There are so many Allwinner H3 SBCs or development boards that new ones are often uninteresting, but with the release of Linux 5.0, I discovered a new board that I had never heard of: MapleBoard MP130. The board is equipped with 1GB RAM, Fast Ethernet, four USB ports, and various I/O expansion headers. But the form factor looked familiar, and it seems compliant with 96Boards CE Extended, except for some reasons they decided to swap the low speed and high speed connectors, so I doubt the board is compatible with any of the 96Boards mezzanines. MapleBoard MP130 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H3 quad core Arm Cortex-A7 processor at up to 1.3GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3L 1600 MHz Storage – 8GB eMMC 4.41 flash, microSD slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 output with HDCP1.2 Connectivity – 10/100Mbps Ethernet Audio 2-ch 92dB ADC, 2-ch 100dB DAC, I2S/PCM Interface, […]
balenaFin Developer Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly Instructions
Balena launched balenaFin 1.1 at the end of last month. The board is a professional carrier board for Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 / 3+ Lite that includes support for variable voltage power input, optional PoE, industrial eMMC flash storage, a real-time Arm Cortex-M4 core via Artik-020 module, and more. Somehow a balenaFin 1.1 developer kit ended up in my home, and I’ll play with it in several weeks, but in the first part of the review, I’ll just check out the content of the package, and show how to assemble the kit. BalenaFin 1.1 Developer Kit Unboxing The local courier brought a largish balena Fin package. which contained a smaller balenaFin package, and the actual developer kit. Everything is nicely packaged in the box with the part related to power supply in a white box, a small opening for smaller accessories and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, as well […]
AAEON RTC-1010M Semi Rugged Tablet Runs Windows 10 IoT or Android 9
AAEON has introduced a new semi-rugged Intel Apollo Lake tablet with a 10.1” sunlight readable screen, IP54 certification, and optional modules such as a smart card reader, magnetic stripe reader (MSR) and 2D barcode scanner, as well as various mounting options from docking mounts to shoulder belts. The choice of operating system is also interesting for AAEON RTC-1010M tablet as it will come with Windows 10 IoT by default, and support for Android 9 is planned for Q2 2019. AAEON RTC-1010M tablet specifications: SoC (One or the other) Intel Celeron N3350 dual core processor @ 1.1 GHz / 2.4GHz (Turbo) with Intel HD graphics; 6W TDP Intel Pentium N4200 quad core processor @ 1.1GHz / 2.5GHz (Turbo) with Intel HD graphics; 6W TDP System Memory – 4 GB DDR3L (Default), up to 8GB Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot, optional mSATA III drive up to 512GB Display – […]
Acute Angle AA is a Triangle Shaped Mini PC with a Wooden Finish
Most mini PCs are boring black boxes, and maybe that’s the way it should be, but if you are looking for something a bit fancier Acute Angle AA is an Apollo Lake mini PC with a triangular shaped enclosure made of aluminum and something that looks like wood… The mini PC is equipped with an Intel Celeron N3450 quad core processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, 128GB SSD, and is currently sold for $199.99 shipped on GearBest. Acute Angle AA was apparently launched at CES 2018 riding the cryptocurrency wave, and selling for $600 as a dual use machine: a standard mini PC and an Ethereum mining machine during idle time working together with other Acute Angle AA mini PCs as part of the Acute Angle Cloud. None of the Ethereum / cryptocurrency mining / cloud options are mentioned in the specifications, but you still get a uniquely designed machine […]
Privacy Badger and QuantCast Choice GDPR Compliance Popup
So last year, the European Union enacted a new privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that give users more control about their privacy settings (handling of cookies etc..), and that come with the threat of heavy fines for non-compliance starting at up to €10 million, or 2% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher. Small blogs like CNX Software will never make that kind of money over the course of their life time, but we must still comply. After discussing with other bloggers, I activated Quantcast Choice plugin for European users last year in order to be in compliance to the best of my knowledge. That means the first time a European user visits the website he/she should be presented with the following window to either accept the default use of cookies, or click on “Show Purposes” to either decline all […]
Google to Launch Edge TPU Powered Coral Development Board and USB Accelerator
Several low power neural network accelerators have been launched over the recent years in order to accelerator A.I. workloads such as object recognition, and speech processing. Recent announcements include USB devices such as Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 or Orange Pi AI Stick2801. I completely forgot about it, but Google also announced their own Edge TPU ML accelerator, development kit, and USB accelerator last summer. The good news is that Edge TPU powered Coral USB accelerator and Coral dev board and are going to launch in the next few days for respectively $74.99 and $149.99. Coral Development Board Coral dev board is comprised of a base board and SoM wit the following specifications: Edge TPU Module SoC – NXP i.MX 8M quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with Arm Cortex-M4F real-time core, GC7000 Lite 3D GPU ML accelerator – Google Edge TPU coprocessor delivering up to 4 TOPS System Memory – […]
Linux 5.0 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.0: Ok, so the last week of the 5.0 release wasn’t entirely quiet, but it’s a lot smaller than rc8 was, and on the whole I’m happy that I delayed a week and did an rc8. It turns out that the actual patch that I talked about in the rc8 release wasn’t the worrisome bug I had thought: yes, we had an uninitialized variable, but the reason we hadn’t immediately noticed it due to a warning was that the way gcc works, the compiler had basically initialized it for us to the right value. So the same thing that caused not the lack of warning, also effectively meant that the fix was a no-op in practice. But hey, we had other bug fixes come in that actually did matter, and the uninitialized variable _could_ have been a problem with another compiler. Regardless – all […]
GameShell Kit Review – Part 2: An Hackable Retro Gaming Console
ClockworkPi GameShell is an hackable retro gaming console combining Arm Linux and Arduino boards that happens to come in kit form, and that’s lot of fun to assemble as we’ve seen in the first part of the review of ClockworkPi GameShell. Since then I’ve had time to have more fun, play some games, and experiment with the device, so I’ll report my experience and point out the good parts, as well as some of the shortcomings I came across. We can press the power button to start it up, and after a few seconds we get to the main menu with several icons including… the self-describing Settings, Retro Games with MAME, MGBA, NESTOPIA, and PCxs emulators that require your own ROMs/BIOS, as well as Indie Games with ready to play games like OpenTyrian spaceship shooting game, or NyanCat. Moving on to the right of the menu we’ve got the famous […]