generally not user friendly or portable across operating systems (OS). For example, in the OpenWrt OS, the UCI System allows users to configure their wireless devices easily through the CLI. But because this tool is tightly integrated into OpenWrt, it is not easily portable to other …

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Adaptive Bitrate Streaming using GStreamer

January 26, 2016

Gateworks’ SBCs are widely used for streaming audio and video over the network via Ethernet, 802.11 WiFi, or 4G LTE Cellular.Networks are dynamic, whether from network load, RF interference or signal strength thus throughput will vary requiring intelligent and flexible applications to adjust as necessary. Adaptive Bitrate Streaming is the concept of adjusting the quality of video and/or audio depending on the quality of the network connection or server load. This type of technology is widely implemented throughout technology today, evident in streaming services like Netflix and YouTube. Gateworks created an example GStreamer application named gst-variable-rtsp-server. This application includes a …

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GStreamer Compositing for Streaming H.264 Video

December 2, 2015

Gateworks recently featured a blog in which 8 video cameras were connected to a Gateworks Ventana SBC and then displayed on a HDMI monitor. This is useful for localized applications. For remote applications there is another solution. Remote applications require streaming the multiple video streams over the network (Ethernet or WiFi). For bandwidth efficiency, all camera inputs can be joined together into a single frame and then transmitted across the network. To join all the streams into a single frame, a software element of GStreamercalled a compositor is used. Older versions of the compositor relied on the CPU and caused …

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Capturing 8 Video Inputs on Gateworks Ventana SBCs

November 2, 2015

Gateworks would like to introduce software support for the AVC8000nano Mini-PCIe card on the Ventana Single Board Computers. Figure 1: Screen capture of 8 analog cameras displayed on a monitor using the Gateworks Ventana SBC Many applications, such as surveillance, require multipleanalog video inputs from cameras for monitoring. These cameras can then be displayed on an HDMI monitor or streamed over the network. Figure 2: Eightanalog video cameras mounted in a circular fashion for a panoramic capture Gateworks has added driver support for the AVC8000nano in it’s Yocto Linux board support package. This driver support will reveal 8 video interfaces …

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i.MX6 GStreamer-imx Plugins – Tutorial & Example Pipelines

September 24, 2015

Gateworks would like to announce the support of the GStreamer-imx plugins starting with Yocto 1.8 on the Ventana family of Single Board Computers. Gateworks, the leading supplier of Powerful ARM based Single Board Computer solutions using the Freescale i.MX6, has invested countless engineering hours researching and mastering GStreamer for the i.MX series of processors. Gateworks would like to share this GStreamer research with the rest of the i.MX community of developers! There are two main versions of GStreamer used on the i.MX6 processor:0.10 and 1.0. Version 1.0 is now the latest standard. The i.MX6 processor has hardware blocks such as …

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Yocto 1.8 Linux BSP – Gateworks i.MX6 SBCs

September 18, 2015

Gateworks would like to announcethe release & support of Yocto 1.8 on the Ventana Family of Single Board Computers that feature the Freescale i.MX6 processor. Yocto 1.8 is under the code name Fido. Yocto is a Linux operating system that Gateworks uses for video input and output, networking, GUI, IoT and more. Gateworks recommends all customers and engineers update from Yocto 1.7 to Yocto 1.8. Yocto 1.8 Updates and Highlights: Updated Linux Kernel. The kernel has been updated to the Gateworks downstream 3.14 vendor kernel. Updated the gstreamer video framework to gstreamer-imx and gstreamer-1.0 Updated to the gstreamer-imx community based …

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