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November 22, 2021January 24, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

International Black Friday 2021 Deals

We’ve been listing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals available internationally since 2014, going beyond the US-centric Amazon Black Friday deals for instance. So let’s do it again this year from the usual suspects like Aliexpress and Banggood, as well as direct deals from manufacturers. Arduino Black November The maker board manufacturer offers discounts on eight products until November 29, namely the Arduino Starter Kit, the Arduino UNO board, the Arduino Nano Arduino Micro, Oplà IoT Kit, Arduino Due, Portenta H7 machine vision bundle, and the Arduino Mega. The company also offers discounts on Arduino-branded gears from T-Shirts to pens. Khadas 20% discount Khadas has an upcoming deal on the Amazon US store that will run for only 24 hours from 25th November 12:00 am to 26th November 11:59 pm (Pacific Standard Time). As I understand it, they ship internationally too, and you’ll be able to get 20% off the […]

November 19, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Jetson EX1 and SUB mini PCs put Xavier NX SoM into metal enclosures

Seeed Studio has just unveiled another Jetson Xavier NX mini PC with the Jetson EX1, plus some metal enclosures for the Jetson SUB mini PC announced last month with the official NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX developer kit, a 128GB SSD, and the Re_Computer case comprised of an aluminum frame and a plastic cover. Jetson EX1 mini PC The Jetson EX1 mini PC has a different design with a custom carrier board offering dual Gigabit Ethernet and support for four MIPI CSI cameras, a 256GB NVMe SSD, and an aluminum enclosure designed to help with cooling, albeit the computer is not completely fanless since a 5V fan is included in the design as well. Jetson EX1 specifications: NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module CPU – 6-core NVIDIA Carmel ARMv8.2 64-bit processor with 6 MB L2 + 4 MB L3 cache GPU – NVIDIA Volta architecture with 384 NVIDIA CUDA cores and 48 […]

November 19, 2021December 29, 2021 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 7 Comments

Using MangoHud to check FPS, CPU & GPU usage on a ‘hackendeck’

Previously I followed Valve’s documentation to build a ‘hackendeck’ using a mini PC to emulate their highly anticipated Steam Deck. Interestingly the ‘hackendeck’ uses a Linux OS, specifically Manjaro, as whilst Valve based their earlier version of Steam OS on Debian, they have now switched to being based on Arch. If the ‘hackendeck’ had just been Steam on Windows then to review gaming performance I’d just use MSI Afterburner. Until now, however, for Linux, I’ve always had to estimate the average FPS as I’ve not been aware of a good reliable equivalent. Fortunately several ‘commenters’ recommended using MangoHud, a Linux open-source Vulkan/OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, CPU/GPU usage, and temperatures similar to MSI Afterburner. So now I’ve been able to capture the average frame rate for the games I previously tested and I’ll present them below. MangoHud Installation and configuration The installation of MangoHud was extremely simple. First I installed […]

November 17, 2021May 29, 2022 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 11 Comments

Experiences of configuring and using a ‘hackendeck’ homemade Steam Deck

Valve recently released information about developing for the Steam Deck if you didn’t have a Dev-Kit which is an engineering verification test build (EV2) version of their device. Included in the documentation is a suggestion to build your own Steam Deck, or ‘hackendeck’ using a mini PC. Whilst I didn’t have the exact brand they picture in the article I did have a mini PC with the required specifications so I set about following the instructions to see how it performed. Hardware Overview Valve’s documentation under ‘Performance’ states that ‘if you are really interested in finding a PC for testing that will perform similarly to a Steam Deck … there are a few options out there and then goes on to suggest a mini PC with the following ‘roughly similar specifications to a Steam Deck’: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H Radeon RX Vega 10 Graphics 16GB of DDR4 RAM This exactly […]

November 15, 2021September 26, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop – A $219 Windows on Arm Developer Kit

The “Snapdragon QC710 Developer Kit” for Windows 10 on Arm app development was unveiled last May, and it’s now available for $219 on Microsoft Store as the “ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop”. The developer kit can also be purchased at a discount for $197.10 by students, parents(!), teachers, and members of the military. I suppose this applies only to the US military and showing your Taliban membership card may not work. The developer kit looks like a standard mini PC and features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Compute Platform (SC7180), 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, HDMI output, 10/100M Ethernet and WiFi 5, and several USB ports. ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Compute Platform (SC7180) with octa-core Qualcomm Kryo 468 (2x Cortex-A76, 6x Cortex-A55) CPU @ up to 2.4 GHz, Adreno 618 GPU System Memory – 4GB Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card […]

November 2, 2021June 22, 2022 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 19 Comments

Beelink U59 Review – Windows 11, Ubuntu on a Jasper Lake mini PC

Coupling a German submarine with a North American lake seems a perfect match in this topsy-turvy supply-constrained COVID-19 broken world we find ourselves in but that’s just what Beelink has figuratively done by launching their new Intel Jasper Lake mini PC, the U59. Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows 11 and Ubuntu 20.04. Beelink U59 Hardware Overview The Beelink U59 physically consists of a 124 x 113 x 42mm (4.88 x 4.45 x 1.65 inches) square plastic case. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses Intel’s new 10 nm Jasper Lake N5095 processor which is a quad-core 4-thread 2.00 GHz Celeron processor boosting to 2.90 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics. The front panel has an illuminated power button, dual USB 3.1 ports, a Type-C USB 3.0 port with DisplayPort Alternate Mode, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a reset pin-hole ‘CLR CMOS’. […]

October 29, 2021November 1, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Jetson SUB mini PC ships with Xavier NX SoM, 128GB SSD

Jetson SUB is a mini PC powered by NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module and equipped with a 512GB 128GB SSD, a WiFi module, all housed in an aluminum case with a cooling fan. [Update Nov 1, 2021: Seeed Studio informed me the SSD would only have 128 GB capacity] Preloaded with NVIDIA Jetpack, the mini PC is designed for higher-end edge AI and IoT workloads leveraging the 384 NVIDIA CUDA cores, 48 Tensor cores, the hexa-core Carmel 64-bit Arm processor, and the two NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerators (NVDLA) engines from the Xavier NX SoC. Jetson SUB mini PC specifications: NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module CPU – 6-core NVIDIA Carmel ARMv8.2 64-bit processor with 6 MB L2 + 4 MB L3 cache GPU – NVIDIA Volta architecture with 384 NVIDIA CUDA cores and 48 Tensor cores Accelerators – 2x NVDLA Engines, 7-Way VLIW Vision Processor Video – Multiple 4Kp60 encode, multiple […]

October 24, 2021 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 3 Comments

How to upgrade a mini PC to Windows 11 and install WSL

In this short article, I show how to install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and how to force the upgrade of Windows 10 to Windows 11 in a mini PC rather than waiting for Windows to offer it. The reason I’ve coupled these two topics together is not because there is any dependency, but simply as I use WSL to help me perform administrative tasks like downloading and copying files when installing applications on Windows mini PCs. WSL installation Installing WSL has recently become so simple it is worth doing just to gain the flexibility it offers for so little effort. Now you only need to open ‘Windows Terminal (Admin)’ and enter wsl –install: then reboot for Ubuntu to start installing, during which you will be asked to create your user with a password, which finishes in Ubuntu: Further information about installing WSL can be found in Microsoft’s documentation. Now […]