CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

July 14, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

$50 Forgix board pairs Raspberry Pi RP2354 MCU with Trion T8 FPGA in Teensy form factor

Adiuvo Engineering’s Forgix is a development board pairing a Raspberry Pi RP2354 microcontroller with 2MB flash and an Efinix Trion T8 FPGA in the Teensy 4.0 form factor. The board also features a 16 Mbit PSRAM chip, a USB-C port, a push-button, an RGB LED, and through and castellated holes routed to either the RP2354 MCU or Trion T8 FPGA for SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, USB 1.1, and custom interfaces. Forgix board specifications: SoC – Raspberry Pi RP2354B CPU Dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 @ 150 MHz with Arm Trustzone, Secure boot Dual-core 32-bit RISC-V Hazard3 @ 150 MHz (3-stage in-order pipeline; RV32IMAC with Zba, Zbb, Zbs, Zbkb, Zcb, Zcmp, and Zicsr extensions) Up to two cores can be used at a time, either 2x Arm, 2x RISC-V, or 1x Arm + 1x RISC-V Memory – 520 KB on-chip SRAM Storage – 2MB of stacked (in-package) flash memory FPGA – Efinix Trion T8F49 connected to […]

July 14, 2026July 14, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Meet Moddo Pinch – The world’s smallest 32-bit Arduino-compatible board (2026 Edition)

Canada-based Moddo has designed the Pinch board, which it claims is the world’s smallest 32-bit Arduino-compatible board so far, measuring just 10.9 x 10.5 mm. The board is powered by a Microchip SAMD11 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller with 4 KB SRAM and 16KB flash, features an RGB LED, reset/bootloader button, 3.3 V LDO, a USB-C port, and a total of 12 GPIOs. Moddo Pinch specifications: Microcontroller – Microchip SAM D11 (ATSAMD11D14A) MCU core – Arm Cortex-M0+ processor running at up to 48 MHz RAM – 4 KB SRAM Storage – 16 KB Flash (12 KB for sketches, 4 KB bootloader) USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power, programming (CDC serial), and HID Expansion – 16-pin header (1.27mm pitch) 12x GPIO (D0–D11) 5x analog input (A0–A4) 11x PWM 1x DAC 1x I2C, 1x SPI, 2x UART(multiplexed with USB & D5/D6) Debug – SWD on D5 (SWCLK) and D6 (SWDIO) Misc RGB LED […]

IoTLabs wM-Bus gateway – An ESP32 device with Wireless M-Bus connectivity for Home Assistant

IoTLabs wM-Bus Gateway is an ESP32 device supporting the Wireless M-Bus (wM-Bus) standard for receiving data from compatible meters and sensors, designed for full integration with Home Assistant. Wireless M-Bus (Wireless Meter Bus) is a wireless protocol specifically designed for remote reading of smart meters, generally gas, water, or electricity meters, and typically used by utilities, but the wM-Bus gateway allows you to deploy the standard for your home automation solution, meters, and sensors. wM-Bus gateway specifications: Main controller – ESP32 dual-core microcontroller with Wi-Fi and BLE connectivity Display – 1.3-inch OLED for live measurements and status wM-Bus – 868 MHz radio receiver; Semtech SX1276-based RFM95/RFM96 according to the code Supports T1 and C1 frames, compatible with the wmbusmeters library Antennas Built-in 2.4 GHz antenna for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth External SMA antenna for wireless M-Bus; important: must be connected before powering the device to avoid damage Misc Top button to […]

July 13, 2026July 13, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Ambient Scientific GPX10 Pro MCU delivers years of always-on AI on a coin-cell battery

Ambient Scientific GPX10 Pro Cortex M4 MCU always on embedded AI

Ambient Scientific GPX10 Pro is a processor/microcontroller for always-on embedded AI applications on power-constrained edge devices. With a consumption of under <100μW, it can deliver years of always-on AI on one coin-cell battery. The SoC features ten software-programmable MX8 AI cores leveraging the company’s DigAn technology, ultra-low power ADC, an 8-bit DVP camera interface, 2048 KB SRAM, support for numerous peripherals, and an Arm Cortex-M4F core for non-AI workloads. GPX10 Pro key features and specifications: MCU core – Arm Cortex-M4F core clocked at 100 KHz to 100 MHz Memory 2048 KB system SRAM 64KB retention SRAM in “Always On” block Storage – External SPI or QSPI flash 10x MX8 programmable AI Cores for ultra-low power deep learning applications Based on the DigAn AI engine, which can change behavior between being a master and a slave. Up to 2,560 MAC operations per clock cycle (256 MAC per cycle per core) Peak […]

