$30 FireAnt Development Board Features Efinix Trion T8 FPGA (Crowdfunding)

FireAnt Trion T8 FPGA Board

When I think FPGA, company names such as Xilinx, Altera (now Intel), or even Microsemi come to my mind. But there are also other companies such as Anlogic or Lattice Semi that offer FPGA chips. Today I’ve come across another FPGA silicon vendor, namely Efinix, with their Trion T8 FPGA found in XIPS Technology’s tiny FireAnt development board targeting makers and hardware designers. FireAnt specifications: FPGA – Efinix Trion T8 (T8F81C2) with 7384x LE counts, 8x embedded multipliers, 1x low-power oscillator, 1x PLL, 122.88 kbit internal RAM; Package – BGA-81 (5×5 mm) Storage – 8 Mbit serial NOR Flash Expansion – 2x 20-pin headers (soldered or unpopulated) with up to 35 GPIOs Debugging & Programming Micro USB 2.0 port via FTDI FT232HQ USB to serial chip JTAG signals in bottom layer Misc – Onboard 33.333 MHz crystal oscillator for PLL; 6x LEDs including 4 user configurable; 3x buttons (Reset, BTN1, […]

GAPPoc AI development boards based on the GAP8 RISC-V Chip

GreenWaves has developed a development board based on the GAP8 chip which can be evaluated from a GAPuino board, a generic board that can run off a low power external power source or USB and is compatible with the Arduino ecosystem.  Recently the company moved beyond the generic board to the GAPPoc, platform which stands for GAP8 Proof of Concept. The GAPPoc is focused on a class of applications which can be embedded on a single board and able to carry hardware such as crystal or external memory, sensors, a radio fit, and a battery. The board will be geared towards a set of low power functions for a particular class of applications.  This is a family of boards designed to increase the range of abilities in edge Artificial Intelligence.  At this time there is only a single board with a platform to enhance AI, targeting Computer Vision in the […]

Programmable USB Hub Power Adjustable with Built-In Dev Board (Crowdfunding)

Capable Robot Components has launched its Crowd Supply campaign for the Programmable USB Hub in June of 2019. The hub is a feature rich and component rich USB hub that has a dev board built-in. The entire system is housed in an extruded aluminum case, with all the numbering and lettering and port attachments in brilliant white.  Control power and data flow, directly through the unit. The first 40 units are sold out. There seem to be good reasons why these USB Hubs sell out fast.  There was an in-depth article written on a similar hub some time ago.  Inside the enclosure is an array of functionality packed neatly onto a small board. There are 4x USB 2.0 ports that are High-Speed downstream ports and 1x upstream port, a 5th endpoint on the USB hub exposes 2 12C buses via Sparkfun Qwiic connectors, the UART and 2X GPIO. The input power is […]

Khadas VIM3 Review – Part 1: Kit Unboxing and Assembly

Khadas VIM3 Review

We started to read about Khadas VIM3 in May of this year as an Amlogic S922X development board with an M.2 socket for NVMe SSD, and 802.11ac WiFi 5 & Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module. Eventually, Shenzhen Wesion decided to change the processor to Amlogic A311D before the launch last month, since it does not cost much more, but includes a 5.0 TOPS neural processing engine. The company has sent me a Khadas VIM3 kit for evaluation and review. Before going through the software part, and especially the tools for the NPU which will be one of the highlights of the board, I’ll check out what I received today, and show how to assemble the kit. Khadas VIM3 Kit Unboxing The package is rather boring… But what’s really important is what’s inside… We’ve got an enclosure, a smaller package with the board itself, a USB-C power supply, a thermal pad + […]

Microchip SAMA5 based Giant Board Launched on Crowd Supply for $50 and Up

Giant board

Earlier this year we gave you details about some new development board, most especially about the Giant board. A tiny single board computer that runs Linux on Arm Cortex-A5 processor.  This super tiny single-board computer (SBC) is based on the Adafruit Feather form factor. Unlike its name, the giant board is actually a small microchip. And it packs an awful lot of power for its size. The news is that it has launched on Crowd Supply for $50 and up. In addition, the giant board implements the power of size, which makes it unique. It squeezes SBC into a package the size of a microcontroller board. This will in turn relax memory, storage, and processing constraints. Consequently allowing you to effectively work on your projects. Another thing to know about the Giant Board is that it runs full Debian Linux.  Giving developers and users access to an endless number of […]

NanoPi M4 RK3399 SBC Price Drops to $50 and Up

NanoPi M4

The launch of Raspberry Pi 4 SBC has generated lots of interest, especially with the extra performance and low $35 price tag that has made most alternatives suddenly less interesting. However, Raspberry Pi 4 benchmarks show it’s not quite the fastest board around, and for example, Rockchip RK3399 platforms are still quite faster, sometimes as much as twice as fast. They do cost much more though, often more than twice, and so far one of the cheapest RK3399 boards was NanoPi M4 going for $65. FriendlyELEC has now decided, certainly in response to Raspberry Pi 4 offering, to lower the price to $50 for the 2GB RAM version which compares to $45 with Raspberry Pi 4 2GB, as well as $75 for the 4GB RAM version (was $95). NanoPi M4 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 big.LITTLE hexa-core processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 @ up to 2.0GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 @ up […]

Khadas VIM3 SBC Launched with Amlogic A311D Processor, 5 TOPS NPU

Khadas VIM3 Amlogic-A311D SBC

We’ve previously written about Khadas VIM3 Amlogic S922X development board and revealed the price tag for VIM3 Basic ($69.99) and VIM3 Pro ($99.99) with a launch date announced for June 24. As time has passed, this has become “fake news” except for the launch date, as Khadas VIM3 SBC has indeed launched but for $99.99 (Basic) and $139.99 (Pro). What’s going on? Why the large price increase? That’s because Khadas team has decided to provide a more powerful platform to the community, and replace Amlogic S922X processor with Amlogic A311D processor boasting higher clock speeds and a 5.0 TOPS NPU. Another version may also become available later on with the soon-to-be-released Amlogic S922X-B processor whose Cortex-A73 cores are clocked at up to 2.2 GHz, instead of 1.7 GHz for the original Amlogic S922X processor that will be referred to Amlogic S922X-A in the future. New Khadas VIM3 SBC specifications: SoC […]

PanGu Board an SBC Based on the STM32MP1 Processor

PanGu Board

The PanGu Board is a single board computer (SBC) that is feature-rich and versatile, at an affordable price point. The board powered by STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 processor was released in February of 2019 and hadn’t really made much a splash in the pool of microprocessors available at the time. The processor is now the main feature of the PanGu Board, an SBC with a host of features and utilizing the Arm dual-core Cortex–A7 MPU and the Cortex-M4 coprocessor to allow for more enhanced multimedia ability and all the heavy real-time processing that users are calling for today. Hardware Features MPU Dual Cortex-A7, 650MHz Cortex-M4, 209Mhz 3D GPU Flash & Memory 16-bit DDR3L, up to 1GByte 8-bit eMMC Flash Quad-SPI NOR Flash Supports Micro SD Audio 3.5mm stereo headphone jack support microphone input Display Parallel RGB LCD interface, the resolution up to WXGA (1366×768) MIPI DSI interface Support for resistive and capacitive […]