Stinger96 (NB-IoT + eMTC) and Avenger96 96Boards STM32MP1 SBCs Giveaway

96boards Avenger96 & Stinger96 SBC Giveaway

96Boards,  Arrow Electronics, STMicro, and Shiratech have joined hands to organize a giveaway event with up to 500 Avenger96 or Stinger96 boards going to lucky winners. I’ve already covered STM32MP1 powered Avenger96 SBC compliant with 96boards CE Extended specification, but I’ve never heard about Stinger96 board, so before going into the giveaway rules, let’s have a closer look at this new 96Boards board designed by Israel based Shiratech. Stinger96 96Boards NB-IoT + eMTC SBC Specifications: SoC – STMicro STM32MP157 dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ up to 650 MHz (4158 CoreMark) with Arm Cortex-M4F MCU @ up to 200 MHz (673 CoreMark), 708KB internal SRAM System Memory – 256M x 32-bit DDR3 (1GB RAM) Storage – 8Gbit SLC NAND Flash, MicroSD card slot Connectivity Gigabit Ethernet header (via Microchip KSZ9031RNX) GPS, NB-IoT & eMTC (LTE Cat M1) IoT cellular connectivity with 2G fallback via Quectel BG96 module, SIM card slot, and […]

Arrow Embedded To Go Free Online Conference, and 3,000 Development Boards Giveaway

Arrow Embedded to Go

With the coronavirus outbreak on-going, many events are either canceled or moving online. Arrow Electronics has now announced what appears to be a completely new online event. Embedded To Go virtual technology exhibition for embedded systems will take place on April 1-3, 2020, and offer technical presentations, information on newly launched technology, and access to Arrow’s sales and engineering teams. The event will entirely free to attend, and you can register online today with a company’s email address. The event will start in about 10 days by so far the virtual “booth map”, “supplier guide” and “lecture area” are inaccessible. We only know what the event should consist of thanks to an article on EENew Embedded: Technical presentation webinars will be hosted by leading suppliers covering AI, IoT and Edge computing, precision measurement, high-performance computing, intelligent condition-based monitoring, and other technological subjects. Information will also be available in the form […]

Arrow Shield96 Arm Linux Board Focuses on Hardware-based Security

Arrow Shield96

Powered by a Microchip SAMA5D2 SiP integrating a Cortex-A5 processor and 128MB DDR2 memory, Arrow Shield96 board has been designed for secure IoT application development with on-board hardware security. Two versions of the SBC are offered: Shield96 Standard reference platform Shield96 Trusted Platform preloaded with the EmSPARK Security Suite software by Sequitur Labs. Both versions come with the same hardware specifications: SiP – Microchip ATSAMA5D27-D1G Arm Cortex-A5 processor @ 500 MHz with 128MB DDR2 Storage – 128MB DDR2 Storage – 128MB (1Gbit) flash, MicroSD card slot Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet port, 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 via ATWILC1000 “IoT link controller module” USB – 1x USB 2.0 port HW Security – ATECC608 secure element Expansion – 96Boards Mezzanine connector Debugging – JTAG header, serial console via Micro USB port Power Supply – 5V via Micro USB port Dimensions – N/A (CNXSoft note: it’s supposed to be 96Boards compliant, but with […]

BOOTPRINT X2 96Boards AIoT Development Kit Features Sunrise 2.0 AI Processor

Horizon Robotics BOOTPRINT X2 is an AIoT / AI computing development kit providing a complete reference solution from device to cloud integration. The board is powered by the company’s Sunrise 2.0 AI edge processor based on the second-generation BPU (“Brain Processing Unit”) architecture that  delivers up to 4 TOPS at low power consumption and is said to follow 96Boards specification, although from the photo below they’ve taken some liberties with the option (e.g. added a Gigabit Ethernet port). The board has now launched yet, and we have limited information about BOOTPRINT X2 kit specifications: SoC – Horizon Sunrise 2.0 AI edge processor with 4 TOPS equivalent AI processing power (no mention of architecture) System Memory – 1GB LPDDR4 RAM Storage – 4GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card socket Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet Camera I/F – Dual 1080p camera inputs for symmetric binocular camera,  combination of infrared and visible light. Audio – […]

