WeAct ESP32-C6-Mini is the cheapest ESP32-C6 board so far going for less than $4

WeAct ESP32-C6-Mini board

WeAct ESP32-C6-Mini is a small development board based on Espressif Systems ESP32-C6 WiFi 6, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4 wireless SoC that’s the cheapest we’ve seen so far selling for just $3.86 on Aliexpress. WeAct was one of the first companies to launch a third-party ESP32-C6 development board year with the price starting at just $6. I still remember the excitement around the first $5 ESP8266 WiFi 4 module when we first covered it in 2014, and ten years later, we can get a full $4 development board with a more powerful 160 MHz RISC-V microcontroller, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, and an 802.15.4 radio for Thread, Zigbee, and Matter. WeAct ESP32-C6-Mini specifications: Wireless SoC – ESP32-C6-N4 CPU Single-core 32-bit RISC-V clocked up to 160 MHz Low-power RISC-V core @ up to 20 MHz Memory – 512KB SRAM, 16KB low power SRAM Storage – 320KB ROM, and 4MB flash Wireless – 2.4 GHz […]

Geekworm X1011 board adds up to four NVMe SSDs to the Raspberry Pi 5

Raspberry Pi 5 four NVMe SSD NAS

Geekworm X1011 is a new expansion board for the Raspberry Pi 5 with four M.2 sockets enabling the insertion of up to four M.2 NVMe SSDs with data pushed through the PCIe Gen2 interface of the popular SBC. We were already wondering why most people would want to connect two NVMe SSDs to the Raspberry Pi 5 when the Geekworm X1004 HAT+ was launched considering the 5GT/s limitation from the board and the PCIe switch, but the company decided to double the number of drives with the X1011 meaning each drive can achieve up to around 100 MB/s (or 400MB/s) when used simultaneously. It does look nice and fairly compact though. Geekworm X1011 specifications: Supported SBC – Raspberry Pi 5 and other SBCs with a compatible 16-pin PCIe FPC connector and mounting holes Chipset – ASMedia ASM1184e PCI express packet switch with 1x PCIe Gen2 x1 upstream port and 4x […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC

Enabling Zigbee in Bluetooth LE temperature and humidity monitors from Xiaomi and Qingping using Telink TLSR8258 WiSoC

XIaomi temperature humidity monitors Zigbee

Qingping CGDK2 and Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC Bluetooth LE (BLE) temperature and humidity monitors based on Telink TLSR8258 can be switched to Zigbee thanks to a custom firmware flashed over-the-air. Telink TLS8258 is a multi-protocol wireless microcontroller supporting Bluetooth LE 5, Bluetooth Mesh, Zigbee, RF4CE, Thread, 6LoWPAN, HomeKit, ANT, and 2.4GHz proprietary and found in boards such as the LILYGO T-Zigbee and various products. Some products only enable one wireless protocol, for example, Bluetooth LE as in the just-mentioned Qingping and Xiaomi monitors, but “SmartHomeScene” has found out that it was possible to switch from BLE to Zigbee on those by simply updating the firmware. The Telink TLS8258 devices mentioned above will publish data over BLE every 10 minutes (unless humidity or temperature changes, in which case data is transmitted immediately) with the default firmware, but Zigbee can be enabled by using the pvvx custom firmware for the following models: Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC […]

Waveshare UGV Rover – A 6-wheel AI robot built around Raspberry Pi 4/5 and ESP32

Waveshare Unmanned Ground Vehicle Rover(UGV) for Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 5

The Waveshare UGV Rover is a 6-wheel robot platform based on Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 as well as an ESP32 module and built for remote exploration, object recognition, and autonomous navigation. Since the source code for the platform will be open-sourced it can also be used for educational purposes, programming, robotics, AI experimentation, and many other applications. This Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) rover features a 2mm thick aluminum body, six 80mm shock-absorbing tires, and a four-wheel drive system controlled by an ESP32 sub-controller. The sub-controller also handles sensors, LiDAR, cameras, and more. The brain or the main controller of the rover is a Raspberry Pi SBC – either a Pi 4B or Pi 5 – which notably handles computer vision and machine learning operations. Since the mounting holes are designed to fit a Raspberry Pi, it is safe to assume that it will fit other SBCs with the same […]

Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro low-profile SBC features Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 AIoT SoC

Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro

Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro, also known as Armsom Sige5, is a low-profile single board computer (SBC) powered by the Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC for the AIoT market that offers a mid-range offering between Rockchip RK3588 and RK3399 SoCs. The board comes with 16GB LPDDR4X and 128GB eMMC flash by default, offers dual GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, an M.2 2280 PCIe socket for expansion, HDMI and MIPI DSI display interfaces, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header. Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores @ 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores @ 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0 and Vulkan 1.1 NPU – 6 TOPS (INT8) AI accelerator with support for INT4/INT8/INT16/BF16/TF32 mixed operations. VPU Video Decoder: […]

Alfa Networks AHST7394S Wi-Fi HaLow module enables low-power, long-range IoT connectivity up to 1km

Alfa Networks AHST7394S HaLow

Taiwanese wireless equipment manufacturer, Alfa Networks, and US-based Wi-Fi HaLow semiconductor company, Newracom, have collaborated to develop the AHST7394S Wi-Fi HaLow module. The solder-down module is based on Newracom’s NRC7394 SoC, a low-cost and high-efficiency HaLow SoC chipset providing up to 17dbm output power and capable of connecting to a maximum of 8K devices within a single network. The NRC7394 also supports a standalone mode, which enables the execution of a wide range of IoT applications on the embedded ARM Cortex-M3 CPU. While HaLow is more energy-efficient than other Wi-Fi types, low-power operation modes such as legacy, TWT, and WMM-PS can reduce power consumption further. The AHST7394S Wi-Fi HaLow module supports a data rate of up to 15Mbps, over 600 times faster than LoRaWAN while maintaining a good range (over 1km). The second-generation HaLow module is perfect for building long-range, ultra-low-power networks in sub-1 GHz, license-exempt frequency bands. It is a […]

Intel Arc Graphics Technology

NXP i.MX 8M Plus powered DIN-Rail IoT gateway takes DIO, RS232, RS485, and ADC expansion modules

Compulab IOT-DIN-IMX8PLUS IoT gateway with IO modules

Compulab IOT-DIN-IMX8PLUS is a DIN Rail IoT gateway powered by an NXP i.MX 8M Plus AI SoC that takes various expansion modules with digital inputs and outputs (DIO), RS232, RS485, or ADC. The new model looks to be an evolution of the Compulab IOT-GATE-IMX8PLUS Arm Linux IoT gateway introduced in 2022 with many of the same features, except the IOT-DIN-IMX8PLUS is designed to be installed in a cabinet or other installation with a DIN Rail, and can easily be connected to additional I/O modules. Compulab IOT-DIN-IMX8PLUS specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX 8M Plus Quad or Quad-lite CPU Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.8 GHz Arm Cortex-M7 real-time core @ 800 MHz GPU – Vivante GC7000UL 3D GPU, Vivante GC520L 2D GPU VPU – 1080p H.265/H.264 video decoder & encoder DSP HiFi 4 DSP AI accelerator – 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on i.MX 8M Plus Quad only […]

Yocto Project 5.0 “Scarthgap” released with Linux 6.6 and plenty of changes

Yocto Project 5.0

The Yocto Project 5.0 codenamed “Scarthgap” has just been released with Linux 6.6, glibc 2.39, LLVM 18.1, and over 300 other recipe upgrades. As a result of the release, the developers have made it available for download (bz2 tarball). The Yocto Project, or Yocto for shorts, is a popular framework used to create custom embedded Linux distributions, and we’ve played with it over the year showing how to create a minimal image for the Raspberry Pi, and last year, we used it again when reviewing two industrial development boards, namely the VOIPAC IMX8M and ADLINK i-Pi SMARC 1200. Yocto is quite a powerful framework/build system with plenty of options that make it highly customizable, but the learning curve is fairly steep. Some other changes in Yocto Project 5.0 include: New variables: CVE_DB_INCR_UPDATE_AGE_THRES: Configure the maximum age of the internal CVE database for incremental update (instead of a full redownload). RPMBUILD_EXTRA_PARAMS: […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC