Oscar-winning Flying-Cam system takes to the skies with QNX technology

Flying-Cam has been at
the forefront of unmanned
aerial filming since 1988.

Ever wonder how film crews manage to achieve death-defying camera angles that take your breath away? Well, wonder no more, because I am about to show you one of the most advanced tools of the trade. It's called SARAH, it runs on the QNX OS, and it recently won a Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its contribution to movie making.

The SARAH unmanned aerial system is the brainchild of Flying-Cam, a company founded in 1988 by Emmanuel Prévinaire, who, in 1979, developed the first unmanned close-range aerial camera for motion pictures. SARAH represents the latest generation of Flying-Cam technology and has been in service since 2012 — yet its credits already include Skyfall, Oblivion, Prisoners, Smurfs II, and Mr. Go.

The Flying-Cam SARAH unmanned aerial system in action, filming a scene for Mr. Go. 

So why did the folks at Flying-Cam choose the QNX OS? Several factors contributed to the decision, including flexible architecture, predictable response times, and advanced profiling tools. To quote Tony Postiau, head of aerial robotics engineering at Flying-Cam, "we have been thoroughly impressed with the QNX OS. It works extremely well on our hardware and uses system resources efficiently, leaving most of the hardware processing power available to our application — a crucial attribute that we looked for.”

To find out more about QNX and the Flying-Cam SARAH system, check out the press release that QNX issued this morning.

And for a look at SARAH in action, here's a promotional video that demonstrates how it helps film crews capture angles that would be impossible for full-size helicopters, cable systems, or other traditional camera support devices:

30 years of QNX: Celebrating a decade of Eclipse

Correct me if I'm wrong, but until Eclipse came along, the software industry didn't have a standard platform for developing applications in C and C++. This was certainly true in the embedded market, where almost every OS vendor offered their own proprietary development environment.

As a wise man once said, what a dumb approach. Vendors wasted time reinventing the wheel, when they could have focused on innovative tools that offered real value. Meanwhile, developers had to learn a new toolset every time they worked with a different OS. Doh!

Folks at QNX knew this situation had to change. Which explains why Dan Dodge, the company's CEO, became a founding steward of Eclipse.org, the consortium responsible for creating the Eclipse open-source tooling platform. It also explains why Sebastien Marineau, the company's VP of engineering, became the first project lead of CDT, the C and C++ development environment for Eclipse.

QNX's contribution didn't stop there. The company also donated a large amount of source code and developer time to the CDT project. As a result of these and other community efforts, Eclipse CDT subsequently became the C/C++ platform of choice for IBM, Ericsson, Texas Instruments, and other multi-billion dollar organizations.

Eclipse CDT also formed the basis of a major new QNX product, the QNX Momentics Tool Suite. More importantly, the platform gave QNX more freedom to innovate, particularly when it came to tools for debugging and optimizing multi-core systems. In fact, these multi-core tools garnered several awards, including:

• Eclipse community awards, best developer tool, 2007
• EDN China innovation award, 2007
• Embedded World embedded AWARD, 2006

Here, for example, is a screen capture of the system profiler for the QNX Momentics Suite. The profiler is displaying CPU activity for the 4 cores of a quad-core processor:



Eclipse is ten years old this month. If you're interested in its history, or in crashing an Eclipse birthday party, check out out the Eclipse website.
 

Sneak preview of Eclipse tips and tricks webinar

I’m totally addicted to PhotoShop. But, like every other PhotoShop user, I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never really master the program. It simply has too many tools, any of which can be used in a thousand different ways.

Eclipse CDT is a lot like that. This tooling environment, which forms the basis of products such as the QNX Momentics Tool Suite, is so feature rich that you can take years to become a true power user.

My colleague Andy Gryc, who has helped customers with Eclipse issues, has seen this problem first hand. And it gave him an idea: What if he canvassed a number of advanced Eclipse users and collected their favorite productivity tips?

He did just that, and the result is a webinar called “Hot Tips and Tricks for the Eclipse IDE.” Andy will cover automatic code formatting, code folding, advanced search, automatic refactoring, call hierarchy navigation, plug-ins, keyboard shortcuts, custom breakpoint actions, and many other techniques for boosting productivity.

