Orange Pi 4 SBC Gets a $16 4G LTE mini PCIe Card based on Rockchip RM310

Orange Pi 4 4G LTE Mini PCIe Card

Orange Pi 4 SBC is one of the most cost-effective Rockchip RK3399 SBC’s, as it sells for as low as $50 with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth, HDMI 2.0 output, etc.. The board also comes with a 24-pin PCIe connector that’s not of much use on its own, so the company introduced a $4 PCIe adapter board providing access to a standard mPCIe socket and a SIM card slot so you could install your own. 4G mini PCIe cards can easily cost around $50 or more, but Shenzhen Xunlong Software has now launched its own 4G LTE mini PCIe card based on Rockchip RM310 module and sold for $16 on Aliexpress, excluding shipping. mPCIe card and RM310 module specifications: Frequency bands LTE-FDD – B1, B3, B5, B8 LTE-TDD – B38, B39, B40, B41 WCDMA – B1, B5, B8 GSM – 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz Data rates […]

YARC Case Can House a Raspberry Pi Board with one HAT Expansion Board and Up to 3 Hard Drives (Crowdfunding)

YARC Raspberry Pi Case HAT HDD

There are plenty of enclosures for Raspberry Pi board and other compact x86 or Arm Linux SBCs, but many projects require expansion boards and it’s not always possible to use an off-the-shelf case. That’s with that in mind that Stefano Zorzi and other enthusiasts have created YARC (Yes, Another Raspberry Case), a hexagonal case that supports the most popular single board computers, even when an add-on board – such as a Raspberry Pi HAT – is attached to the board. There’s enough space for up to three 2.5″ hard drives. Those are the boards officially supported (tested?) with the case: Raspberry Pi B +, 2B, 3B, 3B +, 4B, A +, 3A + Hardkernel ODROID C1, C2 AAEON Up Board Asus Tinker board and Tinker board S Radxa Rock Pi 4 Orange Pi PC, Pi PC2, Pi PC Plus Basically any board with compatible mounting holes can be installed in […]

$4 Orange Pi 4/4B PCIe Expansion Board Includes an mPCIe socket, and a SIM card Slot

Orange-Pi 4 PCIe Expansion Board

Rockchip RK3399 based Orange Pi 4 & 4B boards launched last year with a PCIe connector. But the PCIe interface is available via a 24-pin FPC connector, not quite a standard like a PCIe slot or mPCIe socket, and hard to use for most projects as you’d need to make your own PCIe adapter board. But it’s now become much easier to use the PCIe interface as Shenzhen Xunlong Software has now launched a $3.90 expansion board connecting to the 24-pin FPC connector, and allowing users to connect mPCIe cards, especially the ones for 3G/4G connectivity as a SIM card slot is also included.PCIe expansion board specifications: 24-pin FPC PCIe connector to Orange Pi 4/4B with PCIe, USB, power “key”, and GPIO1_A0 (See schematics below) mPCIe card socket SIM card socket Misc – Reset key Dimensions – 58 x 32 mm The company confirmed the PCIe interface should work in […]

Orange Pi 4/4B Board with RK3399, 4GB RAM Launched for $50 and Up

Orange Pi 4

Orange Pi 4 is yet another Rockchip RK3399 SBC with 4GB RAM, while Orange Pi 4B adds Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801A AI Accelerator. Both models were announced about 10 days but were not for sale just yet. The company has now launched the board on both Aliexpress and their newly opened Amazon store with three options: Orange Pi 4 with no eMMC flash – $49.90 Orange Pi 4 with 16GB eMMC flash – $59.90 Orange Pi 4B with 16GB eMMC flash, Gyrfalcon NPU – $69.90 Quick reminder of Orange Pi 4/4B specifications: SoC – Rockchip K3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two Arm Cortex A72 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.1 support, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL and DX 11 System Memory – 4 GB LPDDR4 Storage – Optional 16 GB eMMC flash, micro SD card NPU (Orange Pi 4B only) – Gyrfalcon […]

