PSLab Electronics Lab Board is Now Available for $65

PSLab Electronics Lab

Pocket Science Lab (PSLab) is an open source hardware USB board that aims to bring electronics labs to the masses, as it can act as an oscilloscope, voltmeter, programmable voltage and current source, logic analyzer, or signal generator when connected to a PC or mobile phone. This is not professional equipment, and instead designed for STEM education. When we first covered the board in August, it was still in development, but I’ve just found it is now listed and in stock on Seeed Studio for $64.90. FOSSASIA and OpnTec are the organization behind the board’s development. Here’s a reminder of PSLab board main specifications: MCU – Microchip PIC24EP256GP204 16-bit microcontroller @ up to 70 MHz with 32KB SRAM, 256KB flash Wireless Connectivity Footprint for ESP8266 module (ESP-12E) for 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (on bottom of board) Bluetooth extension slot 4-Channel, up to 2MSPS Oscilloscope 12-bit Voltmeter. Programmable gain. Input ranges from […]

Tiny Giant Board Runs Linux, Follows Adafruit Feather Form Factor

Giant Board

If you want a tiny single board computer that runs Linux on Arm Cortex-A processor, some options include Raspberry Pi Zero (W), PocketBeagle, or FriendlyElec NanoPi Duo with the latter being smaller and more powerful than RPi Zero although it lacks video output. Another potential option that may become available soon is the Giant Board, which as its name clearly does not imply, is a really tiny board powered by Microchip Atmel SAMA5 Cortex-A5 processor, and leveraging Adafruit Feather form factor. Giant board preliminary specifications: SiP – ATSAMA5D27C-D1G with Microchip SAMA5D2 Arm Cortex-A5 Processor 500MHz, 128MB DDR2 RAM Storage – Micro SD slot for OS and storage Peripherals & I/Os 6x 12-Bit ADC with 3.3V Reference 4x 16-Bit PWM ADC external trigger PWM external trigger 1x I2C, 1x SPI, 1x UART Misc- Power button Power Supply 5V via micro USB port 3.7V LIPO support for portable projects The Microchip / […]

SEI 520 is a 2-in-1 Android TV Hybrid Set-top Box and Smart Speaker

SEI 520 Android TV Smart Speaker

SEI Robotics has showcased a new device at CES 2019 that looks like a smart speaker, and SEI 520 is indeed a smart speaker with Google Assistant support, but it also adds a digital TV tuner and a quad-core Cortex A53 processor running Android TV 9.0 operating system to allow you to watch live TV, and stream videos. Preliminary specifications for SEI 520 smart speaker: SoC – Quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, possibly Amlogic S905X2 System Memory – 2GB RAM Storage – 16GB eMMC flash Video Output – HDMI up to 4K UHD Video Decode – VP9 and H.265/HEVC Audio Output – HDMI audio + optical S/PDIF Input – Far-field microphone Speaker – No technical details provided Connectivity – Ethernet, 2T2R MIMO WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0 Tuner – DVB-S2X/T2/C, ATSC, ISDBT USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 2.0 port Misc – IR blaster Power Supply – 12V DC via […]

tinyWiFi-5G is a NanoPi NEO Air Clone with 5 GHz WiFi

tinywifi-5G

NanoPi NEO Air is a tiny Allwinner H3 board with 802.11 b/g/n WiFi connectivity that launched in 2016 for $17.99 and is now available as NanoPi NEO Air-LTS (Long Term Support) for $28 and up. A company – or group of software developers – called tinyDebian decided to create a clone based on NanoPi NEO Air design, but replacing the 2.4 GHz Ampak AP6212 802.11n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0 LE module by a dual-band Realtek RTL8821CS module that supports 802.11 b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2 LE. Meet tinyWiFi-5G. NanoPi NEO Air comes with two different storage configuration (8GB or 32GB flash), but tinyDebian did not provide the full specifications of the board, so tinyWiFi-5G board specifications below are preliminary: SoC – Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex A7 @ 1.2 GHz with an ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 512 MB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC Flash + micro SD card slot Connectivity […]

