Giveaway Week 2023 – i-Pi SMARC 1200 devkit with Mediatek Genio 1200 Cortex-A78/A55 SoC

i-Pi SMARC 1200 Yocto Linux glmark2 benchmark

We’ll end this year’s Giveaway Week with a pretty powerful development kit – ADLINK i-Pi SMARC 1200 – powered by a MediaTek Genio 1200 octa-core processor with four Cortex-A78 cores @ up to 2.2 GHz, four Cortex-A55 cores, an Arm Mali Mali-G57 MC5 GPU, 4K hardware video decoding and decoding support, and a 4.8 TOPS NPU. The mainboard is comprised of a SMARC 2.1-compliant system-on-module with 4GB LPDDR4 memory and 64GB UFS storage and fitted with a heatsink for cooling as well as a carrier board with a 4Kp60 capable HDMI 2.0 port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, two 40-pin headers for I/Os including one compatible with the 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header, plus LVDS connectors, MIPI CSI camera connectors, and M.2 expansion slots for storage and/or wireless expansion. I tested the MediaTek Genio 1200 devkit with a Yocto […]

Gigadevice GD32VW553 RISC-V microcontroller supports WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 LE

GD32VW553 WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2 LE

Gigadevice GD32VW553 is a new 160MHz RISC-V microcontroller for IoT applications with support for WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.2 Low Energy (LE) and available in QFN32 and QFN40 packages with up to 28 GPIOs. As an IoT chip, the chip supports various power modes and target wake time (TWT) for low power consumption, as well as WiFi features such as WPA3 and WiFi direct, while the radio can handle Bluetooth 5.2 LE bit rates of up to 2 Mbps and support the Long Range mode. Gigadevice GD32VW553 specifications: MCU core – 32-bit Nuclei N307 RISC-V core @ up to 160 MHz with RV32I / M / A / F / D / C / P / B instruction extensions Memory – 320KB SRAM Storage – 2048KB or 4096KB flash Wireless WiFI 6 802.11b/g/n/ax HT20 up to 114.7Mbps 802.11e QoS Enhancement (WMM). 802.11i (WPA, WPA2, WPA3). Open, shared key, and […]

Giveaway Week 2023 – WCH CH583M-R0 development board and some RISC-V microcontrollers

CH853M-R0 development board

Early this year, WCH sent me a few of their RISC-V MCU boards and chips to thank me for writing about their products. I gave one for review with some chips but it went to review heaven, or in other words, no review was ever written. I also sold a couple locally, and since I don’t think I’ll ever have time for a review, we are now giving away the remaining boards and chips here and on CNX Software Thailand. Today’s giveaway is the WCH CH583M-R0-1v1 board, also known as CH583EVT or CH583M-EVT-R0, based on the CH583 RISC-V Bluetooth 5.3 LE microcontroller that exposes all I/Os from the chip, a few buttons, and USB ports, and also features an SWD/UART header for debugging. You’ll find the documentation, code samples, an Android app and other resources to get started on GitHub. I’ll also throw all the remaining chips I have left […]

Giveaway Week 2023 – GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border Router devkit

Getting Started GL-S200 Thread Border Router

It’s already day 4 of CNX Software Giveaway Week 2023 and today, we’ll be giving away GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border router kit that also includes three USB or battery-powered Thread development boards to experiment with various Thread topologies. The GL-S200 router comes with a Qualcomm QCA9531 MIPS router processor running a fork of OpenWrt and provides two Fast Ethernet WAN/LAN ports, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 802.11b/g/n up to 150 Mbps, and support for Thread (via an 802.15.4 radio) and Bluetooth 5.0. The development boards are based on the Nordic Semi nRF52840 microcontroller and each features a potentiometer+button, a PIR sensor, and two RGB LEDs. I reviewed the GL-S200 Thread Border router kit using the router’s dashboard interface and demo firmware provided for the three development boards. This enabled me to test star topology and mesh networking, and play around with demo scripts and code samples to display sensor and potentiometer […]

STMicro launches Bluetooth 5.3/5.4 LE STM32WB09 MCU and STM32WB1MMC wireless module