Orange Pi 4/4B SBC Comes with Rockchip RK3399 SoC, Gyrfalcon 2801S NPU

Shenzhen Xunlong Software’s Orange Pi RK3399 single board computer launched in early 2018 with 2GB RAM for $109, and earlier this year, the company launched an updated version with 4GB RAM and a lower $99.96 price tag. But there are plenty Rockchip RK3399 SBC’s on the market, including FrienglyELEC NanoPi M4 going for $50 and up ($75 with 4GB RAM), and Pine64 RockPro64 board starting at $59.99 with 2GB RAM, and $79.99 with 4GB. So unless you need the extra features (HDMI Input, SATA port, mPCIe socket…) offered by Orange Pi RK3399, other boards may be more competitive. So the company has been working on lowering the cost with a smaller board. Meet Orange Pi 4. They’ve also provided some extra features with a variant of the board called Orange Pi 4B that adds a Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801S AI accelerator chip/NPU. That says a lot that neither Rockchip RK3399Pro SoC […]

Orange Pi AI Stick Lite $20 Neural Compute Stick Ships with Free Training Tools

Orange Pi AI Stick Lite

Shenzhen Xunlong Software launched Orange Pi AI Stick 2801 neural compute stick last year for $69. It was interesting as an alternative to Intel Neural Compute Stick. But once the documentation and SDK were released a few days later we discovered you could only run demos with the stick for that price, and the training tools would cost an extra $149. The excellent news is that the company has now launched an updated, yet similar Orange Pi AI Stick Lite for just $19.99, and best of all the PLAI training tools are now entirely free. Orange Pi AI Stick Lite specifications: ASIC – Gyrfalcon SPR2801S Lightspeeur series processor with 2-dimensional Matrix Processing Engine (MPE) with AI Processing in Memory (APiM) delivering up to 2.8TOPS @ 300mW, 5.6 TOPS @ 100 MHz (peak performance) Storage – eMMC 4.5 flash with 68 MB/s read, 84.69 MB/s write Host interface – USB 3.0/2.0 […]

Orange Pi Zero2 is a Tiny Allwinner H6 SBC with HDMI 2.0, USB 3.0, Ethernet & WiFi

Orange Pi Zero2 USB 3.0

Shenzhen Xunlong Software launched a refresh of their Orange Pi Zero board, namely Orange Pi Zero LTS, a couple of weeks ago. The company is now about to launch another SBC of the “Zero” family. Slightly larger than its predecessor, Orange Pi Zero2 is also quite more powerful with an Allwinner H6 quad core Cortex-A53 processor, and more versatile thanks to the addition of a USB 3.0 port, HDMI 2.0 video output, and a built-in microphone. Orange Pi Zero2 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H6 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with Arm Mali T720 GPU with support for OpenGL ES3.1/3.0/2.0/1.1, Microsoft DirectX 11 FL9_3 Memory – 512MB LPDDR3 (Allwinner AW52A8G32) Storage – 4GB eMMC Flash and microSD card up to 32GB Video Output – HDMI 2.0a port Video Decoding – 10-bit H265/HEVC up tp 4K60 or 6K30; H264/AVC up to 4K30; VP9 up to 4K30; AVS+/AVS up to 1080p60 Network Connectivity 802.11 […]

TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers Benchmarked on Linux SBCs

TensorFlow Lite microcontrollers benchmark linux SBC

Dimitris Tassopoulos (Dimtass) decided to learn more about machine learning for embedded systems now that the technology is more mature, and wrote a series of five posts documenting his experience with low-end hardware such as STM32 Bluepill board, Arduino UNO, or ESP8266-12E module starting with simple NN examples, before moving to TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers. Dimitris recently followed up his latest “stupid project” (that’s the name of his blog, not being demeaning here :)) by running and benchmarking TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers on various Linux SBC. But why? you might ask. Dimitris tried to build tflite C++ API designed for Linux, but found it was hard to build, and no pre-built binary are available except for x86_64. He had no such issues with tflite-micro API, even though it’s really meant for baremetal MCU platforms. Let’s get straight to the results which also include a Ryzen platform, probably a laptop, for […]