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February 25, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Netgem SoundBox is a Speaker with Built-in Set-Top Box Features

Netgem, a company specializing in Connected TV & Home, has sent a press release about profit growth, and two new “innovations int its smart home roadmap” with voice control with Amazon, and SoundBox, a connected speaker which embeds set-top box technology. Netgem does not sell directly to consumers, but instead sell its products and solutions to service providers, and they have not provided a great deal of technical details. But we still know the company has improved Netgem Home Platform, a cloud service allowing the deployment and management of multi-screen features, content discoverability, with support for multi-room, multi-source music service through technology from Voxtok. SoundBox will then offer both video and audio service, and be controlled by voice using Amazon Alexa. The SoundBox will be customized for each Telco to adapt to the needs of local markets. A few more details may eventually surfaced on Netgem’s SoundBox product’s page. They’ll […]

December 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Seagate Duet Portable Hard Drive Automatically Syncs with Amazon Cloud Drive

Seagate has announced the launch of Seagate Duet 1TB portable hard drive with auto-sync to Amazon Cloud Drive, so that your data is always backed in the cloud. If you use the drive to backup data, that means you’ll have a extra backup copy in the cloud, which could be useful if the drive fails just when you want to back it up (it happened to me), or somehow your house burns down… Another advantage is that if you forget to take your drive with you, the data will be accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection from Amazon Cloud service. It connects through your Mac or PC’s USB 3.0 port, and sync files to the cloud after an initial setup with your Amazon account. Once the setup is done, you can use the drive as you’d normally do, and files will automatically be backed up in the cloud. The […]

October 9, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 IoT Starter Kit Supports AWS IoT Cloud Services

Amazon has just launched AWS (Amazon Web Services) IoT (Beta), a cloud platform that lets connected devices securely interact with cloud applications and other IoT devices. As pasrt of the announcement, they also released AWS IoT SDK that comes in three flavors: Embedded C SDK for C-based platforms such as Linux, RTOS, with variants for OpenSSL and mbed TLS. JavaScript SDK in Node.js Arduino Yún SDK. Ten started kits are currently officially supported by AWT IoT, many of them being existing platforms such as LinkIt One, BeagleBone Green, Intel Edison, or TI LaunchPad CC3200, with several of these kits including SeeedStudio’s Grove modules. One of the kits that’s completely new, at least to me, is Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 IoT Starter Kit which include a mini USB to USB cable, and Marvell 88MW302 development board with the following (preliminary) specifications: SoC – Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 ARM Cortex-M4 WiSoC with 512KB SRAM […]

October 1, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Amazon Fire TV 2015 Features Mediatek MT8173 Cortex A72 & A53 Processor

Last year, Amazon launched the Amazon Fire TV box based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor for $100. The company has recently introduced an upgraded model powered by Mediatek MT8173 quad core processor (2x Cortex A72, 2x Cortex A53), and with support for 4K videos, while keeping the same price tag. Fire TV 2015 specifications: SoC – Mediatek MT8173 quad core processor with 2x ARM Cortex A72 cores @ 2.0 GHz and two ARM Cortex A53 cores @ 1.6 Ghz, and a PowerVR GX6250 GPU System Memory – 2GB Storage – 8GB internal storage + micro SD slot up to 128GB Video Output – HDMI up to 2160p30, 108060, 720p60. HDMI CEC and HDCP 2.2 support Video Codecs – H.265, H.264 Audio Support Codecs – AAC-LC, AC3, eAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus), FLAC, MP3, PCM/Wave, Vorbis, Dolby Atmos (EC3_JOC) Dolby Audio, 5.1 surround sound, 2ch stereo, and HDMI audio pass through up […]

October 1, 2015October 1, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Nvidia Shield Android TV vs Apple TV vs Roku 3 vs Fire TV vs Nexus Player – Video Capabilities and Features Comparison

Since Nvidia released the Shield Android TV box, I’ve heard several people saying Nvidia raised the bar and even disrupted the TV box market by bringing a powerful HTPC and gaming console to the market for just $199. The company has now released OTA 2.0 firmware that improves HTPC capabilities, including under Kodi and Plex, and the box supports for 10-bit HEVC, H.264, and VP9 @ 4K, and audio pass-through for HD audio codecs such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master. As part of the release announcement, Nvidia also compared the Shield TV media capabilities to the ones of other US centric media players, namely Apple TV (2015), Roku 3, Amazon Fire TV (2015), and Nexus Player. Since it comes from Nvidia, it was also going to show the Shield TV in a good light, but I’m very surprised to see that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Roku would ship a […]

August 18, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

$5 Amazon Dash Buttons Can Be Hacked as WiFi Logging Buttons

Amazon launched Dash buttons earlier this year in order to allow Amazon Prime customers to order products by simply pressing them. The small WiFi enabled buttons only cost $5, and looked like a nice thing to hack. And that’s exactly what Ted Benson did, and managed to use them to log his baby’s patterns like the number of time he poos, or wakes up at night by pressing some buttons, and storing the results in a spreadsheet. The hack does not involve any firmware or hardware modifications, and instead he noticed that the Dash was disconnected and sleeping, except when the button was pressed. So all he does is to detect ARP requests from the Dash using some Python code relying on Scapy library, and when the MAC address matches one of the dash MAC addresses (hard coded in the Python program), data is sent to a Google Spreadsheet using […]

October 28, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Amazon Introduces $39 Fire TV Stick to Compete with Chromecast, Roku Streaming Stick

Amazon has decided to put Fire TV media player functionality into a low cost HDMI TV stick called “Fire TV stick” to offer an alternative to the likes of Google Chromecast, and Roku Streaming Stick. The device is based on a Broadcom BCM28155 dual core processor with the same VideoCore IV GPU/VPU found in BCM2835 SoC used in the Raspberry Pi. Fire TV stick hardware specifications: SoC – Broadcom BCM28155 (Capri) dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor @ 1.0 GHz with VideoCore IV GPU/VPU System Memory – 1GB RAM with half reserved to the system, and the other half dedicated to video. Storage – 8 GB internal storage Video / Audio Output – HDMI 1.4b output, w/HDCP 1.4. Resolution: 720p and 1080p up to 60fps Video Codecs – H.264 Audio – AAC-LC, AC3, eAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus), FLAC, MP3, PCM/Wave, Vorbis Connectivity – dual-band/dual-antenna 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi (2×2 MIMO), Bluetooth 3.0 […]