CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

August 9, 2022August 6, 2022 by Sponsored Post - 1 Comment

Arylic A50+ wireless stereo amplifier supports 50W speakers (Sponsored)

Acrylic A50+ is a multi-functional wireless stereo amplifier that can stream a variety of sources to your passive speakers and active subwoofers. The amplifier features two 50W outputs, one subwoofer RCA output, two analog stereo RCA inputs, as well as only optical S/PDIF input. The A50+ offers Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity, a USB port to play music from a USB driver, and several A50+ amplifiers can be set up in several rooms in your house to create a multi-room system. Arylic A50+ specifications: Audio Input – USB 2.0, analog stereo RCA, digital optical S/PDIF Audio Output Speaker 2x 24V 4 Ohms 50W speakers 2x 24V 8 Ohms 30W speakers Subwoofer – RCA output Frequency Response – 20Hz to 20KHz Audio Formats – MP3, AAC/AAC+, ALAC, APE, WAV, FLAC Audio Decoding – Up to 24bit/192KHz Connectivity Fast Ethernet RJ45 port 2.4 GHz 802.11 b/g/n WiFi 4 with external antenna Bluetooth […]

August 11, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

ESP32 board with rotary encoder gets 2-key keypad shield

LILYGO TTGO T-Encoder, a round-shaped ESP32 board with a built-in rotary encoder, has gotten a shield with a 2-key keypad based on WCH CH552 8-bit microcontroller. Launched several months ago, the TTGO T-Encoder is a USB-powered rotary encoder with ESP32 microcontroller offering WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and now, you can build a keypad with rotary encoder thanks to T-Encoder shield that features two mechanical switches and keycaps with RGB LED backlight. Since we missed it at launch, let’s check out the tiny TTGO T-Encoder board specifications first: System-in-Package (SiP) – Espressif ESP32-PICO-V3-02 with MCU – ESP32 Xtensa dual-core 32-bit Xtensa LX6 microcontroller up to 240 MHz, 448 KB ROM for booting and core functions, 520 KB SRAM for data and instructions, 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 BR/EDR + LE connectivity Memory – 2MB SPI PSRAM Storage – 8MB SPI flash Dimensions – 7×7 mm Antenna – Ceramic […]

August 10, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Renesas RZ/N2L Arm Cortex-R52 MPU targets industrial Ethernet and TSN

Renesas RZ/N2L Arm Cortex R52 ethernet switch

Renesas RZ/N2L is an Arm Cortex-R52 microprocessor (MPU) family for industrial Ethernet communication equipped with an integrated TSN-compliant 3-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and an EtherCAT slave controller. The new processors also support other major industrial network communication protocols such as EtherCAT, PROFINET RT, EtherNet/IP, and OPC UA, as well as the new PROFINET IRT (Isochronous real-time) that allows deterministic communication with cycle times down to 31.25 µs and one µs of jitter. Renesas RZ/N2L key features and specifications: CPU – Arm Cortex-R52 @ up to 400MHz with 16KB I-cache with ECC, 16KB D-cache with ECC Memory Tightly coupled memory – 256KB with ECC Internal RAM – 1.5MB with ECC Octa/Quad SPI for HyperRAM, HyperFLASH, SRAM, SDRAM Networking Ethernet L2 switch: 3x external ports with Gigabit support TSN support (IEEE 802.1AS-2020, IEEE 802.1Qbv/802.3br, IEEE 802.1Qbu, etc.) Network redundancy support (DLR, PRP) EtherCAT slave controller Industrial Ethernet – EtherCAT, PROFINET RT/IRT, EtherNet/IP, […]

August 10, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Another consequence of supply shortage: mass production mishaps

Chips may suddenly disappear from the supply chain or get really expensive due to the recurring supply shortage, companies are now designing their PCBs to support multiple chips either selecting drop-in replacements or creating multiple footprints to cater to at least one alternative part. That means one PCB and multiple bill-of-materials are needed to be more resilient to any supply disruption. Radxa did that on the ROCK 3A board for the USB PD circuitry with the ability to use either Injoinic IP2315 or WCH CH224D IC. Those are not pin-to-pin compatible chips, and two circuitry were made for the board requiring two BoMs as it’s not just possible to only replace IP2315 by CH224D. But this information did not get to the inventory manager, and once IP2315 was out of stock, he/she believed it would be possible to simply replace IP2315 with CH224D. The unlucky part is that the factory […]