Test AI Performance in Android with AI Benchmark App

AI Benchmark App

Many new phones now come with Silicon-on-Chips (SoC) featuring a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) or similar IP block(s) aiming to accelerate A.I workloads such as facial recognition or object detection. Some silicon vendors will report performance in terms of TOPS (Trillion of Operation per Seconds) with for example 2.25 TOPS for the latest Mediatek Helio P90 processor, or 4.20 TOPS for Hisilicon Kirin 980 SoC. However, those numbers can be deceptive, and nothing beats actual tests. However, last time I checked Android benchmarks such as Antutu do not include tests specific to artificial intelligence just yet. Luckily there’s already an app for that called AI-Benchmark which you’ll find on Google Play. The benchmark includes 9 tasks: Object Recognition / Classification with MobileNet – V2 Object Recognition / Classification with Inception – V3 Face Recognition with Inception ResNet V1 Image Deblurring with SRCNN 9-5-5 neural network Image Super-Resolution with VGG – […]

Radxa Rock Pi 4 Review – Part 1: A First Look at RockPi 4B Performance Set

Rock Pi 4

Hey, Karl here with another RK3399 board. This one is by Radxa and is called the Rock Pi 4. There are 2 main variants to this board and I was shipped the B version “performance set” which includes a power supply, heatsink, and acrylic case. Also shipped was 16gb eMMC 5.1 module, eMMC flashing board, and USB-TTL debug cable. It looks like the difference is the B version has AC wifi and GbE LAN with PoE support with a hat. The A version only has GbE. Rock Pi 4B Performance Set Unboxing Some of the more notable specs eMMC module support M.2 NVME SSD support (SATA not supported) HDMI 2.0 4k@60htz MIPI DSI 2 lanes via FPC connector 3.5mm audio jack MIPI CSI 2 lanes via FPC connector, support up to 8MP camera 802.11 ac wifi Bluetooth 5.0 40-pin expansion header :  1 x UART 2x SPI bus 2x I2C […]

ClearFog CX LX2K Networking Board is Powered by NXP LX2160A 16-core Processor

ClearFog CX LX2K

SolidRun started their ClearFog family of networking boards back in 2015 with Marvell ARMADA based ClearFog Pro board exposing 7 Gigabit Ethernet ports, an SFP cage, mPCIe/mSATA sockets, and more. Since then the company has launched several other ClearFog boards with small variation in the name with the latest being ClearFog CX 8K equipped with a COM Express module based on Marvell ARMADA A8040 quad-core Arm Cortex A72 processor. Today I was made aware that the company leveraged of the flexibility of having a COM Express module by offering a more powerful version of the board – ClearFog CX LX2K – powered by NXP LX2160A networking processor with 16 Arm Cortex-A72 cores, 100GbE support, 24x PCIe Gen4 lanes, and more. The rest of the specifications are pretty much the same since the COM Express carrier board – pictured above – remains the same: COM Module – CEx7 LX2K module with […]

Rockchip RK1808 Cortex-A35 NPU Delivers up to 3.0 TOPS

RK1808 NPU AIoT Solution

Rockchip RK3399Pro was expected to be the first processor from the company featuring an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to accelerate artificial intelligence workloads, but eventually went through a redesign, and the community found it gave birth to RK1808 NPU by looking at a device tree file in the Linux kernel. Rockchip has now made the NPU official at CES 2019, and we now know a little bit more. Here are the specifications shared by the company: Dual-core Arm Cortex-A35 CPU NPU computing performance up to 3.0TOPs supporting INT8/INT16/FP16 hybrid operation VPU supporting 1080P video codec Built-in 2MB system-level SRAM Display – MIPI/RGB video output Camera – MIPI/CIF/BT1120 Camera video signal input with built-in ISP Audio Microphone array support with hardware VAD function for low-power monitoring and far-field wake-up Audio output I/O PWM/I2C/SPI /UART USB3.0/USB2.0 PCIe interface Support for Gigabit Ethernet and external WiFi/Bluetooth modules Manufacturing – 22nm FD-SOI process It […]

Exit mobile version
UP 7000 x86 SBC