December 2012 - Page 2 of 7 - CNX Software

December 26, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 38 Comments

MK802 II Mini PC Now Costs as Much as Raspberry Pi Model B. Let’s Compare Them!

MK802 mini PC quickly went viral as it launched in May 2012 for $74 US, and since then many Chinese manufacturers have jumped into the market bringing both new faster devices, and the price down. AllWinner A10s, a low cost version of AllWinner A10 used in MK802, was also launched specifically for this market to bring costs even lower. Today, I’ve been informed an HDMI TV dongle based on AllWinner A10s that sells for $36.55 on Tinydeal.com which is a very good price, but decided to check on Aliexpress to look for comparable deals, and found one shop selling MK802 II for $34.91 including shipping via China Post, which makes it cheaper than the Raspberry Pi model B selling for $35 excluding shipping. Both products target 2 different markets, as MK802 is oriented to the consumer market, and Raspberry Pi targets the educational market, but in practice, it appears people […]

December 24, 2012December 24, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

$6.80 Easycap DC60 USB Video Capture Card

You may have some old VHS tapes that you want to digitize to play on your computer or media player, or don’t feel like spending money on an HD recorder for your satellite or cable TV box, but still would like to record your favorite programs. It’s actually possible to do so for less than $7 thanks to USB video grabbers. Those USB capture cards are nothing new, but I did not know the price had come down that much. One of the cheapest capture card is Easycap DC60 (clone?) that sells for $6.80 on Aliexpress, and runs on Windows, and (if you are lucky) in Linux. The device provides stereo audio input, composite input and S-Video input. It is sold with a USB cable to connect it to your computer. CD is normally provided with Windows drivers and program. All you need is a Windows 2000/XP computer with a […]

December 23, 2012December 24, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Toradex Open Sources Oak USB Sensors & Interface Boards

Toradex Oak product family is a range of USB sensors enabling measurement of humidity, temperature, motion, orientation… and USB expansion boards with relays, digital I/O and more. Following feedback from customers who needed to customize the designs, Toradex decided to fully open source those sensors and interfaces by releasing hardware files and the source code under Creative Commons License ‘Attribution CC BY’. This release brings 13 USB sensors to the open source community: Oak USB Sensor Atmospheric Pressure Oak USB Sensor 3 Axes Acceleration Oak USB Sensor Angular Rotation Oak USB Sensor Humidity Oak USB Sensor IR Distance Triangulation (10-60cm) Oak USB Sensor IR Motion Detection Oak USB Sensor Luminosity (LUX) Oak USB Sensor Orientation (3-Axes Accelerometer & Magnetometer) Oak USB Sensor 3 Axes Tilt/Inclination Oak USB Sensor IR Distance Triangulation (10-80cm) Oak USB Sensor 2 Channels Thermocouple Oak USB Sensor 4 Channels Capacitive Proximity Switch Oak USB Sensor RGB […]

December 22, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Ramos W32 Android Tablet Powered by Intel Atom Z2460

One of my reader, Alex, pointed me to Ramos W32 Tablet, which appears to be the first Android tablet built around Intel Atom Z2460 (Medfield), although the processor has been unveiled in January 2011, and smartphones such as Lenovo K800 have been available for nearly half a year. I suppose the delay between tablets and smartphones releases is because whereas the first smartphones could be based on Android 2.3.x (gingerbread), tablets would have to use Android 4.0.x (ICS) or greater to have a proper large screen interface. Here are Ramos W32 Tablet PC specifications: SoC – Intel Atom Z2460 @ 1.6GHz with PowerVR SGX540 GPU System Memory – 1GB RAM Storage – 16GB Nand Flash, microSD card socket (Up to 32GB) Display – 10.1″ Capacitive Screen IPS Display (1280×800) Connectivity: Bluetooth WIFI 802.11 b/g/n 3G via external 3G dongles such as E1916, ZTE AC2736, HUAWEI E1750, HUAWEI EC122, HUAWEI EM770W […]

December 21, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Olimex A13-OLinuXino-MICRO Development Board Unboxing And Review

Every Friday, Olimex organizes an online competition where they give away one of their board. They’ll ask a (usually simple) technical question on their twitter account at 22h00 (GMT+7), and all you have to do is to reply to their tweet with the correct answer within one hour. The winner is then selected randomly with random.org. There are usually 50 to 100 respondents so the odds are pretty good. I played a few times, and finally, I was lucky enough to win an A13-OLinuXino-MICRO development board at the beginning of December. I received it yesterday, after UPS took a whooping 15 days to deliver the board (Way to go UPS!). The board can be purchased on Olimex for 35 Euros plus shipping and taxes, or even lower if you order larger quantities. A13-OLinuXino-MICRO is a stripped down version of A13-OLinuXino-WIFI with the following specs: SoC – AllWinner A13 Cortex A8 […]

December 21, 2012December 21, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Linaro 12.12 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro release 12.12 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1. The tracking version (stable release) uses Kernel 3.4.22. This release upgrades Android to version 4.2.1, Ubuntu images are now based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and Linaro U-Boot 2012.12 has been released with support for Origen 4 Quad and Arndale boards. Further improvements have been done for OpenEmbedded ARMv8, where they replaced the php Apache module by php-fpm among other things. On the kernel side, USB drivers have been refactored, and a kernel size analysis have been performed on several platforms. The power management team has mainly worked on big.LITTLE IKS and MP implementations, and it’s the first time LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) is included in the release, and they worked on UEFI for ARM, GRUB for U-Boot, and provided a Ubuntu server image for Arndale board which can boot via UEFI or UBoot. Here […]

December 20, 2012February 22, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Qualcomm Vuforia SDK 2.0 Augmented Reality Development Kit Leverages the Cloud

Qualcomm has just announced their new Vuforia SDK 2.0 for Android and iOS to enable developers to create augmented reality applications for those platforms. Key new features include: Cloud Recognition Service – Up to now developers were limited to about 100 images on the target device due to limited storage space, but thanks to the Cloud recognition service, apps can “see” more than 1 million images, creating new mobile augmented reality (AR) opportunities for retailers and publishers. For example, every product (or image) in a store can bring associated content from the retailer’s website and render it directly on top of the product (or image). Watch American Apparel AR app video demo for an example of such app. The Cloud Recognition service requires a Vuforia Web Services account which is free for developers (Limited to 1,000 images, 3000 events per months), but is subject to fees for businesses. User-Defined Targets […]

December 20, 2012December 21, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Digia and the Qt Project Release Qt 5.0

The Qt Project and Digia have announced the release of Qt 5.0, which is available via Qt 5.0 page on qt-project.org, or via qt.digia.com/qt5 for commercial customers. Qt 5.0 comes as a full SDK package including Qt 5 framework, Qt Creator 2.6.1, examples and full documentation. Qt 5.0 is available in source code and binary format for Linux (64 and 32 bit), Mac OS X (10.7 and 10.8), and Windows. You can read more about the main changes and new features compared to Qt 4.8, on my previous blog post about Qt 5 Alpha. A video showcasing some of the key features of Qt 5 has been uploaded to Youtube. The video above is actually a screen capture of a Qt 5 based application using Qt Quick, OpenGL and WebKit, running in a Mac. Audio has been added with iMovie application. You can try this Qt 5 Launch Demo by yourself by […]