Sample techniques
To give you a taste, here are a few techniques that Andy will cover. Keep in mind that I've chosen some of the simpler examples — the webinar will also explore more advanced topics.

Viewing definitions and prototypes
If you press <Ctrl> and hover your pointer over an identifier, it transforms into a hyperlink. Simply click the link to view the identifier’s definition or prototype:



Prompting for command-line arguments
To prompt for command-line arguments when launching an executable, go to the program’s Launch Configuration, click the C/C++ Program Arguments tab, and insert the ${string_prompt} literal:



Detaching views
If you use multiple monitors, detaching a view from the main window can come in really handy. Simply right-click on the header and select Detach:




Again, this is just a sample — Andy will also cover template proposals, variable directory paths, automated header file include, function completion, automatic structure completion, expansion of #define’s, version compare, and other techniques.

The webinar occurs Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 2:00 pm EST. For more information or to register, click here.

 

QNX wins Best in Show at FTF India

This just in: QNX Software Systems has won the Best in Show award at the Freescale Technology Forum in India.

QNX took top honors for its multi-core tools and RTOS, which were showcased on a dual-core version of the Freescale QorIQ P2020 communications processor.

QNX takes a two-pronged approach to multi-core support: 1) the QNX Neutrino RTOS, which supports symmetric multiprocessing, and 2) the QNX Momentics Tool Suite, which provides a system profiler for diagnosing and optimizing multi-core software behavior.

Using the system profiler, a developer can track threads as they migrate from one core to another, diagnose IPC flowing across cores, and identify resource contention between threads on different cores. As a result, it becomes much easier to pinpoint bottlenecks and identify the best strategy for improving performance.

Here's an example of the system profiler being used to diagnose a missed deadline on a quad-core system (click image to magnify):



To learn more about how the system profiler helps improve the performance of multi-core systems, check out this whitepaper.
 

Reap the zombies, Take 2

Well, boys and girls, it's time to wipe the egg off my face. Last night, I posted an article on the QNX Neutrino RTOS v6.5 and claimed that it introduces a new feature: the ability to reap zombies. In other words, it can kill off "undead" processes that have terminated but still have an entry in the process table.

As it turns out, there is nothing new about this feature. QNX Neutrino can already reap zombies, thank you very much; it now simply does a better job of it in certain situations.

And guess what: the article contained incorrect information about a couple of other new features as well.

Now that I've come clean, let's review what version 6.5 does support:

• symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) on ARM Cortex-A9 processors and Freescale Power e500MC processor cores


• SMP on multi-core processors with up to 32 cores


• faster kernel performance under heavy memory utilization


• higher file system throughput on many platforms, as well as new parameters to fine-tune file system performance


• support for Intel APICs and MSIs, and expanded support for x86 boards from Advantech, Intel, and Kontron


• a new Persistent Publish/Subscribe (PPS) service that helps simplify the design and maintenance of systems that integrate diverse software and hardware components

Besides adding new OS features, QNX Software Systems is also putting the finishing touches on version 6.5 of the QNX Momentics Tool Suite. Enhancements include:

• support for the Eclipse platform 3.5.2, Eclipse CDT 6.0, and GCC 4.4.2


• optimizations to dynamic linking, including lazy linking and GNU hashing

For more information of version 6.5 of the QNX Neutrino RTOS and QNX Momentics Tool Suite, click here. To download an experimental version, click here.

Version 6.5 is slated for release in June 2010.

Intel blogger: QNX BMP simplifies migration to multi-core chips

Maury Wright, former editor-in-chief of EDN Magazine, has just posted a blog on the Intel embedded community site that provides an overview of QNX's bound multiprocessing technology — aka BMP.

If you've never heard of BMP, it's a variant of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) that simplifies the migration of legacy applications to multi-core processors. In a nutshell, it allows legacy apps to run on a multi-core chip as if they were still in a conventional uniprocessor environment. Meanwhile, it allows new, parallelized apps to take full advantage of the chip's multiple processing cores.

In other words, your old stuff can run on a multi-core chip without going haywire or messing up your new stuff. This is good.