Geniatech SOM3399 RK3399 SoM Complies with 96Boards System-on-Module Specification

CBD96-3399

96boards System-on-Module specification was introduced last April together with their first SOM-CA (2x board-to-board connectors) and SOM-CB (4x board-to-board connectors), namely TB-96AI & TB-96AIoT modules powered by respectively AI capable Rockchip RK1808 and RK3399Pro processors that would fit into a compatible baseboard. Those started to ship early this summer, and there’s now a new module that complies with 96Boards SoM specification courtesy of Geniatech SOM3399 powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor without the extra NPU / AI accelerator found in the aforementioned modules. Geniatech SOM3399 Specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 dual-core Cortex-A72 up to 1.8GHz, quad-core Cortex-A53 up to 1.4GHz,  Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0, OpenCL1.2, DirectX11.1 System Memory –  2GB LPDDR4 (4GB as option) Storage – 8GB eMMC flash (16, 32, and 64GB as option) Board-to-board connector – 4x 100-pin high-speed connectors (X1, X2, X3, and X4 as defined by the spec) with USB 3.0, […]

Linux 5.3 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.3 Changelog

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.3: So we’ve had a fairly quiet last week, but I think it was good that we ended up having that extra week and the final rc8. Even if the reason for that extra week was my travel schedule rather than any pending issues, we ended up having a few good fixes come in, including some for some bad btrfs behavior. Yeah, there’s some unnecessary noise in there too (like the speling fixes), but we also had several last-minute reverts for things that caused issues. One _particularly_ last-minute revert is the top-most commit (ignoring the version change itself) done just before the release, and while it’s very annoying, it’s perhaps also instructive. What’s instructive about it is that I reverted a commit that wasn’t actually buggy. In fact, it was doing exactly what it set out to do, and did it […]

Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 Schedule – IoT, AI, Optimizations, Compilers and More

Linaro Connect San Diego 2019

Linaro has recently released the full schedule of Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 that will take place on  September 23-27. Even if you can’t attend, it’s always interested to check out the schedule to find out what interesting work is done on Arm Linux, Zephyr OS, and so on. So I’ve created my own virtual schedule with some of the most relevant and interesting sessions of the five-day event. Monday, September 23 14:00 – 14:25 – SAN19-101 Thermal Governors: How to pick the right one by Keerthy Jagadeesh, Software Engineer, Texas Instruments With higher Gigahertz and multiple cores packed in a SoC the need for thermal management for Arm based SoCs gets more and more critical. Thermal governors that define the policy for thermal management play a pivotal role in ensuring thermal safety of the device. Choosing the right one ensures the device performs optimally with in the thermal budget. […]

96Boards RK1808 & RK3399Pro SoM & Devkit Now Available for Purchase

RK3399Pro SoM Development Kit

Back in April, we covered the very first 96Boards SoM’s (Systems-on-Module) which were based on Rockchip RK3399Pro or RK1808 processors, and targeted applications leveraging artificial intelligence acceleration. There were not quite available at the time, but Seeed Studio now has both BeiQi modules for pre-order for $119 and $59 respectively, while the carrier board goes with $125 with antennas, and power supply. Note that the RK3399Pro SoM and the carrier board are basically available now with shipping schedule for July 4th, but you’d had to wait until the end of the month for the RK1808 module. BeiQi RK1808 AIoT 96Boards Compute SoM Module specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK1808 dual-core Arm Cortex-A35  processor @ 1.6 GHz with NPU supporting 8-bit/16-bit operations up to 3.0 TOPS, TensorFlow and Caffe frameworks; 22nm FD-SOI process System Memory – 1GB LPDDR3 (I also read “4GB LPDRR3” (sic.) in other places, but the capacity is likely […]