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

February 11, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

PiLink PL-R5/R5M Series – IP20/IP65 Industrial PCs powered by Raspberry Pi CM5

Made by Japan-based PiLink, the PL-R5 and PL-R5M Series are compact industrial PCs powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) and offered with either IP20 or IP65 ingress protection rating. The PL-R5 Series provides one USB 3.0 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and 9V to 40V DC input, while the PL-R5M Series offers one USB 2.0 port, one 100 Mbps Ethernet port, an optional extra Gigabit Ethernet port, and a 10.7V to 28.8V DC input range. Both include optional WiFi 5 and Bluetooth, an M.2 B-Key socket for cellular, optional RS-232, RS-485, I2C interfaces, and more. The IP65 models are offered in Basic, Basic Plus (adds 4x analog inputs, 4x DI/DO), and USB (3x USB ports) configurations. The PL-R5 also adds a DIO CAN IP65 variant with two DI, two DO, and two CAN Bus interfaces. The IP20 variants have an even wider choice of options. PiLink PL-R5/R5M […]

February 10, 2026February 10, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

PicoClaw ultra-lightweight personal AI Assistant runs on just 10MB of RAM

PicoClaw lightweight personal AI Assistant embedded systems

PicoClaw is an ultra-lightweight personal AI Assistant designed to work on less than 10 MB RAM and suitable for resource-constrained embedded boards such as the Sipeed LicheeRV Nano SBC going for around $15 and powered by a SOPHGO SG2002 RISC-V SoC with 256MB on-chip DDR3. I keep reading news about the OpenClaw personal AI assistant, after first finding out about it when the Cubie A7S SBC was launched. OpenClaw (previously ClawdBot) clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, and checks you in for flights from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app. It’s been shown to run a range of hardware platforms, but it can be resource-intensive, and HKUDS created the nanobot ultra-lightweight personal AI assistant with about ~4,000 lines of Python code, or roughly 99% smaller than Clawdbot’s 430k+ lines. PicoClaw further builds on the nanobot project, and has been “refactored from the ground up in Go through a […]

February 10, 2026February 11, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

TOPST D3-G maker SBC is powered by Telechips TCT8050 “Dolphin3” Cortex-A72/A53/R5 automotive-grade SoC

TOPST D3-G is a single board computer (SBC) powered by a Telechips TCT8050 “Dolphin3/3M” 9-core automotive-grade SoC with four Cortex-A72 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, and one real-time Cortex-R5 core. The board features 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4 RAM, 32GB eMMC flash and a microSD card for storage, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a DisplayPort 1.2 connector capable of driving four display through MST, two MIPI CSI connectors, a PCIe Gen3x 1 slot, a few USB ports, a 40-pin GPIO header compatible with Raspberry Pi HAT+, and three CAN Bus interfaces. TOPST D3-G specifications: SoC – Telechips TCC8050 (Dolphin3) CPU(45,180 DMIPS) Quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 @ 1.69 GHz, 31,840 DMIPS Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @1.45 GHz, 13,340 DMIPS Real-time MCU core – Arm Cortex-R5 @ 600 MHz GPU – Imagination Technologies PowerVR 9XTP (GT9524) delivering up to 168 GFLOPS; Supported APIs: OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 / 3.2, Vulkan 1.2, OpenCL 2.0 / 3.0 System […]

February 10, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Black Sesame Technologies Wudang C1200 “cross-domain” automotive SoCs feature up to 10x Cortex-A78AE cores

I found two interesting automotive SoCs in the Linux 6.19 changelog: Renesas R-Car X5H 16-/32-core Cortex-A720AE SoC and Black Sesame Technologies’ “Wudang” C1200 8-/10-core Cortex-A78AE processor family. While announced in 2024, there’s still no product page for the Renesas chip. So today, I’ll focus on the Wudang C1200 family. They are designed to be automotive-grade “cross-domain computing platforms” capable of handling multiple functions such as in-cabin sensing systems (e.g., driver attention monitoring), infotainment, auto-parking systems, safety information, autonomous driving, and more. Wudang C1296 10-core SoC Wudang C1296 specifications: CPU 10x Arm Cortex-A78AE automotive-grade cores Dual-Core Lockstep (DCLS) supported, ASIL-D compliance Up to 32K DMIPS (or 16K DMIPS in DCLS) GPU – Automotive-grade Arm Mali-G78AE GPU; DCLS supported, ASIL-D compliance NPU – DynamAl NN Engine Hybrid precision 4-bit/8-bit MAC array Overall 80% utilization of convolution layers MAC Array Sparse support for storage and acceleration INT8/INT16, FP16 GEMM and nonlinear functions acceleration […]