B-WB1M-WPAN1 Bluetooth 5.4 LE evaluation board

STMicro has released two new Bluetooth 5.3/5.4 products with the STM32WB09 Cortex-M0+ wireless Bluetooth 5.3 LE microcontroller and the ST32WB1MMC Cortex-M0+/M4 Bluetooth 5.4 LE module for simpler designs, as well as the B-WB1M-WPAN1 evaluation board STMicro STM32WB09 Bluetooth 5.3 LE MCU STM32WB09 highlights: MCU core – Arm Cortex-M0+ core running at 64 MHz Memory and storage – 512 KB flash memory and 64 KB RAM Wireless Bluetooth 5.3 with support for up to 2 Mbps link, long-range Tx Power – Up to +8 dBm Rx Sensitivity -97 dBm at 1 Mbps -104 dBm at 125 bps Direction finding support (AoA/AoD) Integrated balun Misc – Capacitor-less 32 MHz crystal Power consumption 3.9 mA Tx current 3.2 mA Rx current at peak 15.5 µA/MHz for the Arm Cortex-M0+ core  Packages WLCSP36 (2.83 x 2.99 mm) VFQFPN32 (5×5 mm) The microcontroller integrates a balun and a 32 MHz crystal and is designed for […]

Toradex Titan Evaluation Kit features NXP i.MX 95 AI processor for IoT, industrial, and automotive applications

Toradex TITAN NXP i.MX 95 evaluation kit EVK

Toradex Titan Evaluation Kit features the NXP i.MX 95 Cortex-A55/M33/M7 heterogenous AI processor introduced at the beginning of the year with an NXP eIQ Neutron Neural Network Accelerator (NPU) for automotive, industrial, and IoT applications. The design is comprised of a carrier board and a SO-DIMM system-on-module with the NXP i.MX 95 SoC, up to 16GB LPPDR5 memory, up to 128GB eMMC flash storage, a WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module, a gigabit Ethernet controller, a PMIC, and a few other components. The carrier board also comes with 10GbE and Gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI video output, a few USB ports, and various expansion connectors and headers. Toradex Titan evaluation kit specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX 95 with Up to 6x Arm Cortex-A55 application cores clocked at 2.0 GHz with 32K I-cache and D-cache, 64KB L2 cache, and 512KB L3 cache 1x Arm Cortex-M7 real-time core clocked at 800 MHz […]

$15 Olimex RT1010-Py board runs MicroPython on 500 MHz NXP i.MX RT1011 Cortex-M7 MCU

Olimex RT1010Py

Olimex RT1010-Py is a small development board powered by a 500 MHz NXP i.MX RT1011 Cortex-M7 MCU designed to run MicroPython and about four times faster than the Raspberry Pi Pico. The board comes with two 20-pin GPIO headers exposing various interfaces such as SPI and I2C, a microSD card slot for storage, two buttons, and a USB-C Type port for power and programming. The RT1010-Py also includes a 12-pin fUEXT connector to connect Olimex’s UEXT modules via a flat cable. Olimex RT1010-Py specifications: SoC – NXP iMX RT1011 crossover microcontroller with an Arm Cortex-M7 clocked at 500 MHz and 128KB SRAM/TCM Storage – 2MB SPI Flash, microSD card slot USB – 1x USB 2.0 OTG Type-C port Expansion 2x 20-pin headers with up to 15x GPIO, 3x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 1x I2S, 4x PWM. 5x analog input fUEXT connector (12-pin flat cable 0.5 mm step connector) with […]

Renesas RA8M1 is the world’s first Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller

Renesas RA8M1 Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller

Renesas RA8M1 is an up to 480 MHz Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller with Arm Helium technology to improve DSP and machine learning performance on Cortex-M microcontrollers, and delivering up to 6.39 CoreMark/MHz performance using EEMBC’s CoreMark, or over 3,000 CoreMark at 480 MHz. The Arm Cortex-M85 core was first unveiled in April 2022 as a faster Cortex-M7 alternative and new Arm Helium technology that delivers machine learning performance similar to Cortex-M55 application processor. We had some teases about the upcoming Renesas Cortex-M85 in the last year, but the world’s first Cortex-M85 microcontroller is finally here. Renesas RA8M1 key features and specifications: MCU core – Arm Cortex-M85 clocked at 240 to 480 MHz with Helium MVE (M-Profile Vector Extension) with 32KB I/D Caches and 12KB Data Flash Memory & Storage 1MB SRAM with TCM 1MB to 2MB Flash memory External memory interfaces (CS/SDRAM) Camera – 16-bit Capture Engine Unit (CEU) interface Communication […]