Linux News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

GEEKOM A6 Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 24.04 tested on an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H mini PC

We’ve already checked out the hardware of the GEEKOM A6 mini PC with an unboxing and teardown in the first part of the review, and thoroughly tested the AMD Ryzen 7 6800H mini PC in Windows 11 Pro in the second part, so it’s now time to report our experience with Ubuntu 24.04 Linux on the mid-range mini PC. We’ve gone through features testing, system benchmarks, storage (SSD and USB) performance tests, 2.5GbE and WiFi 6 network evaluation, 4K and 8K YouTube video playback, a stress test to check out the cooling ability of the mini PC, and finally fan noise and power consumption measurements. Ubuntu 24.04 installation and system information Since we wanted to install Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS alongside Windows 11 Pro, we resized the partition by roughly half. But since the C: drive was “BitLocker Encrypted”, we knew Ubuntu installation wouldn’t be successful that way, so we went to […]

February 15, 2025February 15, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

ODROID-H3 and H4 SBCs get NetCard 3 card with four 5Gbps Ethernet ports

Hardkernl NetCard 3 is an expansion card with four 5Gbps Ethernet ports designed for the ODROID-H3 and ODROID-H4 SBCs and adding to the two 2.5GbE ports on the Intel Jasper Lake and Alder Lake-N single board computers. It follows the H2 Net Card with four 2.5GbE ports introduced in 2021 for the ODROID-H2, and tested by Ian with the ODROID-H3+ SBC in 2023. Hardkernel ended up selling more than expected, so they designed the Netcard 3 with 5GbE ports as an upgrade. It remains to be seen whether 5Gbps networking will be as popular as 2.5GbE or users will prefer moving to 10GbE hardware instead… NetCard 3 specifications: 4x 5Gbps Ethernet ports via RealTek RTL8126 5GbE controllers. M.2 edge connector with PCIe Gen3 x4 signaling Cooling with a long heatsink on RTL8126 controllers Compatible with ODROID-H3/H3+ and ODROID-H4/H4+ only, and not earlier ODROID-H2/H2+ boards You may need to flash a […]

February 14, 2025February 14, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Orange Pi AIPro (8T) SBC features a 8 TOPS Huawei Ascend AI SoC, runs Ubuntu or openEuler

Orange Pi AIPro (8T) is a new single board computer for AI applications that features an unnamed Huawei Ascend AI quad-core 64-bit processor delivering up to 8 TOPS (INT8) of AI inference performance, although there’s also a 20 TOPS (INT8) variant of the SoC. The SBC comes with up to 16GB LPDDR4X and a 32MB SPI flash but also supports other storage options such as a microSD card, an eMMC flash module, and/or an M.2 NVMe or SATA SSD. The board also features two HDMI 2.0 ports, one MIPI DSI connector, a 3.5mm audio jack, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5 connectivity, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header for expansion. Orange Pi AIPro specifications: SoC – Huawei Ascend quad-core 64-bit processor delivering up to 8 TOPS (INT8) AI performance and equipped with an unnamed 3D GPU; Likely Ascend 310B with Arm Cortex-A76 equivalent […]

February 13, 2025February 13, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Boardcon SBC3576 – A feature-rich Rockchip RK3576 SBC with HDMI, mini DP, dual GbE, WiFi 6, optional 5G/4G LTE module, and more

Boardcon SBC3576 is a feature-rich single board computer (SBC) based on the MINI3576 system-on-module powered by a Rockchip RK3576 AI SoC and equipped with two 100-pin and one 44-pin board-to-board connectors for interfacing with the carrier board. The carrier board is equipped with up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, two gigabit Ethernet ports, a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 module, 4K-capable HDMI 2.1 and mini DP video outputs, a mini HDMI input port, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, RS485 and CAN Bus terminal block, and more. The Rockchip RK3576 SoC comes with the same 6 TOPS NPU found in the Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S SoC and can be used as a lower-cost alternative with less performance. Boardcon SBC3576 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU clocked at 1GHz with support for OpenGL […]

February 13, 2025February 13, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Edge video processing platform features NXP i.MX 8M Plus, i.MX 93, or i.MX 95 SoC, supports up to 23 camera types

