SCUBAPRO-UWATEC and Energy Micro have unveiled the SCUBAPRO Meridian dive computer powered by Energy Micro EFM32 Gecko MCU. Meridian is a sophisticated dive computer in a watch design, powered by a CR2032 lithium battery. The companies claim the Meridian is the world’s first 32-bit dive watch-computer. It can operate at depths of up to 120 meters, incorporates an advanced diving algorithm, performs multi-gas decompression and features an heart rate monitor that enables adaptive workload calculations. The watch computer can be used both during diving, configured to display a variety of dive information including depth, dive time, decompression status and water temperature, and above the surface where it handles remaining desaturation time, no-fly time. Its built-in thermometer and altimeter can also be used for mountain treks. The MCU used in the Meridian is the Energy Micro EFM32G890 Gecko, a 32MHz 32-bit MCU based on ARM Cortex-M3 consuming 180µA/MHz is active mode […]
Ainol Novo 7 Aurora II Android 4.0 Tablet Features AMLogic AM8726-MX Cortex A9 Processor
Last week, I wrote about the Rockchip RK3066 based Cube U30GT Android 4.0 Tablet, and today I’ll blog about the Ainol Novo 7 Aurora II, one of the first Android 4.0 tablet powered by the new AMLogic AM8726-MX dual core Cortex A9 processor. Here are the specs of the device: CPU – AMLogic AM8726-M6 Cortex-A9 Dual Core processor @ 1.5 GHz GPU – Mali 400MP RAM – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 8 GB NAND Flash / microSD Card slot (Support up to 16GB) Display – 7″ capacitive touch screen (5-point) IPS LCD (1024×600) Camera: 2.0 MPixel front camera Sensors – 4-way G-sensor Connectivity – Wi-Fi b/g/n. 3G via external 3G/WCDMA dongle Battery – 3700mAh Dimensions – 187 x 111 x 12 mm Weight – 360 grams The Aurora II will be available later this month and sell for about 190 USD. The company will also offer the cheaper Novo 7 […]
This is What a Calxeda 192-Core ARM Ubuntu 12.04 Server Looks Like
Last November, Calxeda announced its 32-bit ARM Chip for servers, and now there are been some good progress as Calxeda is currently showcasing a 192-core ARM Server running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server edition at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California. The server showcased has 192 cores (48 Calxeda EnergyCore quad core Cortex-A9 processors), consumes less than 300 Watts, supports up to 24 SATA drivers and runs Ubuntu 12.04 with OpenStack’s cloud management infrastructure. Karl Freund, Calxeda Vice President of Marketing said that the Calxeda server is running “a standard LAMP stack (running Calxeda’s website) along with other popular web frameworks such as node.js and Ruby on Rails, provisioning of OpenStack Nova compute instances, and even Canonical’s Metal-as-a-Service bare-metal provisioning.” The company also explained that a complete native build of the Ubuntu 12.04 kernel took less than an hour to build on a single node, 4 times faster than the […]
Editing AllWinner A10 Board Configuration Files (script.bin)
AllWinner A10 based devices all have board configuration files in binary format, sometimes refereed to as script.bin, evb.bin, sys_config.{product_nane}.bin store in the FAT partition with the kernel. You may want to decode those binary files to configure your hardware and/or disable/enable peripherals. For the Ubuntu image provided for the Mele A1000 set-top box, the file is called evb.bin and the two other files (mele.bin and sys_config1.mele_mod.bin) are not used. The filename can change since it is configurable in u-boot e.g.: load1=fatload mmc 0 43000000 evb.bin bootcmd=run load1 boot_mmc If you want to decrypt the binary files into text format (fex), you can retrieve bin2fex tool: git clone https://github.com/amery/sunxi-tools Build it: cd sunxi-tools make This will compile both bin2fex (binary to fex text files) and fex2bin (fex files to bin), but the later does not seem to work right now. fex2bin also works now. If you want to decrypt a configuration […]
Xibo Digital Signage Running on Mele A1000 AllWinner A10 Set-Top Box
Those following my blog know that I recently bought a Mele A1000 to play around. For those who are not familiar with this device, the Mele A1000 is a $70 Android set-top box featuring an AllWinner A10 cortex A8 processor and lots of peripherals, and it can easily be hacked to run a Linux distributions. This hardware would also be a great digital signage player thanks to its video playback capabilities: up to 2160p video decoding and 1080p video output. Last year, I ported Xibo, an open source digital signage player, to ARM and ran it in the Beagleboard emulator (qemu), but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out in a real hardware. I’ve tried this rootfs based on Linaro ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) image for BeagleBoard in the Mele A1000, by following an adaptation of the method I provided earlier. For this demo, I created a […]
Cube U30GT Android 4.0 10.1″ Tablet Powered by Rockchip RK3066
Alldocube Technology and Science will manufacture one of the first Android 4.0 tablet based on the new Rockchip RK3066 Dual Cortex A9 Processor: the Cube U30GT which will sell under 51cube.com brand. Here are the specs of the device: CPU – RK3066, Cortex-A9 Dual Core processor 1.6 GHz GPU – Quad Core Mali 400 with OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, OpenVG1.1 RAM – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 16 GB NAND FAST / microSD Card slot (Support up to 32G) Display – 10.1″ capacitive touch screen (1280×800) Camera: 2.0 MPixel front camera 2.0 MPixel rear camera Sensors – 4-way G-sensor Connectivity – Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth and 3G (via external 3G dongle). Battery – Up to 4 hours movie playback,up to 12 hours music playback and up to 6 hours web page browsing. Weight – 450 grams Charbax discovered this tablet last month in Hong Kong. You can watch the video below to have a closer […]
Portwell AMDY-7000 Series Mini-ITX Boards Based on AMD Embedded Processors
American Portwell Technology has announced the AMDY-7000 Series Mini-ITX embedded system boards targeting applications that require high quality graphics output with low power consumption such as digital signage, surveillance security monitoring, point of sales (PoS) and more. The company provides 3 families of AMDY-7000 series mini-ITX boards: AMDY-7000 – Single-core AMD Athlon II Neo R44L processor. AMDY-7001 – Dual-core AMD Turion II Neo N54H, AMD Athlon II Neo N36L or single-core AMD Athlon II Neo R44L processor. AMDY-7002 – Dual-core AMD Fusion G T56N processor. The AMDY-7000/7001/7002 Series models are powered by AMD Fusion processors featuring ATI HD 6320 and HD 4200 GPU. Depending upon the model, the power consumption ranges from a 12W to 25W. All boards can support up to 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM memory, dual display via VGA/DVI/HDMI/LVDS and dual LVDS (AMDY-7002 only), PCIe x1, PCIe x16 or half-size mini-PCIe depending on the model and dual Gbit Ethernet. […]
Ziilabs ZMS-40 Decodes 6 HD Videos and Maps them to 3D Objects Simultaneously!
Ziilabs uploaded an impressive video that shows the Ziilabs ZMS-40 simultaneously decoding 6 High Definition Videos (although they don’t say if it’s 720p or 1080p) with 5 H.264 videos and 1 VP8/WebM video and rendering them on 3D objects via OpenGL ES. That’s quite amazing, but the next question could be why would you need that much processing power in a chip aimed at tablets? Augmented reality perhaps… Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com