$35 expEYES Junior Transforms the Raspberry Pi, Aakash2 Tablet or any Linux Powered Device into an Electronics Lab

I remember in high school in France, our class only had 2 oscilloscopes and few other electronics equipment, needless to say I did not actually get to use an oscilloscope until I went to university. It would have been nice to be able to play around with oscilloscopes, frequency generators, etc… earlier, but due to budget constraints, this was not possible. Dr Ajith Kumar, a scientist working with the Inter University Accelerator Centre of India, has spent several years working on an ultra low cost electronics lab composed of an oscilloscope and a signal generator to provide students attending schools that cannot afford regular equipments. This learning & experimentation tool is called expEYES, and a prototype was demonstrated last year with the Raspberry Pi. At the end of last year, the final version called expEYES Junior (aka expEYES 2.0) was announced, and is now available to schools and hobbyists in […]

Freescale Unveils Kinetis KL02, an Ultra Small (1.9×2.0mm) ARM Cortex M0+ Microcontroller

Freescale Semiconductor introduced the Kinetis KL02, the world’s smallest ARM MCU, at Embedded World 2013. KL02 is an ARM Cortex M0+ micro-controller designed to address the miniaturization needs of the Internet of things, and its size (1.9×2.0mm) makes it suitable for applications such as ingestible healthcare sensing, portable consumer devices, remote sensing nodes, and wearable devices.   Kinetis KL02 MCU features include: 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ core, 1.71-3.6V operation Bit manipulation engine for faster, more code-efficient handling of peripheral registers 32 KB flash memory, 4 KB RAM High-speed 12-bit analog-to-digital converter High-speed analog comparator Low-power UART, SPI, 2x IICI2C Powerful timers for a broad range of applications including motor control Power Efficiency – 15.9 CM/mA (Coremark 1.0) -40 °C to +85 °C operation The MCU is manufactured using chip-scale package (CSP) technology that allows to connect the die directly to the solder ball interconnects and, in turn, to the printed […]

mbed 2.0 SDK Released, becomes Open Source and Supports $12.95 Freescale Freedom Board

The mbed community has had a pretty busy week, with first the announcement that mbed SDK would become open source, the release of mbed 2.0, and finally support for the low cost Freescale Freedom board FRDM-KL25Zpowered by Kinetis Cortex M0+ KL25Z MCU. mbed becomes open source The mbed Software Development Kit (SDK), a C/C++ MCU software platform, has always been free (as in free beer) for both commercial and noncommercial use, and the large community around mbed has written tons of code for ARM microcontrollers. But now that the SDK has now a stable API, and the developers achieved transparent portability for code based on the SDK across multiple controllers and multiple toolchains, they decided to release the SDK source under an Apache 2.0 license. Although sharing modifications is encouraged, this license allows users to keep the changes closed if they wish to do so. mbed developers explain that the 3 […]

iWave Systems Announces RainboW-G15S Pico ITX Board Powered by Freescale i.MX6 Duallite/Solo Processor

iWave Systems has just launched the RainboW-G15S, a Pico ITX single board computer featuring Freescale i.MX 6 Solo and Dual Lite processor at Embedded World 2013, in Nuremberg, Germany. This embedded board targets intelligent industrial control systems, industrial human machine interface, ultra portable devices, home energy management systems, and portable medical devices. RainboW-GS15 Specifications: SoC – Freescale i.MX6 Dual Lite/Solo, (Quad /Dual compatible) System Memory – 512MB DDR3 (Expandable up to 2GB) Storage – On-board Micro SD slot, standard SD/SDIO slot, optional eMMC  support, and an optional SATA 7-pin connector (Probably just to make the board pretty since i.MX6 Solo and Duallite do not support SATA…) Connectivity – 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet USB – 2x USB Host Connector + micro USB OTG connector Misc – Half mini PCIe card connector, CAN Header Audio & Video interfaces: AC97 Audio Codec with Audio Out Jack & Audio In Header HDMI  Port LVDS connector  with […]

