Broadcom BCMxxxx Category - Page 34 of 67 - CNX Software

February 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

$99 RAK7246 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway Features Raspberry Pi Zero W SBC

Outdoor LoRaWAN gateways meant to be deployed in the field usually cost several hundred dollars, so companies also offer cheaper gateways for indoor use that can be used by developers. RAKWireless offers this type of gateway with products such as Pilot Gateway Pro RAK7243 based on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ board, or RAK7244 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway featuring the more recent Raspberry Pi 4 board and sold for $212 and up with price depending on options such as cellular connectivity. The company has now worked on providing much cheaper indoor/developer gateways with their RAK7246 and RAK7246G LoRAWAN developer gateways with the latter adding GPS. RAK7246 is available. RAK7246 key features and specifications: SBC – Raspberry Pi Zero W board with Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 processor @ 1GHz, 512MB RAM Storage – 16GB MicroSD card Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 via Cypress CYW43438 module found on RPi Zero W board […]

February 11, 2020February 11, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

KKSB Raspberry Pi 4 Aluminum Case Review – Benchmarks at Stock Clock and Overclocked to 2.0 GHz

KKSB is a Swedish company designing and manufacturing metallic products for various open-hardware products such as single board computers including Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ODROID, Orange Pi and others, as well as mobile phone and tablet stands, and they also have a mini-ITX case planned for March. The company approached CNX Software to review their latest Raspberry Pi 4 case, and I was interested to find out how it would handle cooling. KKSB Raspberry Pi 4 Case Aluminum Unboxing So I recently received the enclosure in a mostly white package. The case comes in two parts as well as a thermal pad for the processor, mounting screws, rubber pads, and two plastic bits for the LED. Aluminum Case Assembly First, peel over the plastic film on one side of the thermal pad, and place it on the extrusion for the processor on the top part of the enclosure. Remove the second […]

February 3, 2020February 3, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 is Now OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformant, Work on Vulkan Drivers Started

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4 was launched last June with a new Broadcom BCM2711 SoC featuring an upgraded Videocore VI GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics API. Some drivers only implement a subset of OpenGL 3.0/3.1 3D graphics standard defined by the Khronos Group, and the good news is that Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is now OpenGL ES 3.1 conformant, as it passed all tests in Khronos conformance test suite. That means that any Linux programmed using OpenGL ES 3.1 API should work out of the box, although in some cases there may be issues/bugs that were not detected by the test suite. The Vulkan API is an evolution of OpenGL ES API that is meant to be more power-efficient as it better makes utilize of multi-core processors. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has also started working on Vulkan support for Raspberry Pi 4, and while the driver is […]

February 2, 2020February 1, 2020 by Stephen Vicinanza - 8 Comments

Sania Box Raspberry Pi 4 based DIY Kit is Designed for STEM Education (Crowdfunding)

Sania Box, A Special Kind of DIY RPi4 Based Kit The 13-year-old Sania Jain is a young entrepreneur, published writer and tech aficionado who now offers an embedded computer kit called Sania Box. The Raspberry Pi 4 based embedded system kit comes with an add-on board and has been designed to develop coding skills in anyone 8 years old or more, and for learning IoT, STEM, and for all kinds of DIY fun. Background Some DIY RPi-based kits can be found in our archives, such as the Piper Computer Kit 2 made for children’s education, but there’s now another option thanks to Sania Jain who has been designing, building, and writing in the STEM arena for some time. Sania Jain’s accomplishments are amazing, and look to be just her beginning in STEM-based endeavors. A Concept With Wide Reach The Sania Box was conceived by Sania Jain and built by Moonshot […]

January 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 49 Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 Benchmarked with 32-bit and 64-bit Debian OS

Raspberry Pi 4 AES memset 32-bit vs 64-bit

The first Raspberry Pi board with a 64-bit Arm processor was Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, and all new models including the latest Raspberry Pi 4 come with four Arm Cortex-A 64-bit cores. But in order to keep backward software compatibility with the original Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 2, the Raspberry Pi foundation decided to keep provided 32-bit OS image, so nearly everybody is now running a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware, and Eben Upton famously claimed it did not matter. We already wrote that 64-bit Arm (Aarch64) boosted performance by 15 to 30% against 32-bit Arm (Aarch32) several years ago, but Matteo Croce decided to try it out himself on Raspberry Pi 4 board first running benchmarks on Raspbian 32-bit before switching to a lightweight version of Debian compiled as aarch64. Dhrystones is much faster with the 64-bit OS, namely 50% faster, but as a synthetic benchmark, its […]

January 27, 2020January 27, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 5.5 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.5 has just been released by Linus Torvalds: So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter module loading fixes, David didn’t think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it’s really been very quiet indeed – there’s a panfrost driver update too, but again it didn’t really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week. Outside of those, it’s all really tiny, even if some of those tiny changes touched some core files. So despite the slight worry that the holidays might have affected the schedule, 5.5 ended up with the regular rc cadence and is out now. That means that the merge window for 5.6 will open tomorrow, and I already have a couple of pull requests pending. The timing for this next merge window isn’t optimal […]

January 20, 2020January 20, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

MarsCat is a Bionic Cat Powered by Raspberry Pi 3 (Crowdfunding)

Elephant Robotics MarsCat is a robotic cat that tries to mimic the behavior of actual cats through artificial intelligence. It can have a life of its own roaming the house, and you can also interact with it as it will play with toys/teasers through its camera, and you can send voice command to ask it to walk, run, look at you, be quiet. etc… but the trick is that it may not always obey like a real cat, and its personality will evolve depending on how you interact with it. Beside being a bionic pet, MarsCat can also be used to teach/learn robotics as the company will release an open-source SDK allowing you to change the Python code running on the Raspberry Pi 3 board powering the cat, and access API’s to control the camera, microphone, touch sensors, as well as the 16 servos connected to a Microchip ATMega2560 MCU […]

January 12, 2020January 12, 2020 by Siji Sunny - 27 Comments

Build & Customise OpenWrt for Raspberry Pi

OpenWrt is an open source operating system based on Linux especially designed for embedded & networking devices. This OS is well known for its lightweight footprint, standardized configuration approach (using LUCI interface), easy to build images, as opkg packages. At the core of OpenWrt is a writable root file system, where the users can add and/or remove packages, modify configs etc…. without having to re-flash the entire firmware/operating system. This is achieved by overlaying a read-only compressed SquashFS file system with a writable JFFS2 filesystem using OverlayFS. You can install pre-built packages from OpenWrt repo (which contains approximately 3500 packages) using opkg package manager. The Build Process Below steps cover the required pre-build environment and how to build OpenWrt from the source tree for Raspberry Pi board. Even though OpenWrt recommends Debian for the build machine, I built it successfully on Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop. Setup Build Environment

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install git-core subversion mercurial build-essential libssl-dev libncurses5-dev unzip gawk zlib1g-dev
unset SED
unset GREP_OPTIONS 
export GREP_OPTIONS= 
export PATH=$PATH:~/openwrt/openwrt/staging_dir/host/bin 
export PATH=$PATH:~/openwrt/openwrt/staging_dir/toolchain-mips_34kc_gcc-5.3.0_musl-1.1.16

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install git-core subversion mercurial build-essential libssl-dev libncurses5-dev unzip gawk zlib1g-dev

unset SED

unset GREP_OPTIONS

export GREP_OPTIONS=

export PATH=$PATH:~/openwrt/openwrt/staging_dir/host/bin

export PATH=$PATH:~/openwrt/openwrt/staging_dir/toolchain-mips_34kc_gcc-5.3.0_musl-1.1.16

Build OpenWrt […]