Buy Arylic smart audio equipment up to 20% off during Mother’s Day sale (Sponsored)

Arylic smart audio mother day 2023

Arylic has just launched a Mother’s Day sale for their smart audio equipment where you can get up to a 20% discount with coupon mother20 on specific products namely Up2Stream Amp Sub multiroom wireless subwoofer amplifier board, SA100 50W wall-mounted amplifier, WBC65 multiroom wireless ceiling speaker, and the new Arylic BK501/BK651 2-way bookshelf speakers that were introduced last month. The company also offers up to 15% off with the coupon mother15 on a wider range of Smart Audio products that include the S10 WiFi music stream, Arylic A30+ 30W WiFi mini stereo amplifier, Arylic A50+ streaming amplifier (See Arylic S50+ review for details), and the Qualcomm QCC3350-based B50 Bluetooth stereo amplifier with a built-in audio transmitter. Other discounted smart audio products that qualify for the 15% discount part of the Mother’s Day sale include several Up2Stream boards for DIY connected speakers, Arylic S50+ pre-amplifier, and various speakers. Arylic products ship […]

Linux 6.3 release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.3 release

Linux Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.3 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): It’s been a calm release this time around, and the last week was really no different. So here we are, right on schedule, with the 6.3 release out and ready for your enjoyment. That doesn’t mean that something nasty couldn’t have been lurking all these weeks, of course, but let’s just take things at face value and hope it all means that everything is fine, and it really was a nice controlled release cycle. It happens. This also obviously means the merge window for 6.4 will open tomorrow. I already have two dozen pull requests waiting for me to start doing my pulls, and I appreciate it. I expect I’ll have even more when I wake up tomorrow. But in the meantime, let’s enjoy (and test) the 6.3 release. As always, the shortlog […]

Offline voice recognition module supports Arduino programming, custom voice commands

Offline Voice Recognition Arduino

We’ve already covered inexpensive offline voice recognition modules based on US516P6 or TW-ASR ONE microcontrollers that allow people to add smarts to their projects without a network connection for improved privacy and lower latency. Those are great in theory, but at the time (April 2022) documentation was lacking or only in Chinese, and they were fairly hard to use based on some of the comments in my earlier posts. But today, I’ve noticed DFRobot is now selling the “Gravity: Offline Voice Recognition Sensor – I2C & UART” module with support for Arduino programming, and it looks fairly easy to customize as we’ll see further below. Gravity Voice Recognition DF2301QG module specifications: Voice recognition module – WS-2520-TR module with MCU – TBD 121 commonly used fixed voice commands, one-fixed wake word Support for 1 learned wake-word, 17 user-defined commands Audio Output – Built-in speaker and external speaker interface Input – Dual […]

Arylic BK501/651 bookshelf speakers integrate high-end AMT tweeters (Sponsored)

Arylic Bookshelf Speakers

Arylic is better known for its connected audio devices such as the Arylic A50+ wireless amplifier or S50 Pro+ wireless stereo pre-amplifier, but the company has now launched its first passive speakers with the Arylic BK501 and BK651 bookshelf speakers that integrate high-end Heil AMT (Air Motion Transformer) tweeters. The BK501 is a pair of 5-inch speakers with 80W peak power, while the BK651 is a pair of 6.5-inch stereo speakers delivering up to 100W peak power. The specifications table below shows how both models compare. Both speakers support Treble up to 40kHz to feel detailed treble clarity and brightness, 180° wide soundstage, feature a fiberglass mid-woofer and received FSC Environmental Certification. Both designs include an MDF (medium-density fiberboard) cabinet with 15mm thick walls for the KB501 and 18mm thick walls for the BK651. Arylic says the Heil AMT tweeter found in its speakers uses a folded Kapton ribbon diaphragm […]

Banana BPI-P2 Pro headless SBC features RK3308 CPU, PoE Ethernet, WiFi 5, audio jack

Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro

Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro is Rockchip RK3308 quad-core Cortex-A35 SBC for headless applications with a PoE-capable Ethernet port, WiFi 5, a USB port, an audio jack, and two GPIO headers for expansion. You may think the Banana Pi guys have gone crazy by calling such entry-level level SBC “Pro”, but that’s because the company previously released the BPI-P2 Zero and BPI-P2 Maker single board computers based on Allwinner H2+ quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, so the BPI-P2 Pro is indeed an improvement albeit with some caveats. Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3308 quad-core Arm Cortex-A35 processor @ up to 1.3 GHz with built-in VAD (Voice Activity Detector) System Memory – 2GB LPDDR2 SDRAM [Update: According to Rockchip RK3308 specifications, the maximum memory capacity is 512MB, so Banana Pi may have meant 2 Gbit instead, meaning 256MB of RAM]. Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot Video Output – […]

Allwinner R128 wireless SoC features 64-bit RISC-V core, Arm Cortex-M33 core, and HiFi 5 audio DSP

Allwinner R128

Allwinner is mostly known for its low-cost Arm processor running Android or Linux, but the Allwinner R128 is a wireless audio SoC with a C906 64-bit RISC-V application core, an Arm Cortex-M33 real-time time core, a HiFi 5 DSP, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The SoC also comes with 1MB SRAM, up to 16MB flash, up to 32MB PSRAM, display and camera interfaces, support for microphone arrays, and plenty of I/Os that should make it suitable for smart speakers and other voice-controlled home appliances with or without display. Allwinner R128 specifications: Application core – Xuantie C906 64-bit RISC-V core clocked at 600 MHz. DSP – Cadence HiFi 5 audio DSP clocked at 400 MHz Communication core – Arm M33 Star (Cortex-M33 from Arm China?) core clocked at 240 MHz with Trustzone support Memory 1MB SRAM 8MB, 16MB, or 32MB PSRAM (SiP = System-in-Package) OPI PSRAM controller Storage QPI flash […]

Ploopy – 3D printed open-source hardware headphones feature Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU, TI PCM3060 24-bit DAC

Ploopy open-source hardware headphones

I don’t think I’ve ever written about open-source hardware headphones. But that’s precisely what Ploopy offers with an amplifier based on a Raspberry Pi RP2040, a Texas Instruments PCM3060 24-bit DAC, and an amplifier circuit, as well as 3D printed parts and open-source firmware written in C. As we’ll see further below the project is reasonably well documented, and you can either build it from scratch, purchase a fully-assembled kit, or something in the middle. I suppose you could even do some knitting since woven covers are part of the build just in case making your own PCBs and 3D printing parts are not your things. The electronics are comprised of two boards: The Gould amplifier board with the Raspberry Pi RP2040, Texas Instruments PCM3060 24-bit 96/192 kHz DAC, and several TI OPA1688 audio operational amplifiers The Mazzoleni driver flex boards going into the left and right rings with a […]

Eoxys Xeno+ Nano ML board combines NuMicro M2354 or STM32L4 MCU with Talaria TWO ultra low power WiFi & BLE 5.0 module

Eoxys Xeno+ Nano ML board

Eoxys Xeno+ Nano ML is a wireless machine learning (ML) board with either Nuvoton NuMicro M2354 or STMicro STM32L4 microcontroller, InnoPhase IoT’s Talaria TWO ultra-low power Wi-Fi and BLE 5.0 module, and the Syntiant Core 2 NDP120 neural decision processor we first noticed in the Arduino Nicla Voice module a few weeks ago. The boards/modules are designed for intelligent and secure IoT devices for smart home, industrial, and medical automation applications, and the company claims it can be used in Wi-Fi IoT sensors with up to 10+ years thanks to the low-power chips and circuitry used in the design. Eoxys Xeno+ Nano ML specifications: General purpose MCU (one or the other) STMicro STM32L4 Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller at 80MHz with 1MB flash, 128KB/352KB SRAM Nuvoton NuMicro M2354 Arm Cortex-M23 microcontroller at 96MHz with 1MB flash, 128KB SRAM. Wireless module Innophase Talaria TWO ultra-low-power 2.4GHz 802.11b/n/g WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.0 […]