DAB Embedded AquaEdge video processing platform

DAB Embedded AquaEdge is a compact computer based on NXP i.MX 8M Plus, i.MX 93, or i.MX 95 SoC working as an edge video processing platform and supporting 23 types of vision cameras with resolution from VGA up to 12MP, and global/rolling shutter. The small edge computer features a gigabit Ethernet RJ45 jack with PoE to power the device. It is also equipped with a single GSML2 connector to connect a camera whose input can be processed by the built-in AI accelerator found in the selected NXP i.MX processors. Other external ports include a microSD card slot, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, and a mini HDMI port (for the NXP i.MX 8M Plus model only). DAB Embedded AquaEdge specifications: SoC / Memory / Storage options NXP i.MX 8M Plus CPU – Quad-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.8GH, Arm Cortex-M7 real-time core AI accelerator – 2.3 TOPS NPU VPU Encoder up to […]

February 11, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Mekotronics R58-PTZ video surveillance/live streaming embedded computer features a PTZ camera, two HDMI input ports

Mekotronics R58-PTZ embedded computer with pan and tilt camera

I swear it’s not an AI-generated picture of a device, but the Mekotronics R58-PTZ is real and just another unusual Rockchip RK3588 hardware platform from the company that’s an embedded computer with a 3-inch display on the front panel and a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) camera placed on top. Mekotronics describes it as a live-streaming box designed for video surveillance, so I assume its main use case is to leverage to built-in 6 TOPS NPU for live streaming with some real-time effect and/or surveillance applications detecting persons, masks, etc… especially it also offers two HDMI inputs for extra cameras. Mekotronics R58-PTZ specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588 octa-core processor with CPU – 4x CortexA76 cores @ up to 2.4 GHz, 4x CortexA55 core @ 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.2, Vulkan 1.2 Video decoder – 8Kp60 H.265, VP9, AVS2, 8Kp30 H.264 AVC/MVC, 4Kp60 […]

February 9, 2025February 9, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

DeepSeek shown to run on Rockchip RK3588 with AI acceleration at about 15 tokens/s

Rockchip RK3588 DeepSeek R1 NPU acceleration

DeepSeek R1 model was released a few weeks ago and Brian Roemmele claimed to run it locally on a Raspberry Pi at 200 tokens per second promising to release a Raspberry Pi image “as soon as all tests are complete”. He further explains the Raspberry Pi 5 had a few HATs including a Hailo AI accelerator, but that’s about all the information we have so far, and I assume he used the distilled model with 1.5 billion parameters. Jeff Geerling did his own tests with DeepSeek-R1 (Qwen 14B), but that was only on the CPU at 1.4 token/s, and he later installed an AMD W7700 graphics card on it for better performance. Other people made TinyZero models based on DeepSeekR1 optimized for Raspberry Pi, but that’s specific to countdown and multiplication tasks and still runs on the CPU only. So I was happy to finally see Radxa release instructions to […]

February 8, 2025February 8, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

OpenWrt 24.10 released with Linux 6.6, TLS 1.3 by default, and 1970 supported devices

OpenWrt 24.10 open-source lightweight Linux operating system for routers has just been released. It’s been upgraded to Linux 6.6 from Linux 5.15 in OpenWrt 2023.05, supports TLS 1.3 by default, improves support for WiFi 6 (802.11ax), and adds initial support for WiFi 7 (802.11be). After over one year of work since the release of OpenWrt 23.05, OpenWrt 24.10 adds over 5400 commits, and the total number of supported devices is now close to 2,000 at 1,970. It’s also the first stable release supporting OpenWrt One, the router directly designed by OpenWrt developers in collaboration with Banana Pi. OpenWrt 24.10 highlights: TLS 1.3 support in default images with MbedTLS 3.6 Activate POSIX Access Control Lists and file system security attributes for all file systems on devices with big flash sizes. Needed by docker. Note this is not enabled for all targets with the small_flash feature flag, including ath79/tiny, bcm47xx/legacy, lantiq/ase, lantiq/xrx200_legacy, […]