February 9, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Geniatech DB3506 is a full-featured Rockchip RK3506 development board and 3.5-inch industrial SBC

Geniatech DB3506 is a full-featured Rockchip RK3506 development board and 3.5-inch SBC designed for industrial control, human–machine interface (HMI) systems, IoT gateways, and other embedded applications. The board combines the tri-core Arm Cortex-A7 SoC with 256 MB to 1 GB LPDDR3 RAM and 256 MB or 512 MB NAND flash options, offers HDMI and RGB touchscreen display interfaces, dual Fast Ethernet, dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0, optional 4G LTE via a mini PCIe slot, two USB 2.0 ports, and a range of headers for CAN bus, RS-232/RS-485, Audio, GPIOs, and more. Geniatech DB3506 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3506 CPU 3x Arm Cortex-A7 cores Arm Cortex-M0 real-time core GPU – 2D GPU only with hardware-accelerated 2D rendering No VPU, no NPU System Memory – 512MB LPDDR3 (option for 256MB or 1GB) Storage – 256MB NAND flash (option for 512MB) Video Output HDMI output 50-pin RGB display FPC interface up to 1280 × 1280 @ 60 […]

February 9, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.19 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 6.19 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): No big surprises anywhere last week, so 6.19 is out as expected – just as the US prepares to come to a complete standstill later today watching the latest batch of televised commercials. The betting man would expect them all to be AI-generated, but maybe some enterprising company decides to buck the trend? Doubtful, but there’s always a slight chance. But for anybody outside the US, maybe taking the newest kernel out for a spin instead is an option? I have more than three dozen pull requests for when the merge window opens tomorrow – thank you to all the early maintainers. And as people have mostly figured out, I’m getting to the point where I’m being confused by large numbers (almost running out of fingers and toes again), so the next kernel is going to […]

February 7, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Texas Instruments unveils MSPM33C321A mixed-signal Cortex-M33 microcontroller with 256KB SRAM, 1MB flash

Texas Instruments MSPM33C321A is a new Arm Cortex-M33 mixed-signal microcontroller clocked at 160MHz, with up to 1MB of flash with ECC and 256kB SRAM with ECC, and a range of digital and analog peripherals. Those include 9.4MSPS dual SAR ADCs and comparators, QSPI, UART, SPI, I2C, I2S/TDM, & CAN-FD interfaces, and the company also highlights a separate VBAT power domain with RTC, integrated watchdog, and tamper I/O, as well as low power consumption with a 16µA standby current with 64kB SRAM and CPU/register retention. The MSPM33C321A also has a little brother with 512KB flash called the MSPM33C3219. MSPM33C321A specifications: MCU core – 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33 CPU @ 160MHz with TrustZone, FPU, and DSP extensions Memory – 256kB of SRAM with ECC Storage Up to 1MB of flash memory with error correction code (ECC); dual-bank with address swap EEPROM operations using 32kB high-endurance data flash Quad SPI (QSPI) for external memory […]

February 6, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Compact, fanless DIN-Rail Intel Core Ultra 5 235U/7 265U industrial PC targets AMR, robotics, and computer vision

ASUS IoT PE1000U is a compact (160 x 110 x 63 mm) fanless DIN-rail industrial Edge AI PC powered by an Intel Core Ultra 5 235U/ 7 265U (Series 2) processor and designed for AMR (Autonomous Mobile Robots), robotics, and computer vision applications. Housed in a fanless, MIL-STD-810H-rated, rugged IP40-rated chassis, the PE1000U supports SO-DIMM DDR5 memory, SATA and NVMe storage, features two 2.5GbE RJ45 ports, four USB ports, four COM ports, onboard CAN Bus and DIO interfaces, as well as DisplayPort and HDMI outputs for dual 4K display setups for HMI or machine-vision monitoring. As an industrial computer, it accepts a wide 9-36V DC power input, includes built-in ignition control, and can operate in environments with temperatures ranging between -25°C and 70°C. ASUS IoT PE1000U specifications: Arrow Lake SoC (one or the other) Intel Core Ultra 5 235U CPU – 12-core (2P+8E+2LPE) / 14 threads processor @ 2.0 GHz […]