F9 Android Set-Top Box Features Samsung Exynos 4412 Processor

Geekbuying just announced they would be soon selling a tiny Android set-top box powered by Samsung Exynos 4412 quad core processor. This media player will come with 1 to 2 GB RAM, 8G to 16G flash, and run Android 4.0 (ICS), upgradeable to Android 4.1 or 4.2. Here are the specifications of this device: SoC – Samsung Quad Core Cortex-A9 Exynos 4412 @ 1.6GHZ + Mali-400 Quad Core GPU System Memory – 1GB RAM (optionally 2G) Storage – 8GB flash (optionally 16GB) + microSD slot Connectivity – WIFI 802.11 b/g/n Video Output – HDMI Audio Codec – MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, OGG, WAV, etc. Video Containers – AVI, MKV(XVID/px/H.264), MOV, TS, M2TS, RM/RMVB, FLV, 3GP, MPEG, DAT, MP4 USB – 2x USB 2.0 Power Supply – 5V/2A Weight – 109g The device will come with an HDMI cable, a power adapter, a 2.4Ghz remote control, and a user guide. Geekbuying […]

Renesas Unveils APE6 Octo Core big.LITTLE Processor

Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor is getting some competition with the announcement of Renesas AP6 processor at MWC2013. This SoC comes with the same big.LITTLE configuration (4x Cortex A15, 4x Cortex A7), but with a PowerVR SGX Series 6 ‘Rogue’ GPU, which, I assume, should outperform PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU used in Samsung SoC. R-Mobile APE6 could be the fastest mobile processor announced to date, and is currently showcased at Imagination Technologies booth at MWC 2013 running several OpenGL ES 3.0 applications, as well as a demonstration of Rightware’s Kanzi Studio, “a PC-based real-time WYSIWYG editor for designers and embedded engineers to create and customize embedded 3D user interface”. There’s very little information about the processor, so that’s basically all I have for now. But before I conclude, I’ll just drop a performance comparison chart between different PowerVR SGX series (source), since it’s the first mobile processor that I know of […]

ST Ericsson NovaThor L8580 Dual Core Processor To Match big.LITTLE Quad Core Processors Performance and Power Consumption

ST Ericsson already showcased NovaThor L8580 Cortex A9 processor @ 2.8 GHz at CES 2013. The processor features a technology called eQuad, and as I previously noticed there’s no mention of the number of cores at all on the website and many websites reported the processor featured 4 cores. The processor actually features 2 Cortex A9 core, but thanks to FD-SOI technology they are able to do the equivalent of a Quad Core big.LITTLE processor (i.e. 2x Cortex A15 + 2x Cortex A7) electrically. Since this is just done electrically, you can use the same software as before and will consume much less power, whereas big.LITTLE requires a lot of kernel work. A Cortex A9 will obviously be less powerful than a Cortex A15, but since they are able to boost the frequency up to 3GHz (probably limited to 2.5Ghz in actual product) this can compensate the lower performance, and […]

Samsung HomeSync Media Server Comes with a Dual Core Processor, 1TB Storage

Yesterday, Samsung announced the HomeSync, a media server featuring a dual core processor at 1.7 GHz, 1GB RAM, 8GB eMMC, and a 1TB hard drive. HomeSync is said to be running a modified version of Android Jelly Bean. Here are HomeSync specifications: Processor – Dual Core @ 1.7GHz (I’d guess it should be the Exynos 5250, but why all the mystery?) System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC + 1TB HDD Connectivity LAN – Gigabit Ethernet WiFi – 802.11 b/g/n 2.4GHz & a/n 5GHz HT40 2×2 MIMO Channel Bonding Bluetooth – V4.0 USB – 2x USB 3.0 Host, 1x Micro USB (11pin) Video Output – HDMI out Audio – Optical Audio (Audio Amp. Connection) Video Codec – H.264, H.263, MPEG4, VC-1, Sorenson Spark, WMV7/8, MP43, VP8, DivX Audio Codec – MP3, AAC LC/AAC+/eAAC+, WMA 9std/10pro/Lossless, FLAC, Vorbis, AMR-NB/WB, Wav, Mid, AC-3 DRM – HDCP 1.3/2.1, Playready, Widevide, Trustzone […]

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