Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft), Author at CNX Software

July 18, 2026July 18, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

M5Stack Core2 gets open-source firmware to reproduce OpenAI’s Codex Micro features

IAMLIUBO has written firmware for the M5Stack Core2 IoT controller to reproduce the features of the $230 Codex Micro macro pad for OpenAI’s AI coding agent platform, enabling developers to more easily monitor and control agents. The original is neat with a CNC-milled enclosure, a rotary encoder, and a joystick, but it’s rather pricey (and now out of stock), only ships to the US, and the company has now launched pre-orders for a 25-key “Custom Alternative” going for $125. However, you can easily reproduce the same functionality with other macro pads with rotary encoders, such as the SayoDevice O3C, DuckyPad Pro, Waveshare MK10, T-Keyboard-S3 Pro, and others at a fraction of the price by simply remapping the keys. IAMLIUBO went another route with the M5Stack Core2 IoT controller since it doesn’t come with any keys. Instead, he leveraged the 2-inch touchscreen LCD of the ESP32 device with six agent keys, […]

July 17, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Espressif releases SDK for Aliro smart door locks based on ESP32-C or ESP32-H SoCs

Espressif Systems has just released the SDK for Aliro, designed for smart Matter door locks and other access control solutions built around ESP32-C (WiFi) or ESP32-H (Thread) microcontroller and third-party NFC chips. We recently wrote about the Aliro vendor-agnostic digital access control standard working over NFC, Bluetooth LE, or BLE+UWB. It’s basically the equivalent of Matter, but for smart locks, instead of the broader Smart Home ecosystem. The ultimate goal is to reduce fragmentation and allow users to use compliant wallets from Google, Apple, Samsung, and others to work with Aliro-compatible devices. Espressif’s SDK for Aliro (ESP-Aliro) currently supports the following features of Aliro-over-NFC: Standard Expedited Phase Fast Expedited Phase Reader Certificate Sending via AUTH1/LoadCert Command Keyslot to Look up Access Credential Public Key Mailbox of Exchange command Step-up Phase Espressif’s solution currently only works with Aliro NFC for tap-to-unlock applications, although Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth LE + UWB support […]

July 17, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

reCamera Pro “Open AI Camera” supports computer vision, LLM, VLM, STT, and TTS workloads

Seeed Studio’s reCamera Pro is an AI camera powered by a Rockchip RV1126B quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC with a 3 TOPS NPU for on-device AI vision, but also large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), as well as speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) with built-in audio capabilities. It offers a powerful update to the earlier reCamera modular AI camera based on an SG2002 RISC-V AI SoC, with up to 4GB RAM, 16GB eMMC flash, an 8MP camera sensor supporting up to 4K @ 30 FPS, an M12 lens mount, a built-in 1W speaker, two microphones, Gigabit Ethernet with PoE, dual-band WiFi 5 connectivity, a USB-C port for power and data, and and expansion through a GPIO and MIPI DSI connectors. reCamera Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RV1126B CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 up to 1.2 GHz with 32KB L1 I-Cache and 32KB L1 D-Cache, unified 512KB L2 Cache MCU – […]

July 17, 2026July 16, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Olimex PICO-EVB automation board adds high-voltage terminals to Raspberry Pi Pico family

Olimex PICO-EVB board for the Raspberry Pi Pico and compatible boards is designed for high-voltage automation with four 3.3-30V DC or 110-220V AC inputs and four 15V DC/220V AC relays. It features two 20-pin headers enabling users to connect their preferred Pi Pico-compatible board, a USB-C port for power and programming, a UEXT connector for I2C, UART, and SPI expansion, and status LEDs for the high-voltage signals. Olimex PICO-EVB specifications: Compatible boards Raspberry Pi Pico, Pico 2, Pico W, Pico 2 W Olimex RP2040-PICO30 USB – 1x USB Type-C port I/Os 4x 15V DC/240V AC relays 4x optoisolated inputs taking 3.3 – 30V DC or 110-220V AC UEXT connector with I2C, UART, and SPI signals Unpopulated 18-pin GPIO header Misc 4x status LEDs for the relays 4x status LEDs for the inputs Power Supply – 5V power supply via screw connector, USB-C port, or Pico’s micro USB connector Dimensions – […]

July 16, 2026July 16, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

pico-usb-wifi firmware converts the Raspberry Pi Pico W into a driverless USB WiFi adapter

pico-usb-wifi is an open-source firmware project that converts the Raspberry Pi Pico W into a driverless USB WiFi adapter that works with Windows, Linux, macOS, and other operating systems with USB CDC-NCM support. The Infineon CYW43439 chip found in the SBC can’t be used directly as a USB to WiFi bridge, and instead, the firmware implements a transparent Layer-2 bridge between the Pico W’s wireless module and USB interfaces. It basically works as an Ethernet to WiFi gateway/bridge, which exposes an Ethernet connection through USB (aka USB gadget mode) used to route Wi-Fi packets from the network. pico-usb-wifi highlights: Transparent Layer-2 Bridging between the Pico W’s wireless and USB interfaces Exposed as a USB CDC-NCM device IPv4 and IPv6 with no NAT, no private subnet, and no port-forwarding to configure Out-of-band management and debug consoles over CDC-ACM serial WPA2-PSK and WPA3-SAE authentication (and open networks) Throughput – Average 4.75 Mbits/sec; […]

July 16, 2026July 16, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

NVIDIA launches smaller, mainstream Jetson T2000 and T3000 modules for Edge AI and robotics applications

NVIDIA has just launched the Jetson T2000 and T3000 “mainstream” modules as smaller and lower cost options to the Jetson T4000/T5000 modules introduced last year for Edge AI and robotics applications. The Jetson Thor T3000 and the industrial version IGX Thor T3000, which adds functional safety, both deliver up to 865 FP4 TFLOPS of AI compute. They feature a 1536-core NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, an eight-core Neoverse Arm CPU, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory with 273GB/s bandwidth, and 25 GbE connectivity. The Jetson Thor T2000 delivers up to 400 TFLOPS of AI performance, features a 1024-core Blackwell GPU, 16GB LPDDR5 with 137GB/s bandwidth, and 10 GbE networking. Both are about half the size of the Jetson T4000/T5000 modules. Here’s a preliminary comparison between the Jetson Thor T2000, T3000, T4000, and T5000 modules. It’s preliminary because, as I write this article, NVIDIA has yet to provide the full specifications for the new T2000 and […]

July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Reverse-engineering brings RK3576 NPU support to open-source Rocket driver for mainline Linux

Back in 2024, we noted that the open-source driver for RK3588’s NPU by Tomeu Vizoso delivered decent performance for object detection. Since then, good progress has been made, and it’s now known as the Rocket driver in mainline Linux. However, the Rockchip RK3576 SoC is not supported by the Rocket driver in mainline yet, despite sharing a similar NPU. The good news is that Ga Hing Woo has been working on mainline Linux support for the Rockchip RK3576 NPU using the Rocket driver stack and has tested the updates on the Radxa ROCK 4D running Linux 7.1-rc5. This required some serious reverse-engineering work due to hidden registers not documented in the TRM. Ga Hing Woo (also written as Jiaxing Hu) sent us an email explaining some of the challenges: Single int8 convolution now comes out byte-exact against a CPU reference on the open stack. Getting there meant reverse-engineering the compute […]

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 […]