July 13, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

WisMesh Station Review – Telemetry, MQTT, and Grafana tested on a Raspberry Pi 4-based Meshtastic gateway

RAKwireless has sent us a sample of the WisMesh Station, a Meshtastic gateway and base station based on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a WisMesh Pi HAT RAK6421 expansion board, a LoRa module, a GNSS module, all housed in a compact metal enclosure. It comes with meshtasticd preinstalled, making it ready to use right out of the box. Just unbox it, plug it in, and start using Meshtastic immediately. We’ll also use software packages for communication, data storage, and visualization, such as MQTT, Node-RED, InfluxDB, and Grafana, mostly following RAKwireless’s user guide WisMesh Station is available in 2 models according to transmit power: the standard RAK8622 model that uses the RAK13300 LoRa module (Semtech SX1262 with 22 dBm transmit power), suitable for urban networks where nodes are close to each other, and the high-power RAK8623 (HP) model that uses the RAK13302 module (SX1262 + SKY66122 amplifier circuit with 30 […]

July 13, 2026July 12, 2026 by Debashis Das - No Comments

Raspberry Pi gets 10BASE-T1S/T1L Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) HAT+ board

Germany-based Brechel Electronic has launched two new Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) expansion boards for Raspberry Pi platforms: the BE-IIS-HPP-T1S and the BE-IIS-HPP-T1L. Designed for technology evaluation, industrial network prototyping, and educational laboratory use, these boards add 10 Mbit/s Ethernet communication over a single twisted pair to standard Raspberry Pi SBCs. The BE-IIS-HPP-T1S is based on the Microchip LAN8651 10BASE-T1S MAC-PHY and supports IEEE 802.3cg Single Pair Ethernet over multidrop networks with up to 8 nodes, enabling distances up to 25 meters on a shared bus. For longer-reach point-to-point links, the company offers the BE-IIS-HPP-T1L, built around Analog Devices ADIN1110 MAC-PHY. Both boards are part of the BE-IIS HAT++ ecosystem, which allows multiple industrial communication HATs to be stacked on a single Raspberry Pi without running into SPI or GPIO resource conflicts. Brechel Electronic 10BASE-T1L and 10BASE-T1S specifications: Compatibility – Raspberry Pi HAT+ compliant T1L – Supports Pi 3, 4, 5, and Zero […]

July 12, 2026July 12, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Beelink EQi review – Part 2: An Intel Core 3 304 “Wildcat Lake” mini PC tested with Windows 11 Pro

Beelink EQi Wildcat Lake Core 3 304 Windows 11 mini PC review

We’ve already checked out the specifications and hardware of the Beelink EQi Wildcat Lake mini PC in the first part of the review, with an unboxing and a teardown, before booting the mini PC into the pre-installed Windows 11 Pro for a first quick look. We’ve now had time to test the Intel Core 3 304 mini PC in more detail on Windows 11 Pro, so we’ll report our experience. The review includes feature testing, benchmark results, 4K and 8K YouTube video playback, 10GbE, 2.5GbE, and WiFi network performance evaluation, cooling performance, and measurement of fan noise and power consumption. Software Overview and Feature Testing After fully updating Windows 11 Pro and drivers to the latest version (excluding previews), I went to System > About window again. We still have a 1.50 GHz (base frequency) Intel Core 3 304 processor with 16GB 6400MT/s memory, and 834GB of storage from the […]

July 11, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Lua-programmable ELM11-Feather board puts Gowin GW1NR FPGA into Feather form factor (Crowdfunding)

BrisbaneSilicon ELM11-Feather is a “microcontroller” board based on a Gowin GW1NR FPGA that is natively programmable in Lua, C, SystemVerilog, and VHDL. Compatible with the Adafruit Feather form factor, the board features GPIO headers, a built-in debugger, a USB-C port for power and programming, and a 2-pin header for a LiPo battery. The company calls it a microcontroller board because the FPGA runs a PicoRV32 MCU softcore at up to 75 MHz with 1MB RAM and 8MB flash, programmable with Lua, and the user can also customize hardware layers with RTL code using the remaining FPGA fabric. ELM11-Feather specifications: FPGA – Gowin GW1NR-LV9 FPGA from the GW1NR-9 family 8K LUTs 8,640 logical units (LUTs) 6,480 flip-flop 17,280 bits shadow SRAM (SSRAM) 486 Kbit block SRAM (BSRAM) 64 Mbit (8MB) PSRAM 608 Kbit user flash 2x PLL Up to 276x user I/O USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and […]