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

July 13, 2014July 13, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 27 Comments

Raspberry Pi Model B+ with 4 USB Ports, a micro SD Slot, and More GPIOs Coming Soon

With over 3 million boards sold, the Raspberry Pi is by far the most popular ARM Linux board on the market, but people are often asking for hardware upgrades with a faster processor, more RAM and so on. The good news is that a new Raspberry Pi board seems on the way, but since the real competitive of the Raspberry Pi is not the cheap hardware only, but software support and the community around the little ARM board. So instead of designing of completely new board, they’ve kept Broadcom BCM2835 and 512MB RAM, and mostly made some changes to the ports, and form factor. Since the board has not been officially announced just yet, the full details are available, but according to various reports, the specs should be as follows: SoC – Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 processor @ 700MHz with VideoCore IV GPU System Memory – 512 MB SDRAM (PoP) Storage […]

July 12, 2014July 12, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

More Details on Mediatek MT2502 Aster SoC and Linkit Platform for Wearables (Video)

Last month, Mediatek announced their Mediatek MT2502 SoC for wearables, codenamed Aster, as well as the Linkit development platform targeting the developer’s community. But at the time they did show the actual hardware, and thanks to Charbax we know have more interesting details about Aster and Linkit. First they compare a design based on Aster to Samsung Galaxy Fit wearable band, and show why it uses less space, will cost less, and they claim over twice the battery life. Simple and smaller design (~36% reduction in size) Aster solution – MT2504 (6.2 x 5.4 mm) plus all required resistors, capacitors and inductors require 89.97 mm2 Galaxy Fit – MCU. Bluetooth Transceiver, external memory, a linear charger, and all required resistors, capacitors and inductors require 140.97 mm2 Battery life – Samsung Galaxy Fit is supposed to last between 1 and 1.5 days on a charge, whereas devices based on Aster should last about […]

July 11, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

$70 MicroNFCBoard Brings NFC Connectivity to Any Board or Device (Crowdfunding)

AppNearMe MicroNFCBoard is a development platform for Near Field Communication (NFC) comprised of an NFC transceiver, an NXP MCU, and all software stack and tools you need for development. This board also exposes various I/Os that allows you to connect to external hardware or devices, and it can be used with an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, mbed or PC/Mac. Let’s go through the board specifications first: MCU – NXP LPC11U34FHN33/421 Cortex M0 MCU @ 48MHz, with 10KB RAM, 48KB FLASH, 4KB EEPROM NFC Transceiver – NXP PN512. Reader/Writer and card operation modes supporting ISO14443A/Mifare and FeliCa schemes. NFCIP-1 mode Splittable antenna USB – 1x micro USB port for power and programming I/O – 20x through holes with access to serial (UART), I2C, SPI, 4x ADC inputs, IRQ, Boot and Reset, and power pins. (2x pin header that you can solder are provided) Misc – Reset and bootloader enable push-buttons, 2x LEDs. […]

July 11, 2014July 17, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Mediatek MT6795 Octa Core ARM Cortex A53 Processor to Launch in Q4 2014

Mediatek had already announced two 64-bit ARM SoCs with MT6732 and MT6752 boasting respectively four and eight Cortex A53 cores for mainstream and premium smartphones. There are now reports that the company will launch an eight core 64-bit LTE SoC with HMP architecture. Since HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing) is only used for big.LITTLE processing, and Mediatek does not have an history of making their own custom ARM cores, we can safely assume the processor will feature four Cortex A53 little core, and four Cortex A57 big cores. [Update: finally it’s eight ARM Cortex A53 cores, no HMP here]. What we know about MT6795 so far: Processor – 64-bit Octa core ARM Cortex A53 cores @ 2.2 GHz GPU- Imagination Technology G6200 @ 700 MHz Memory I/F – 2x LPDDR3 @ 933 MHz (PoP) Camera I/F – 20MP@30fps using a dual ISP Display – Up to WQXGA (2560×1600) Video Decoding – 4K2K […]

