Raspberry Pi based Hyper Keyboard Pi & hgTerm Handheld PCs, and RasPi Arcade Stick

hgterm DIY Raspberry Pi Handheld Computer

There are so many products and projects based on Raspberry Pi that it’s difficult to keep track, and many are often not that interesting, not because they are not useful, but instead because it just feels we’ve seen those before. But this week I’ve come accross three projects that looks to be newsworthy including two handheld computers with a 4″ display, and one retro-gaming console with standard arcade buttons and controls similar to what is found in Pandora’s Box/Key 5S. hgTerm DIY Raspberry Pi  Handheld Computer hgterm is a portable computer based on a stripped down Raspberry Pi 3 where the Ethernet port, HDMI port, and most of the USB ports have been removed. It features a 4″ touchscreen display, a Bluetooth keyboard all housed in a 3D printed case. It’s not actually a product that you can buy (yet), but a project made by Igor Brkić which you can […]

Fusion for TIVA v8 Development Board Enables Debugging & Programming over WiFi

Fusion for TIVA V8 Development Board

Texas Instruments TIVA Arm Cortex-M4 MCU family was first introduced in 2013, I tested a TIVA Launchpad the following years, and since microcontrollers have usually a long life span they are still in use today, and should still be available for many years. I’m writing about this TI MCU family today because MikroElektronika has just announced Fusion for TIVA V8 development board for TI TIVA, Stellaris and MSP432 microcontrollers with plenty of I/Os including some MikroBus expansion slots, as well as support for debugging and programming over WiFi in addition to the usual USB-UART interface. Fusion for TIVA v8 board specifications: MCU – Socket for MikroElektronika MCU CARD Display Interfaces 2x 20-pin TFT display connector 1x 16-pin LCD connector for 2×16 characters LCD displays in 4-bit mode,  optional PWM backlight driving feature Programming – On-board CODEGRIP programmer/debugger, JTAG connector for connecting an external programmer/debugger Connectivity – Ethernet port, WiFI in […]

One Mix 3 Yoga 8.4″ Mini Laptop is up for Pre-order for $760

One Mix 3 Yoga Pocket Laptop

In recent years we’ve seen several companies launch “mini laptops” with small 6″ to 7″ displays. They have the advantages of being really compact and lightweight, and thanks to Intel Gemini Lake & Amber Lake processors can be fairly powerful. The problem is that with small displays come small keyboards, and people have had a hard type typing text on those. So we’ve started seeing announcements for mini laptops with 8″ to 8.9″ displays such as GPD Pocket 2 Max and CHUWI minibook that should make like easier at the cost of a slightly larger and heavier devices. One Mix 3 Yoga appears to be one the first of those ultra mobile PCs for sale, or more exactly pre-order. You’ll find the pocket laptop on GeekBuying for $759.99 with shipping scheduled for next month. One Netbook One Mix 3 Yoga specifications: SoC – Intel Core m3-8100Y dual-core/quad-thread Amber Lake processor […]

Blueendless X3 Networked “HDD NAS Case” Runs Ubuntu on Marvell ARMADA 3720 SoC

Blueendless X3 2.5-inch HDD enclosure

We’ve previously covered inexpensive Kimax’ Ethernet & WiFi HDD enclosures for 2.5″ SATA drives, powered by MediaTek processor and running OpenWrt. If you need something more powerful and versatile yet still affordable, the easiest way is now likely to go with SBC based solutions such as ODROID-HC1/HC2 or dual SATA NAS enclosure for RockPro64. There may be another interesting option, as I’ve just been informed about another model of those networked HDD enclosure called Blueendless X3 “HDD NAS case” with Ethernet only (no WiFi), and that is equipped with the same Marvel ARMADA 3720 dual core Cortex-A53 processor as found in Marvell ESPRESSOBin board. Blueendless X3 specifications: SoC – Marvell ARMADA 3720 (88F3720) dual core Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.1 GHz System Memory – 512 MB DDR3 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash for OS, SATA 3.0 interface for 2.5″ drives based on ASMedia ASM1092R port multiplier Networking – 1x […]

