MPi4 NEC MediaPlayer Kit slot-in card powers 4K digital signage displays with Raspberry Pi CM4

MPi4 NEC MediaPlayer Kit

NEC Display Solutions has been integrating Raspberry Pi Compute Modules into commercial displays used for digital signage and presentation platforms for over 5 years now. The company, now called Sharp NEC Display Solutions, has launched a new Intel Smart Display Module (SDM)-like slot-in card based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 called “MPi4 NEC MediaPlayer Kit” and designed as an entry-level card alternative to the company’s Intel SDM slot-in cards designed for NEC large format 4K displays. MPi4 NEC MediaPlayer Kit specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 “NEC Edition” with SoC – Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Arm Cortex 72 @ 1.5GHz, VideoCore IV GPU with OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics,  H.265 (HEVC) up to 4Kp60 decode, H.264 up to 1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode System Memory – 4GB LPDDR2 SDRAM Storage – 32 GB eMMC flash Dimensions – 55 × 40 × 4.7 mm Interface Board for Raspberry Pi Compute Module […]

Lenovo LAVIE MINI 8-inch mini laptop to come with optional desktop and gaming docks

Lenovo LAVIE MINI mini laptop game controllers

In the last two years or so, we’ve seen several so-called mini laptops with screen sizes from 5-inch to 8-inch mostly from smaller companies like GPD and One Netbook, but also CHUWI to a lesser extent. Now Lenovo has entered the fray with LAVIE MINI mini laptop powered by an Intel Tiger Lake processor and equipped with an 8-inch touchscreen display. The device is also offered with optional accessories including an HDMI desktop docking station and a gaming dock with two game controllers. Lenovo LAVIE MINI preliminary specifications: SoC – Intel Tiger Lake with Intel Xe graphics up to Intel Core i7-1180G7 SoC System Memory – 16GB LPDDR4x-4266 dual-channel memory (soldered) Storage – 256GB SSD Display – 8-inch touchscreen display with 1920 x 1200 resolution, 400 nits brightness Audio – 1.5W stereo speakers Camera – IR camera with Windows Hello face recognition Connectivity – WiFi 6 & Bluetooth 5.1 User […]

NEC VersaPro VU-3 is a Gemini Lake Tablet with Optional Keyboard, USB type C Dock, LTE Connectivity

NEC VersaPro VU-3 Tablet

There aren’t a lot of tablets based in Intel Gemini Lake processor, and so far we only covered Alldocube Knote5 Gemini Lake tablet powered by an Intel Celeron N4100 processor and equipped with a 11.6″ display. There’s now another option with NEC VersaPro VU-3 & VersaPro J VU-3 tablets with a 10.1″ display, powered by the same Celeron N4100 processor, but running  Windows 10 Enterprise/Education/Pro, and shipping with a USB type C dock, and optional LTE connectivity. All information is in Japanese, so it’s likely the tablet only targets the Japanese market, but let’s go through the specs: SoC – Intel Celeron N4100 quad core processor @ 1.10 / 2.40 GHz (burst) with Intel UHD graphics 600, 4MB L2 cache System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 Storage – 64 or 128GB eMMC flash, 1x microSD (SDHC / SDXC) slot Display – 10.1″ IPS  10-point touchscreen display with  WUXGA resolution (1,920 x […]

LTSI (Long-Term Stable Initiative) Status Update – ELCE 2012

Tsugikazu Shibata, chief manager of OSS promotion center at NEC, gives a status update for LTSI, an LTS kernel for the consumer electronics market at ELCE 2012. Abstract: LTSI (Long-Term Stable Initiative) had been established October 2011 as an activity of CE Working Group of The Linux Foundation. LTSI will maintain Linux kernel for long term and stable for use of Consumer Electronics industry to share common cost and also help industry engineers to merge their patches into upstream. This talk will update latest status of LTSI project and discuss about next step such as how the development process going on and what version of Linux kernel will be maintained for long term and stably use. This talk will be intended to provide information for managers and engineers in the embedded industry and not necessary to have specific knowledge. Agenda of the talk: Status of Linux kernel development and maintenance […]

LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI) Linux Kernel for Consumer Electronics

The Linux Foundation announced a new project, the Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), created by the Consumer Electronics Workgroup (CE WG) at Linuxcon Europe 2011 in Prague. LTSI aims at reducing duplication of effort in maintaining separate private industry kernel trees. The LTSI project intends to deliver an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two to three years. The project is backed by several companies in the consumer electronics industry including Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Qualcomm Atheros, Renesas Electronics Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Toshiba. LTSI will allow device makers to spend less time doing significant back-porting, bug testing and driver development on their own, which carries substantial cost in terms of time-to-market, as well as development and engineering effort to maintain those custom kernels. In some ways, this is similar to Linaro, […]

EDATEC Raspberry Pi 5 fanless case