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

September 9, 2024September 9, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Banana Pi BPI-CM5 Pro – A Rockchip RK3576-powered Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with up to 16GB RAM, 128GB flash, a 6 TOPS NPU

Banana Pi BPI-CM5 Pro, also called ArmSoM-CM5, is a Rockchip RK3576 system-on-module electrically and mechanically compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 while offering up to 16GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB eMMC flash, and a 6 TOPS AI accelerator embedded into the RK3576 SoC. It comes with a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless module, a PMIC for power management, and two 100-pin connectors mostly compatible with the pinout of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. ArmSoM also provides a CM5-IO carrier board to make use of the extra USB 3.0 and PCIe interfaces, and the company told CNX Software they tested the module successfully with the official Raspberry Pi CM4 IO board. Banana Pi BPI-CM5 Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU – 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0, […]

September 9, 2024September 8, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android 15 runs on Linaro development boards based on Qualcomm and HiSilicon chips

Android 15 source code was just pushed to AOSP last week, and Linaro has already ported it to four reference development boards based on Qualcomm and HiSilicon/Huawei chips namely Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devboard (SM8550-HDK), Qualcomm Robotics Board RB5, Qualcomm Dragonboard 845c (DB845c, aka RB3) and HiSilicon Hikey960. Recent Google Pixel phones can already get Android 15 beta, but that makes the aforementioned development boards some of the first hardware platforms running Android 15 which could be useful to app developers and people wanting to customize Android 15 OS for their target product(s). Android 15 worked on the same day as the release to AOSP thanks to a collaboration between Linaro and Google to make sure reference boards get support as soon as possible, and in this case, we had a “0-day boot” as Linaro puts it. This collaboration started in 2022 with Qualcomm Robotics RB3 and RB5 platforms getting […]

September 8, 2024September 9, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Maxtang T0-FP750 review – Part 2: An AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC tested with Windows 11 Pro

Maxtang T0-FP750 mini PC review windows 11

We already listed the specifications and performed an unboxing and a teardown of the Maxtang T0-FP750 mini PC in the first part of the review. We’ve now had time to test the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC in more detail with the Windows 11 Pro operating system. So in the second part of the review, we’ll report our experience with the Maxtang T0-FP750 in Windows 11 Pro with a software overview, features testing, benchmarks, networking and storage performance, cooling performance, and measurement of fan noise and power consumption. Software overview and features testing The System->About menu confirms we have an “FP750” Mini PC powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor clocked at 1.80 GHz (base frequency) with Radeon 780M Graphics, equipped with 32 GB RAM, and running Windows 11 Pro 23H2, OS build 22631.4112. HWiNFO64 provides additional details about the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS 8-core/16-thread processor, the Maxtang […]

September 6, 2024September 6, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Arduino CLI 1.0 released – Let’s try it with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

Arduino has just announced the release of the Arduino CLI version 1.0.0, the first stable release for which users and developers can be confident the software API won’t change over time, or at least with minimal changes that will not impact the workflow of applications based on it. We first looked at the Arduino CLI when it was still at the alpha stage way back in 2018. Arduino CLI version 1.0.0 was actually quietly released about two months ago, but Arduino only announced it now and the utility is now at version 1.0.4 with several bug fixes. Arduino CLI 1.0 release The goal of the API is to easily program the boards from the command line without having to use the Arduino IDE, and the CLI can be integrated into your own script to automatize various processes. Arduino explains there are three ways to integrate and utilize the capabilities of […]

September 5, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

GEEKOM Mini Air12 Lite Intel N100 mini PC comes with a 9-pin expansion header

GEEKOM Mini Air12 Lite is yet another Intel Processor N100 mini PC whose main differentiating feature is a 9-pin expansion header accessible from the outside for expansion. I initially thought it would be similar to having Raspberry Pi 5 SBC in an enclosure like the Pironman 5, but as we’ll see below it may not exactly be the case. As its name implies, it’s also an evolution of the Mini Air12 mini PC with a lower price due to some cost-cutting. The Mini Air 12 Lite notably ships with 8GB DDR4-3200 and a 256GB NVMe SSD, instead of the 16GB DDR5-4800 and a 512GB NVMe SSD for its older sibling. The computer also features HDMI and DP ports for dual display setups, gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5 connectivity, an audio jack, and five USB 3.2/2.0 ports. GEEKOM Mini Air12 Lite specifications: SoC – Intel Processor N100 Alder Lake-N quad-core/quad-thread processor […]

September 5, 2024September 5, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

LicheePi 3A – A SpacemIT K1 RISC-V development board with SoM and carrier board

Sipeed LicheePi 3A is a development board comprised of the LM3A system-on-module based on SpacemIT K1 octa-core RISC-V SoC and the same baseboard as found in the earlier LicheePi 4A equipped with a T-Head TH1520 quad-core RISC-V “LM4A” system-on-module instead. The LicheePi 3A is currently offered with a 32GB eMMC flash and 8GB or 16GB LPDDR4x memory. The carrier board provides a microSD card, two M.2 PCIe sockets for storage or other expansion, two gigabit Ethernet ports, a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 module, HDMI and MIPI DSI display interfaces, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, four USB 3.0 ports, and a 20-pin GPIO header for expansion. Sipeed LicheePi 3A specifications: Sipeed LM3A SoM SoC – SpacemiT K1 CPU – 8-core X60 RISC-V processor @ 1.6 GHz GPU – Imagination IMG BXE-2-32 with support for OpenGL ES3.2, Vulkan 1.2, OpenCL 3.0; 20 GFLOPS VPU – H.265 and H.264 1080p60 decoding/encoding NPU […]

September 4, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Bluetooth 6.0 features accurate two-way ranging using Channel Sounding, latency reduction, improved scanning efficiency, and more

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has just announced the release of the Bluetooth 6.0 Core Specification with features and feature enhancements that include Bluetooth Channel Sounding for two-way ranging between BLE devices, decision-based advertising filtering and monitoring advertisers to improve device scanning efficiency, an enhancement to the Isochronous Adaptation Layer (ISOAL) for lower latency and higher reliability, the LL extended feature set, and a frame space update for throughput optimization. Bluetooth 5.4 was released as a minor update mostly adding electronic shelf label (ESL) support in February 2023, or about 18 months ago, but Bluetooth 6.0 is a major update with the most notable feature being Bluetooth Channel Sounding to enable two-way ranging between two Bluetooth LE devices. It’s not the first time we’ve heard about “Bluetooth Channel Sounding” for distance measurements as it was implemented in WiFi 7/6 and Bluetooth 5.4 chipsets such as Synaptics SYN4382 and Broadcom […]

September 4, 2024September 4, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Android 15 source code pushed to AOSP

Android 15 will only become available on supported Pixel devices in the coming weeks, and on other phones in the next couple of months, but Google has already pushed Android 15 source code to AOSP (the Android Open-Source Project). We already documented some of the main changes in Android 15 when the first developer preview was released in February 2024. These included improvements related to privacy and security, the addition of the partial screen-sharing feature, camera and audio improvements, and some performance optimizations. You should be able to retrieve the Android 15 source code from AOSP with the following commands:

repo init --partial-clone -b android-15.0.0_r1 -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest
repo sync -c -j8

1 2	repo init --partial-clone -b android-15.0.0_r1 -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest repo sync -c -j8

Android 15 is based on Linux 6.6 LTS, so Android 15 SDKs from silicon vendors will likely be offered with Linux 6.6, although I can see Linux 6.1 is also an option. It’s also possible to browse Android 15 source code without downloading several GB of data to your […]