Relation between Visual Studio and Windows CE Versions – Part II

On March 31st Microsoft has announced the general availability of Windows Embedded Compact 2013 update 5 with the support for VS2013 IDE.With this update WinCE developers can update there development tools to VS2013.Sometimes it will be bit confusing for the beginner on the usage of the tools,hope this will help them in choosing the tools for the development.

Check out my blog post which shows the relationship between the Visual Studio and WinCE platform builder.

http://www.e-consystems.com/blog/windowsce/?p=1119

e-con Systems’s Almach kit boots Compact 2013(WEC2013) OS in less than a Second!!!

Check out this great video which shows the recently released Windows Embedded Compact 2013(WEC2013) OS boots in ~830 milliseconds(ms) and also it does the decoding of 1D/2D barcode using the 5MP camera.

This Almach kit is based on TI DM3730 which will serve as very good starting point for the beginners of WinCE and also will be used as data generation source for the people who are trying to build the Internet of Things(IoT) systems.It is available for sale on the e-con’s webstore!!!!!!

WEC2013 Installation Troubleshoot Tips

As a continuation to my earlier post on WEC2013 installation,i like to add some of the troubleshooting tips which will help if there is any error in the installation.Please read the post here.

http://www.e-consystems.com/blog/windowsce/?p=965

Windows Embedded Compact 2013(WEC2013) Platform Builder Installation and Evaluation

As we all know Microsoft has officially launched the much awaited Windows Embedded Compact 2013,let us have a hands on with the installation and evaluation of the new platform builder tools which is a plugin to the latest Visual Studio 2012.

 

Installation:

• Download and Install the Visual Studio Professional 2012.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30682

• Download and install the VS2012 Update 2.This update is an online install update which will take sometime based on your internet speed. Check out this blog post to install Update 2 offline.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/robcaron/archive/2013/04/04/how-to-install-visual-studio-2012-update-2-offline.aspx

• Download and install the Application Builder for Windows Embedded Compact 2013.This installer also comes as part of the WEC2013 PB ISO file.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=38819

• Download and install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 from the below link.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=25150

• Download the Windows Embedded Compact 2013 platform builder from the below link.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/download-compact-2013.aspx

 

Here are the screenshots of the WEC2013 platform builder installations steps.

• Mount the ISO file which is downloaded above. Click on the Begin Install. Accept the License agreement.

 

 

• Now enter the product key which you got from the MSDN subscription site or the Evaluation key.

• By default the WEC2013 Platform builder tools installed in the C:\(OS default Directory).But we can change the directory of the source code install. For that we need to choose “Custom Install” and browse the directory where you want to install the development source code.

• As we had choose “Custom Install” it will show the option of components which needs to be installed.

• Accept the license agreement for shared source and WestTek File viewers.
• As we are downloading the ISO file and installing this installer offline we don’t want to create a local layout copy.

• Clicking Next will show the estimated disk size required for the installation of the WEC2013.

• Once the installation is finished, the below screen will appear.

 

 

Now we have installed the WEC2013 successfully and we are good to go to play with it.

 

Evaluation:

• There are totally three Board Support Packages(BSPs) comes as part of the Platform Builder installation.
  • X86 Microprocessor BSPs
    • CEPC -> this BSP supports PC-based hardware, virtual machines hosted by Virtual-PC, and virtual machines hosted by Hyper-V Client or Hyper-V Server
    • Gseries ->This BSP is for the AMD G-Series processor based development kit.
  • ARM BSP
    • TI_SDP44XX-> This BSP is for TI OMAP4470(Dual Core Cortex A9 MP) Blaze Tablet 2 Development kit with the support of Symmetric Multiprocessing.

 

To get hands on with the tools and OS we can take CEPC BSP and deploy it on VirtualPC.

 

• After installing the WEC2013 PB, open the Visual Studio 2012.Select File–>New Project–>Platform Builder–>OS Design. Avoid using spaces in the naming and path of the OSDesign.

• We will evaluate the OS with the help of VirtualPC,so we have to select the “Generic CEPC:x86” from the BSP list.

• Moving to the next wizard will show us the pre-defined templates which will help us to create OS design quicker. Here we can select the “Win32 and WinForms UI Device”.

• From this WEC2013 release Microsoft had removed the “Standard shell” with the start button on the left corner of the Taskbar. Also in this WEC2013 they had given “Minimal Shell” with the source code using which we can develop our own shell.