Maury provides a nice overview of the technology. You can view his blog here.

QNX spells out its offering for industrial automation developers

If you develop systems for the industrial automation market, I recommend you check out the new "Industrial" section on the QNX website. It has all the obligatory marketing messages about how QNX provides a complete solution for your design requirements, yadda, yadda, yadda. But for my money, it also provides useful information on the technology QNX has assembled for IA developers.

Some highlights:

• A diagram illustrating the QNX "industrial software stack". To see the full version, click here, then click the Technology tab. Once you see the diagram, click the "View All" button.



• A list of protocols, frame grabbers, I/O cards, and other third-party technologies compatible with QNX. Click the Ecosystem tab.



• A list of relevant certifications, including POSIX, ISO, and SIL 3, that QNX has either achieved or is in the process of achieving. Click the Certifications tab.

QNX 6.4.2 development has started. So what are you going to do about it?

QNX Software Systems has started development on version 6.4.2 of the QNX Neutrino RTOS and QNX Momentics Tool Suite. The planned feature set includes ARM Cortex A9 support, faster interrupt-to-thread latency on Power processors, and PPS.

But you know, folks, this isn't the old days, when you had to wait and see what the final product contained. You can now follow QNX product development in real time. In fact, you can participate in the development process. And you can start by visiting the 6.4.2 OS features wiki page.

Intel C++ Compiler 11.1 for QNX hits the streets

For anyone who wants to optimize the performance of their QNX Neutrino applications on Intel processors, Intel has just released version 11.1 of its C++ Compiler Professional Edition for the QNX Neutrino RTOS.

According to Intel, the compiler is validated for Windows XP hosts and includes the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) v6.1.1.044. These primitives provide optimized routines for multimedia, signal processing, and data communication.

The compiler, which integrates with the QNX Momentics IDE, offers a significant performance gain over the standard GCC compiler. Developers can download the Intel compiler free, with community support, from the Intel Web site. Commercial support is optional.

You can use the compiler with versions 6.4.0 and 6.4.1 of the QNX Neutrino RTOS and QNX Momentics IDE.

For information on the compiler, click here. For information on the QNX Momentics IDE, click here. For the forum post that announces the new release, click here.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to the persistance of "Stay" (see comments below), we now have a download URL for the compiler:
http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/compilers/413513.htm

Video Interview: Intel C++ Optimizing Compiler for QNX Neutrino RTOS

Here's an interview with Uli Dumschat, a product manager for Intel Germany, on the Intel C++ Optimizing Compiler for the QNX Neutrino RTOS. Among other things, Uli discusses the compiler's performance boost for Intel Atom processors, and the connection between increased performance and lower power consumption.

I just downloaded QNX. Now what the @#$! am I supposed to do?

I'm glad you asked. Malte, a field application engineer who works for QNX Germany, has created a video to accompany his inimitable QNX QuickStart Guide. The guide leads you through all the basics: installing QNX, configuring network connections, creating IDE projects, compiling code, debugging programs — all in 10 easy-to-follow steps. Better yet, you can download the video in English, German, or Japanese.

Here's Part I of the video, which has just been posted on YouTube. See below for links to the entire video and to the PDF version of the QuickStart Guide.



For the PDF version of the QuickStart Guide, click here.

For the YouTube versions of the video, follow these links:

- Part I: English, German

- Part II: English, German

- Part III: English, German

To download the complete video from the QNX website, follow these links:

- Parts I through III: English, German, Japanese

QNX gets a jolt

Good news: Dr. Dobb's magazine has just announced that the QNX Momentics IDE is a finalist in the 18th annual Jolt awards. Momentics is up against five other IDEs in the Development Environments category, including Sun's Netbeans IDE 6 and ActiveState's Komodo IDE 4.

Taking home this award would be a real coup, as the Jolt judges actually download and try out the shortlisted products. In many other technology competitions, judges simply review written submissions and make their decisions based on what they've read.

But hey, why wait to hear what the Jolt judges say? If you've never used QNX Momentics, download it now and judge for yourself. Visit http://www.qnx.com/products/getmomentics/.


Using the QNX Momentics IDE to analyze a quad-core SMP system.

Tags: QNX