August 10, 2022 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 2 Comments

Beelink SER5 Review – An AMD Ryzen 5 5600H mini PC tested with Windows 11, Ubuntu 22.04

New to arrive in the Beelink SER lineup is the SER5 marketed as a ‘SER PRO’ and features one of last year’s AMD Ryzen 5000 H-series processors typically used in high-performance productivity and gaming laptops. Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.04. Beelink SER5 Hardware Overview The Beelink SER5 physically consists of a 126 x 113 x 42mm (4.96 x 4.45 x 1.65 inches) square metal case. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses AMD’s 7 nm Zen 3 Ryzen 5 5600H Cezanne processor which is a six-core 12-thread 3.3 GHz mobile processor boosting to 4.2 GHz with Radeon Graphics. The front panel has an illuminated power button, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a Type-C USB 3.1 port with Alternate Mode, dual USB 3.1 ports, and a reset pin-hole ‘CLR CMOS’. The rear panel includes a gigabit Ethernet port, […]

August 9, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 gets Vulkan 1.2 conformance, Android Vulkan support

Iglia has done more work on the graphics driver for the VideoCore VI GPU found in Raspberry Pi 4 and other Broadcom BCM2711-based hardware with Vulkan 1.2 conformance, and Roman Stratiienko added Vulkan 3D graphics acceleration to Android, or more exactly LineageOS. Raspberry Pi and Iglia have been collaborating together since the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC to develop a Khronos conformant Mesa 3D graphics driver for the board, and that’s a long-term project that’s been going on for over two years, and not quite finished yet. Here’s a non-exhaustive timeline of the project so far: February 2020 – Raspberry Pi 4 V3DV driver gets OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance, work on Vulkan starts with the basic triangle demo showcased June 2020 – Vulkan driver source code released with many demos working on Raspberry Pi 4 October 2020 – Iglia gives a project update status presentation for Raspberry Pi […]

August 9, 2022August 9, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

ACTAMID M8S – An Intel Pentium N6005 palm-sized PC with dual Gigabit Ethernet, 3x HDMI ports (Crowdfunding)

ACTAMID M8S is a palm-sized 3.4-inch mini PC powered by an Intel Pentium N6005 Jasper Lake processor with up to 16GB LPDDR4 memory, 1TB M.2 2242 SSD. The M8S is bigger than the recently announced 2.7-inch PIX NII mini PC based on the same processor, but that’s for a good reason since it offers more ports with three HDMI outputs, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and three USB 3.0 ports. The mini PC also features WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity, a quiet fan, and a 7-color LED backlight for good effects… Win Element Technology Co., Ltd, the Hong Kong company owning the ACTAMID brand, says the mini PC ships preinstalled with an activated version of Windows 11, but also supports Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 20.04. ACTAMID M8S specifications: SoC – Intel Pentium N6005 quad-core processor @ 2.0GHz / 3.3GHz (Turbo) with Intel UHD graphics @ up to 900 MHz; […]

August 8, 2022August 9, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Conclusive Engineering WHLE-LS1 networking SBC offers 4x GbE, 2x 10GbE SFP+ cages

Conclusive Engineering WHLE-LS1 is a networking SBC powered by a choice of NXP Layerscape LS1xx8A Cortex-A72 or Cortex-A53 communication processors with four Gigabit Ethernet ports, two SFP+ cages capable of up to 10Gbps data rates. The board also features one SO-DIMM socket for up to 32GB DDR4, up to 64GB eMMC flash, M.2 PCIe sockets for NVMe SSDs, USB 3.0 host and USB 2.0 device ports, an RTC with backup battery, as well as serial and JTAG debug interfaces. WHLE-LS1 specifications: SoC (one or the other) WHLE-LS1026A – NXP Layerscape LS1026A 2x Arm Cortex-A72 @ 1.8GHz with DPAA package processing engine WHLE-LS1046A – NXP Layerscape LS1046A 4x Arm Cortex-A72 @ 1.8GHz with DPAA package processing engine WHLE-LS1048A – NXP Layerscape LS1048A 4x Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.6GHz with DPAA2 package processing engine WHLE-LS1088A – NXP Layerscape LS1088A 8x Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.6GHz with DPAA2 package processing engine System Memory – 1x […]