Calaos is an Open Source Home Automation Suite for Raspberry Pi, Allwinner A10/A20 and x86 Platforms

Calaos is a Linux based home automation software released under GPLv3 license that works on Raspberry Pi, some Allwinner platforms like Cubiebaord 1/2, Mele A1000(G)/A2000, as well as x86 / amd64 hardware platforms that allows you control switches & lights in the rooms of your home or office, control your music, and manage security cameras.. The developers have recently released Calaos v2.0, the first stable release, so it’s a good time to have a look. The software stack is comprised of 6 main components: Calaos Server – Daemon that exports the state of the house via a JSON protocol. It can currently manage the following hardware components and protocols: Wago’s PLC, with digital or analog I/O, DALI or DMX light bus IPX800 web relay board GCE Electronics Eco Devices used to monitor power consumption. Web API 1-Wire, X10 Zibase I/O GPIO (Linux based GPIO, for direct use of RaspberryPI GPIO […]

Sigrok and Pulseview in Ubuntu 14.04 with UNI-T UT61E Digital Multimeter

A couple of months ago, I received a new digital multimeter UNI-T UT61E that can send data to a computer via a serial cable, and allows you draw some nice charts. I’ve already done that in Windows 7 with the provided tools, and reported on the power consumption of some Chinese Android TV boxes. However, since I use Ubuntu 14.04 as my main operating system, Linux based tools would be more convenient, and open source sigrok-cli command line client and its graphical interface pulseview are supposed to support UT61E DMM, so I had to give it a try. A Quick Look at UNI-T UT61 Digital Multimeter Before going into Sigrok, I’ll quickly show what the multimeter received from DealExtreme . It took longer than expected to ship because of of  included 9V battery, and at the first shipping attempt it was returned to DX, but after 8 weeks or so, […]

How to Build a Single Kernel Module (Driver) in Ubuntu

When I bought UNI-T UT61E digital multimeter,  I planned to to use the open source tool Sigrok to capture voltage, current or resistance data with my Ubuntu 14.04 machine. Unfortunately, it was just not working for me and I kept getting some “Invalid function byte” error messages, so I asked on Sigrok mailing list, and since it worked for others, I was in big troubles. It turned out the RS-232 to USB dongle I used:

was most likely to culprit, so I decided to buy another random USB to serial dongle on eBay, and after a few weeks I received it only to find out it had the exact same VID:PID, so I was out of luck. Finally, I gave up on Sigrok on Linux, and tested the power consumption of some Rockchip RK3288 & Amlogic S802 devices in a Windows 7 virtual machine running in my Ubuntu 14.04 […]

Compulab Utilite2 Android / Ubuntu mini PC is Now Up for Sale for $192 and Up

Compulab Utilite2 is a new family of mini PCs powered vt Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad core Krait 300 processor, with 2GB RAM, 4GB eMMC and optional mSATA storage that runs Android 4.4 or Ubuntu Linaro, with CM-QS600 SoM found in the device being officially supported by Linaro. Utilite2 Standard 4G and Standard 4G + 32SSD (or just SSD for short) are now listed on UK based TinyGreenPC for respectively £158.00 ($241) and £181.00 ($276), but the two models can also be bought direct on Compulab website for $192 and $229 with a 4 weeks lead time. Utilite2 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064 quad-core Krait 300 @ 1.7GHz with Adreno 320 GPU compliant with OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 / 3.0 and OpenCL System Memory – 2GB DDR3-1066 Storage – 4GB eMMC, mSATA socket (mini-PCie form-factor, populated with 32 GB SSD on SSD model), and micro-SD slot up to […]

Xilinx Introduces Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC with Cortex A53 & R5 Cores, Ultrascale FPGA

Xilinx Zynq-7000 dual core Cortex A9 + FPGA SoC family was announced in 2012, and provides a wide range of SoC with features and price range, and led to low cost ARM + FPGA such as ZedBoard, and more recently Parallela and MYiR Z-Turn boards. The company unveiled its successor with Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC providing five times more performance per watt, with four ARM Cortex A53 cores, two ARM Cortex R5 real-time MCU cores, a Mali-400MP GPU, an UltraScale FPGA fabric manufactured with 16nm FinFET+ process. There are two main sub-families in Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC for “smarter control & vision”, and “smarter network”. Both share the same processing systems (CPU, GPU, MCU, Peripherals, Security), but the networking family has beefier FPGAs,  and lacks the H.264/H.265 video processing unit found in the control & vision version: Processing Systems Processor – Quad ARM Cortex A53 MPCore up to 1.3GHz Real-time Processor – […]

Mixtile LOFT-Q Allwinner A31 Board with SATA Can Now be Purchased for $90

Mixtile LOFT-Q and LOFT Kit were unveiled nearly a year ago, the first being a development board based on Allwinner A31 processor with 2GB RAM, 16GB RAM,  SATA connector, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.., while the second is a kit with an enclosure and power supply. The kit does not appear to be available yet, but the board has recently been listed on SeeedStudio for $90. Mixtile LOFT-Q specifications: SoC – Allwinner A31 quad core ARM Cortex-A7 processor with PowerVR SGX544 MP2 GPU System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC, SATA III connector for 2.5″ drives, and SD card Slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p60 Video Decoding – H.264 4Kx2K video decoding, multi-format FHD video decoding, including Mpeg1/2, Mpeg4 SP/ASP GMC, H.263, H.264,etc Audio I/O – HDMI, 1 S/PDIF, high definition microphone Camera I/F Integrated Parallel & MIPI I/F sensor Integrated powerful ISP, supporting Raw Data CMOS […]

Kodi 15 Alpha 1 Adds Support for H.265 on Android, Drops Some Older OS Versions and Hardware

Kodi 15 Isengard got its first public Alpha release, with 400 pull-request for code merges, 1322 commits and thousands of code lines changed compared to Kodi 14 release with modifications of all operating systems ports, and changes to newer OS versions. Major changes for Kodi 15.0 Alpha 1 include: Added adaptive seeking through audio and video playback, also know as “skip steps” Android HEVC H.265 HW decode support for some chipsets Improved webserver caching control External subtitles over UPnP Allow scanning of new sources and marking as watched during other library operations such as “update library” Allow different sort orders for different sort methods Start of integration binary add-ons and changing the build system around it Improved CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV ffmpeg 2.5.4 update Remove remaining SDL code New OS Requirements: Minimal Mac OSX 10.7 Lion requirements (Only OSX 64-bit builds provided, no more 32bit builds) Minimal […]

Raspbian Image with Docker 1.5.0 Released for Raspberry Pi Boards

I’ve read quite a few articles mentioning Docker recently, but never really looked into it. So what is Docker? The developers describe it as: Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. As a result, IT can ship faster and run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data center VMs, and any cloud. In practice, it looks like a lightweight virtualization solution that facilitates apps distribution to different operating systems and hardware platforms. For example, if your development machine is running Ubuntu 14.04 and you’ve developed an app requiring Python 3.0, Docker should make it a breeze to it on […]

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