July 10, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Renesas RZ/A1H Starter Kit and Emtrion DIMM-RZ System-on-Module Run Segger embOS RTOS or Linux with 10MB SRAM

Announced just about a year ago, Renesas RZ/A1 ARM Cortex A9 processor family can be used for human machine interface applications, and has the particularly to embed large amount of SRAM, especially the RZ/A1H series with 10 MB SRAM which allows the development of some applications without external RAM chip, lowering both board size and BoM cost. I’ve just come across a development kit dubbed “RZ/A1H Starter Kit”, and the just released Emtrion DIMM-RZ system-on-module both powered by Renesas RZ/A1H SoC. Renesas RZ/A1H Starter Kit+ (RSK) The development kit includes the mainboard, a 7″ TFT LCD (Optional), a detachable Colour LCD Board Pmod Compatible,a detachable AD Adjustment Shaft, Segger J-LINK Lite debugger, various connection cables, a power supply, a Quick Start Guide, and a DVD-ROM with documentation, ARM DS-5 IDE (with 32K code limit), KPIT GNU compiler for Cortex A9, Segger debugger drivers. and sample code. The mainboard has the […]

July 9, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

A Quick Look at Antutu 5 Alpha 2 Benchmark

Antutu Labs has released an alpha version of Antutu 5 on XDA Developers, and although I can’t share it directly,you can request a copy by sending an email to Antutu. I did that, received the apk (antutu-benchmark-v5-alpha2.apk). and decided to try it on Tronsmart Vega S89 Elite TV Box and ThL W200 smartphone They’ve added three new tests, replacing the 2D and 3D benchmarks in the process: Added CPU single thread benchmark (integer and float) Real Game engines used for graphics benchmarks: Cocos2D, and Havok Vision HTML5 Test The user interface is very similar to Antutu 4, but you’ll notice the new HTML5 Web Test before starting a full test. You’ll start seeing more changes with the 2D graphics tests which are very similar, but you can still feel it’s different, and the test resolution is now clearly shown during the benchmark. But it’s the 3D graphics benchmarks that’s completely […]

July 9, 2014July 9, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

AllWinner V10 and V15 SoCs Target Video Recording Applications

AllWinner A-series that can be found in tablets and media players are pretty well known, but AllWinner also has V-Series processors with V10 and V15. A first glance, AllWinner V10 is quite similar to AllWinner A31 with a quad core Cortex A7 CPU coupled with a PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU, and AllWinner V15 has the same CPU/GPU combo as AllWinner A10 (CortexA8/Mali-400). But AllWinner V-Series are actually video encoders targeting applications such as IP cameras, car DVRs, and sports digital video cameras thanks to features such as motion detection, video scaling, and digital watermarking. Let’s go through AllWinner V10 specifications, and I’ll mark differences with AllWinner A31, or features not mentioned in A31 specs, in bold: CPU – Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 with· 256KB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache GPU – PowerVR SGX544MP2 compliant with OpenCL 1.1 EP and delivering up to 20GFLOPS. Memory – 32-bit DDR3/LPDDR2 SDRAM controller, supporting up to […]

July 9, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

33 Euros Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME Open Source Hardware Board Supports Linux and Android

Last year, Olimex launched A10-OLinuxXino-LIME powered by AllWinner A10, and it became quite popular due to its Linux and Android support, its open source hardware, and a price tag of just 30 Euros that made it cost competitive with BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi boards. The company has now designed an upgrade with A20-OLinuXino-LIME powered by AllWinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 processor, that sells for just 3 Euros more. A20-OLinuXino-LIME specifications: SoC – AllWinner A20 dual core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 512MB DDR3 Storage – microSD card slot, SATA, and optional 4GB NAND Flash Video Output – HDMI 1080p USB – USB-OTG + 2x USB Hosts Connectivity – 10/100Mbit Ethernet Expansions – 200 GPIOs on 0.05″ connectors Misc – Lipo battery management and connector, buttons Power – 5V Dimensions – 84 x 60 mm The specifications are exactly the same expect for the […]