 

• Click finish and compile the OS using “Build –>Advanced Build Commands–> Sysgen” in either Checked or release mode.

 

During build time we can setup the VirtualPC in order to deploy the compiled nk.bin.There are few articles available online to setup the VirtualPC for WEC7.The same procedure is followed for deploying the WEC2013 OS.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200348.aspx

 

After setting up VirtualPC on the Windows 7 machine,downloaded the compiled OS binary to the VirtualPC.

 

Here is the “Minimal Shell” screenshot of the new WEC2013 running on VirtualPC.

Compact 2013 Minimal Shell

 

Windows Embedded Compact 2013 is a official name of WEC vNext

Finally the WEC vNext had been named as Windows Embedded Compact 2013.As per the road map released before two days it is expected to be launched by Q2 of 2013. David Campbell has shared this news and as well some of the new features of this WEC 2013 release.Check out the blog post here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows-embedded/archive/2012/11/14/windows-embedded-compact-v-next-uncovered.aspx

OMAP35x\DM37x VRFB and Video Capture in WEC7

With OMAP35x/DM37x EVM ,we will face issue of image corruption while rendering the camera output to the screen because of presence of Virtual Rotate Frame Buffer(VRFB). But if we want to use  both VRFB and Camera preview to work together in WinCE 6.0 ,we can set the renderer of the DShow  camera application to use the GDI mode instead of the DirectDraw renderer.The code used in WinCE 6.0,

 

IAMVideoRendererMode::SetMode(DWORD dwMode)   Where dwMode   -   AM_VIDEO_RENDERER_MODE_DDRAW (or)  AM_VIDEO_RENDERER_MODE_GDI

 

 

 

But in the WEC7,there is a change in the DShow renderer (i.e., Video Mixing Renderer(VMR)),which does not support the IAMVideoRendererMode interface or method which we used in WinCE 6.0 to switch the GDI mode.

 

In this blog ,I will show how to fix this issue. But it will have a disadvantage of very low frame rate in the rendering because of not using the hardware overlay.

 

In VMR we can control the renderer preferences using the IVMRFilterConfig::SetRenderingPrefs() method.

 

For this issue here is the fix, we can force the VMR to use the RenderPrefs_ForceOffscreen instead of Overlays, which is more or less the same functionality as used in the WinCE 6.0.

 

IVMRFilterConfig    *pVMRConfig;   hr = m_pVMRRenderer.QueryInterface(&pVMRConfig ); if(FAILED(hr) || pVMRConfig == NULL) {             FAIL(TEXT("Retrieving the IID_IVMRFilterConfig failed.")); }     hr = pVMRConfig->SetRenderingPrefs( RenderPrefs_ForceOffscreen| RenderPrefs_AllowOffscreen ); if ( FAILED(hr) ) { FAIL( TEXT("%S: ERROR %d@%S – failed to set the rendering prefs. (0x%08x)" ), __FUNCTION__, __LINE__, __FILE__, hr ); }

 

 

 

 

MIPI camera(CSI2) working with OMAP35x/37x on WinCE 6.0

Since MIPI camera interface(CSI2) is not officially supported by TI on the OMAP35x/37x processors ,we had a little bit a struggle in getting the same working. We developed a DirectShow Camera driver on WinCE 6.0 to get the MIPI camera working in TI OMAP35x/37x EVM kit.

Check out this blog post for images of the same.

http://www.e-consystems.com/blog/camera/?p=782

Subscribe to Microsoft Windows Embedded Team Blog

Microsoft Windows embedded team started new blog to update about the presence of Windows Embedded in Intelligent Systems.

"The Windows Embedded Team Blog brings together a range of voices to spotlight Windows Embedded news and information and reflect the evolving world of intelligent systems and specialized devices."

"Approaching Embedded Intelligently"

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2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,400 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

How to Get USB Camera Working in Windows Embedded Compact 7

As many of you might be using the USB camera on their WinCE device, so for testing this USB camera on the wince device Microsoft had released the source code for the driver. Check in the link for the source of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 version.

To get the USB camera working under WinCE 6.0,check out my other post on the same topic.

So now in order to get the same source code working in Windows Embedded compact 7,it need few changes in the driver because of few additions in the WEC7.To see what are the changes and to get camera working under WEC7,check out my blog post in the following link.

http://www.e-consystems.com/blog/camera/?p=740

Have fun in playing around with USB camera on WEC7.