IoT OS Hellox successfully ported to Minnowboard Max Development Board

With the efforts of the Hellox development team and the support of Winzent Tech Inc. (headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden), the latest version of Hellox V1.78 has been successfully ported to the Minnowboard Max Development Board. The relevant source code has been posted on GitHub (Github.com/hellox-project/hellox_os), and interested friends are welcome to download the test.

Minnowboardmax is an Intel Atom processor-based card PC developed by circuit, supported by Intel, with ultra-high performance, rich scalability, and relatively low power and cost. is an important step in Intel's foray into the IoT world. The release of the Windows IoT version in the third quarter of this year was based on the Development Board as a major hardware development platform. Here's what Minnowboard Max looks like:

In essence, Minnowboard Max is a PC-architecture card computer, except that it does not have a display, or a user input device such as a keyboard and mouse, and only provides commonly used computer interfaces such as Usb,spi,gpio, which are the most commonly used communication interfaces in the IoT world. For Hellox, there are two difficulties with porting to the board:

1. By default, Minnowboard Max firmware is a UEFI-based computer firmware, and the current version of Hellox does not yet support UEFI, so a bios on the traditional computer is required to boot the Hellox. Winzent Company specializes in customizing a traditional BIOS for the Minnowboard Max Development Board, while providing timely and professional technical support. With their support, we successfully refreshed the boot firmware of Minnowboard Max and successfully completed the boot of Hellox;

2. Since Minnowboard Max does not have a traditional input device such as keyboard and mouse, it can only use the keyboard and mouse of the USB interface. The current version of Hellox does not yet have USB support, so in order to support Minnowboard MAX, you have to add support for USB features. It's not a simple job, we've spent nearly two months porting and optimizing about 10,000 lines of code to implement the full USB functionality, including support for USB OHCI/UHCI (USB 1.0/1.1), USB EHCI (USB2.0) support, and even USB3.0 ( XHCI) support.

For now, Hellox is already fully operational on the Minnowboard Max Development Board, enabling USB keyboards and mice to access the USB interface's storage devices.

Here, thank the Hellox development team, especially Tywind Huang to make the effort.

We will take the Minnowboard Max Development Board as one of the main development environments of Hellox, on this basis, make full use of the interface capabilities provided by the Board to achieve a variety of IoT applications. Even consider optimizing and customizing Minnowboard Max to launch products based on the board.

For the application positioning of the Hellox operating system, explain here the clarification:

1. Hellox is always positioned as an internet of things operating system with the main features of the IoT operating system, such as a high-scaling kernel, highly scalable to suit the needs of hardware fragmentation. The current version of the Hellox, by adjusting the configuration, can be achieved from 10 to a few K size, to 500K size of scaling, almost adapt to any IoT field needs. In addition, the hardware and software separation features are supported, and the application code and CPU instructions are completely isolated through the Java Virtual Machine mechanism. After all, in the internet of things, there are too many kinds of CPUs, unlike the PC era, as long as the implementation of a software for x86 can be played all over the world. Without the characteristics of hardware and software separation, theoretically speaking, each application needs to adapt to all the CPU types, which is undoubtedly unrealistic. At the same time, Hellox also dynamically changes the IoT backend support through dynamic loadable mechanisms. This is also a key feature, according to statistics, the market has been commercially available in the back-end system of IoT, has exceeded 165. Obviously, an Internet of things product cannot be tied to an internet of things platform. With real-time loading and unloading of the IoT backend support code, you can easily switch back to the background. This is similar to the personal phone, can be replaced by the way the SIM card to achieve operator replacement;

2. The second application scenario, in essence, is the internet of things, but it is an internet of things gateway to illustrate it alone. The so-called IoT Gateway, basically a communications conversion device, can be the local wireless communications, such as Bluetooth, ZIGBEE,Z-WAVE,NFC, and so on, into the IP protocol, and sent to the internet of things backstage. At the same time, the IoT network Sekiya the logical processing of local events based on the policies or rules published by the IoT platform. For example, if the TV is turned off, immediately cut off the power of the intelligent switch. This linkage mechanism, does not need to rise to the internet of things background processing, only need to be processed at the gateway level. Hellox aimed at this IoT gateway scenario, because this critical device is one of the most critical aspects of the future of IoT. We build a development environment based on Minnowboard Max, which is also based on this application scenario;

3. The third application scenario can be summed up as "give you a new option". With the gradual enrichment of functionality, Hellox already has the basic capabilities of a general-purpose operating system, such as network support, file system, USB support, and so on, and from the very beginning it is a personal computer as a hardware environment. If your scenario is simple, you don't need a Big Mac like Windows, and you don't want to crop the Linux kernel, or you're not going to use GCC to develop your app, and you want to develop your app with easier-to-use Visual Studio, then Hellox is probably an option you can consider. At least you can evaluate it.

Is the latest version of Hellox, after a day of running on my Dell computer, no exceptions have been found as of now:

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IoT OS Hellox successfully ported to Minnowboard Max Development Board