More Intel Processor HW Security Flaws. Meet Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)

Intel MDS Zombieload, RIDL, Fallout

2018 did not start so well for processor vendors, especially Intel, but also AMD, Arm and others as some of their processors leveraging speculative execution were impacted by Spectre and/or Meltdown hardware security bugs. The workarounds to improve security had a downside as they affected performance in some specific use case. Panic ensued as the bug was revealed to the public a bit too early, so companies were not fully ready with their mitigations / workarounds. Then in summer of 2018, another hardware security flaw known as Foreshadow or L1 Terminal Fault came to light. The new flaw potentially enabled the attacker to access data stored in L1 cache.  Provided you have updated your operating systems to the latest version, your computers and devices should be protected against those vulnerabilities, and you can even check with a script working in Linux or FreeBSD. But this now looks like a never […]

ToyBrick RK3399Pro Board Shown to Outperform Jetson Nano SBC

Toybrick RK3399Pro

NVIDIA created a lot of buzz when they released $99 Jetson Nano SBC featuring a 128-core Maxwell GPU, and said to deliver 472 GFLOPS of compute performance for running modern AI workloads with a power consumption of around 5 watts. But Jetson Nano is not the only low cost platform to deliver high performance at low power for AI workloads, as for example Rockchip RK3399Pro (RK1808 NPU) found in boards such as Toybrick RK3399Pro is said to deliver 3 TOPS for INT8, 300 GOPS for INT16, and 100 GOPS for FP16 inferences. Those operations per second numbers can be confusing and misleading, so it’s important to check out the performance of actual neural network models, and Rockchip did provide some RK3399Pro benchmarks last year for Inception V3, ResNet34 and VGG16 models comparing the results to Apple A11, Huawei Kirin 970, and NVIDIA Jetson TX2. However, ideally you’d want result from […]

BB-400 Neuron Edge Dual Ethernet Industrial Controller Combines Raspberry Pi CM3+ and Arduino MCU

bb-400 neuron edge industrial controller

While the Raspberry Pi boards are mostly promoted as tools to teach STEM to kids and adults alike, they have found their way in a fair amount of industrial products, including ModBerry M500 industrial computer, Janz Tec emPC-A/RPI3 industrial embedded controller,  and Kunbus RevolutionPi RevPi Core among others. There’s yet another option with Brainboxes BB-400 Neuron Edge industrial controller that was announced last year with Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, but recently got an upgrade to Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+. The controller features two Ethernet ports and also includes an Arduino compatible microcontroller to control the system’s eight configurable digital inputs and outputs. BB-400 Neuron Edge industrial controller specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ with Broadcom BCM2837B0  quad-core , Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.2GHz, 1 GB LPDDR2, 32GB eMMC Flash storage MCU – Unnamed Microchip Atmel Arduino compatible microcontroller Connectivity Ethernet Uplink Port – 1x RJ45 jack, 10/100Mbps […]

Khadas VIM3 Amlogic S922X Board to Support M.2 NVMe SSD, WiFi 5, and Bluetooth 5 Connectivity

Khadas VIM3

Ever since the Amlogic S922X powered ODROID-N2 SBC launched last March, I keep reading praise for the processor and board which both deliver great performance at a relatively low price. Hardkernel was the only company that sold such a board so far, but this is about to change with some competition coming from Shenzhen Wesion with their upcoming Khadas VIM3 board that includes 2 to 4GB RAM, 16 to 32GB eMMC flash storage, a wireless module, support for M.2 NVMe SSD, and more. Even though more are planned in the future, two Khadas VIM3 models have been announced so far – Basic and Pro – with the following preliminary specifications: SoC – Amlogic S922X hexa-core processor with 4x Arm Cortex-A73 and 2x Cortex A53 cores, Arm Mali-G52 MP4 GPU, built-in Cortex-M4 core for “always-on” processing MCU – STMicro STM8S003 with Programmable EEPROM for power management, customizations, and boot media configuration […]

Firefly NVIDIA Jetson products