Wechip R69 Allwinner H3 TV Box goes for $19 Shipped

Wechip R69

A few years ago, it was relatively easy to purchase sub $20 TV boxes with some patience, but with the increase in RAM and flash prices, it’s been more difficult to find those ultra-cheap TV boxes. It turns out there’s such a deal now on Aliexpress where Wechip R69 TV box is sold for just $18.99 shipped. Now with an Allwinner H3 processor, 1GB RAM, and 8GB flash, I would not necessarily recommend such device for your media needs, but they can be useful for some specific use cases like a simple digital signage, or even to run Linux with some efforts. Wechip R69 also looks to be similar to Sunvell R69 TV box that is officially supported by RetroOrangePi, but with the pin-to-pin compatible Allwinner H2 processor, so it could make an inexpensive retro gaming console as well. Wechip R69 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex A7 processor […]

MUJA Touch Sensitive Gamepad Sticks to the back of Smartphones (Crowdfunding)

Gaming on smartphones has given rise to various accessories including smartphone gamepads, and smartphone docks to connect USB keyboard and mouse. MUJA is yet another Bluetooth gaming accessories that sticks to the back of your phone and offers four touch sensitive zones enabled 6 fingers operation once you include your two thumbs taking care of handling the control on the touch screen display of the phone itself. MUJA smart touchpad specifications: Connectivity – Bluetooth 4.2 up to 10 meters range Buttons – Four touch sensitive areas 17 suction cups to stick on back of smartphone (compatible with 4.7″ smartphone or larger) Battery – 450 mAh good for about 36 hours of playtime, 56 hours in standby Dimensions – 133 x 68 x 5.4mm Weight – 59 grams Certifications – PSE, telecom, FCC ,CE, RoHS You’ll just need to install MUJA app for Android or iOS on your smartphone with supports […]

Kodi 18 “Leia” Released Ahead of FOSDEM 2019

Kodi 18 Leia

As one should have expected based on the abstract of the upcoming Kodi presentation at FOSDEM 2019, Kodi 18 “Leia” has just been released a few days before the 2-day open source developer event. It’s been nearly two years since the release of Kodi 17 “Krypton”, and it took a little longer than initially expected for Kodi 18 to become stable enough for an official since there have been so many changes including half a million lines of code added by 36 open source developers, close to 10,000 commits for almost 9,000 changed files. Some of the improvements in Kodi 18 include: Retroplayer gaming with support for gaming emulators, ROMs and game controls. Digital Rights Management (DRM) decryption support to play subscription content Improved Music Library with better filtering, faster API access, and more Live TV improvements including support for new back-ends like Zattoo, Teleboy, and Sledovanitv.cz, as well as enhanced […]

Edu-C Arduino Compatible Board Targets Education & Game Development

Edu-C Arduino Board Game Development

Sometimes learning can be boring, and a potentially good way to get kids more engaged is to learn by playing. Edu-C Arduino compatible board is designed to teach game development to kids old and young, so they have a lasting reward once they complete programming of the board, or they may decide to customize the game further. Edu-C hardware specifications: MCU – Microchip Atmel AVR328 microcontroller Display – 28×64 pixel OLED display + 1-digita 7-segment display Game Inputs – Left and right potentiometers Misc – 8x LEDs, left & right LEDs, RGB LED, on/off power switch, reset button, buzzer USB – 1x micro USB connector for programming (CH340) and power Power Supply – 5V via USB; LiPo battery support The board ships with a 200 mAh Lipo battery, and a charger. Educational materials are also provided, but only in French right now, except for some documents which are in English. There […]

FOSDEM 2019 Open Source Developers Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM 2019

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where developers meet on the first week-end of February to discuss open source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2019 will take place on February 2 & 3, and the schedule has already been published with 671 speakers scheduled to speak in 711 events themselves sorted in 62 tracks. Like every year, I’ll create a virtual schedule based on some of the sessions most relevant to this blog in tracks such as  open hardware, open media, RISC-V, and hardware enablement tracks. February 2 10:30 – 10:55 – VkRunner: a Vulkan shader test tool by Neil Roberts A presentation of VkRunner which is a tool to help test the compiler in your Vulkan driver using simple high-level scripts. Perhaps the largest part of developing a modern graphics driver revolves around getting the compiler to […]

ClockworkPi GameShell Review – Part 1: Unboxing & Assembly Guide

ClockworkPi Gameshell Review

ClockworkPi Gameshell is a portable retro gaming console kit designed to be hackable being powered by Allwinner R16 processor to run Linux, as well as an Arduino compatible Atmel AVR MCU. It’s partially open source hardware with PDF schematics, and firmware source code available on Github. The device launched last year on Kickstarter, raised close to $300,000, and started shipping to backers last summer. The company has now sent me a sample for review, so let’s have a look. The first part of the review will be more than just an unboxing, since the game console is meant to be assembled by the end user, and I’ll report my experience doing so. ClockworkPi Gameshell Unboxing The kit comes in a fairly large package that reads “GameShell – Redefine Portable Game Console” and lists the main specifications with quad core Cortex A7 processor, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, 1GB RAM, 16GB micro […]

Steam Link Beta now Available for Raspberry Pi 3 / 3B+

Raspberry Pi 3 Steam Link

Steam is a digital distribution platform developed by Valve Corporation for purchasing and playing video games that was first launched in 2003 for Windows computer only. Since then Mac OS (2010), Linux / Ubuntu, as well as mobile devices running Android & iOS (2012) have been supported in Steam. Mobile could only be used to browse the storefront, manage games, and access the community. However more recently, the company released Steam Link app that allows players to stream games to their mobile devices, while being rendering on more powerful machines.  The good news is that Steam Link (beta) has now been released for Raspberry Pi 3 / 3B + boards. All you need is either board running Raspbian Stretch, and install Steam Link as follows:

Once the app is installed launch it in the command line with steamlink, or launch it from the Games menu in the desktop environment. Steam […]

Sony PlayStation Classic Teardown Reveals MediaTek MT8167A Processor

Sony PlayStation Classic Main Board

Miniature versions of popular game consoles from earlier decades have been all the rage recently, but they all have one thing in common: the inability to add games by default. But eventually, people find ways. For example, when it was found Nintendo NES Classic Mini was found to be powered by an Allwinner R16 processor, enthusiasts found ways to run RetroArch on the device with some efforts. One of the latest announcement was Sony PlayStation Classic, and as reviewers got hold of early sample of the miniature gaming console, it  got torn down by HDBlog Italia. That means we now have a good idea of the technical specifications of the console: SoC – MediaTek MT8167A quad core Arm Cortex-A35 processor @ 1.5 GHz with PowerVR GE8300 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3-1866 (Samsung K4B4G1646E-BYMA) Storage – 16GB eMMC 5.1 flash (Samsung KLMAG1JETD-B041) Video Output – HDMI port up to 720p […]

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