ROOT based DAQ platform for debugging embedded devices

In Embedded Systems the validation of software solutions is quite difficult with respect to high-end devices for the lack of ordinary debugging tools like display, file system, etc. The communication towards a PC permits to debug the software code making use of tools available in high-end devices only (e.g. awk, grep, find). Moreover it is quite beneficial to serialize the data coming from the embedded system in order to to quote numerical
results for the firmware performances (comparing for instance real-world data with simulation or design requirements).

We propose a ROOT-based DAQ framework developed profiting of the standard nature and extendibility feautures of the xml language:

evidence.eu.com/content/view/336/266/

The package comes with a demo where we test the performances of a full-customed firmware for onboard image processing.

The hardware required in our example is a development board embedding a 16-bit Microchip dsPic programmable microcontroller having 30 KBytes of SRAM, 512 MBytes of Flash memory and a maximum speed of 40 MIPS connected to a CMOS camera providing low resolution frames at a maximum rate of about 10 fps (hardware details are given in the above link).

The support is guaranteed for Linux installations and given at the best effort for Cygwin environments.

Even without proper hardware equipments the users can practice with the DAQ following an example (only for Linux) where the “stream” from the embedded system is emulated by a POSIX-like socket.

We look forward to enrich the DAQ package by further examples, useful in real-time contexts, where hardware timers are used to mark and report about time response of processing algorithms, I/O, communication tasks.
For any question, don’t hesitate to reply to this post.
Best regards,

Claudio Salvadori and Paolo Pagano