Broadcom BCMxxxx Category - Page 35 of 68 - CNX Software

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 […]

January 9, 2020February 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments

NComputing RX420(HDX) Raspberry Pi 4 Thin Client Works with Citrix HDX

NComputing RX300 Raspberry Pi 3 thin client was launched in 2017 with support for the company’ vSpace Pro desktop virtualization solution for Linux and Windows, and I tested it accessing a Windows Server 2006 host located in Singapore, and performance was pretty good for a remote system as I could play 1080p YouTube videos, browse multiple tabs in Chrome, etc.. relatively smoothly. This type of solution is aimed at businesses, for which it may be easier and cheaper to handle a fleet of devices using thin clients and servers, instead of traditional PC’s. Beside its vSpace Pro RX300 thin client, NComputing also introduced another Raspberry Pi 3 thin client that same year with RX-HDX using a design similar to RX300 but instead integrating support for Citrix HDX virtualization technology. NComputing now unveiled an update for the latter with RX420(HDX) thin client based on Raspberry Pi 4 SBC with 2GB RAM. […]

January 7, 2020January 7, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Raspberry Pi 4 Powered Open Source Hardware Robot Paves the Way for Robot Maids

Raspberry Pi 4 Open Source Hardware Robot

Eventually, we all expect robots to do chores and other manual tasks performed by humans such as preparing and serving food at restaurants, carry objects over rough terrain as opposed to just inside the warehouse with a flat floor, or even moves pieces on a chessboard when other humans are no here to play with us. I’m fully expecting to eventually own a robot maid of sorts to wash dishes, mop the floors, and perform other tasks on my behalf. We are not there yet, but Raspberry Pi 4 powered Pollen Robotics’ Reachy open source-hardware robot is getting us closer to the goal as it can handle small objects and via two robotic arms and a dual-camera head, and can also interact with humans using a microphone and a speaker. Key features and specifications of Reachy robot: Main body SBC – Raspberry Pi 4 SBC with 2GB according to a […]