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April 26, 2025April 26, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Air Lab is a portable Wi-Fi & Bluetooth LE air quality monitor with an e-paper touchscreen display (Crowdfunding)

Networked Artifacts’ Air Lab is a portable air quality monitor based on ESP32-S3 Wi-Fi & Bluetooth LE wireless SoC, equipped with an e-paper touchscreen display, and plenty of sensors to measure CO2, temperature, relative humidity, air pollutants (VOC, NOx), and atmospheric pressure. The Air Lab ships with a rechargeable 1,500 mAh battery that will be good for about 21 days on a charge in passive mode (taking measurements every minute), and you can also power it over its USB-C ports. It includes a debug port for people wanting to change the firmware, and a GPIO header to connect additional sensors if required. Data can be visualized on the e-paper display or transmitted over BLE or MQTT for integration with Home Assistant. The company also provides a CSV export function and a web-based dashboard for data visualization. Air Lab specifications: Main module – ESP32-S3 module with PCB antenna for 2.4GHz WiFi […]

April 21, 2025April 21, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

ANAVI Miracle Emitter – A WiFi and BLE RGB LED controller compatible with Home Assistant, WLED firmware (Crowdfunding)

ANAVI Miracle Emitter is an open-source hardware ESP32-C3 WiFi and BLE controller designed to control 5V addressable RGB LED strips, which works with Home Assistant over MQTT and also supports the popular WLED firmware to easily control the LED strip through a web interface. It also features four I2C expansion headers for sensors and a small OLED display, a UART header, and a GPIO header. It’s an update to Leon ANAVI’s Miracle Controller introduced in 2019 with an ESP8266. A lot of things have changed since then, and it’s gotten easier than ever to control RGB LED strips using open-source software and firmware. ANAVI Miracle Emitter specifications: Wireless Module – Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 Wireless MCU – Espressif Systems ESP32-C3 single-core RISC-V microcontroller @ 160 MHz with 400KB SRAM, 384KB ROM, 4MB flash, Wi-Fi 4 & Bluetooth LE 5.0 connectivity Antenna – External u.FL antenna USB – USB Type-C port […]

April 17, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Avaota F1 – A tiny camera board based on Allwinner V821 RISC-V SoC with built-in WiFi and 64MB DDR2

The Avaota F1 is an ultra-small, open-source hardware Linux SBC powered by an Allwinner V821 32-bit RISC-V camera SoC with 64MB on-chip DDR2 and built-in 2.4 GHz WiFi 4, and designed for camera applications with a MIPI CSI connector. The 35×22 mm board also features a 32MB NOR flash, an analog microphone, a USB-C port for power, data, and programming, two 15-pin GPIO headers, a FEL button, and a user LED. It looks like it will be offered as a development kit with a 1080p30 camera and a 3.5-inch or 1.54-inch SPI display. I also think it’s the first time I’ve seen a Linux-capable application processor with built-in WiFi. Avaota F1 specifications SoC – Allwinner V821L2-WXX CPU 32-bit RISC-V CPU @ 1.2GHz with 16KB L1 D/I cache, 128KB L2 cache 32-bit RISC-V MCU @ 600 MHz with 16KB L1 I-cache, 8KB L1 D-cache Memory – 64MB DDR2 on-chip VPU – […]

April 13, 2025April 14, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Battery-powered Seeed Studio IoT Button features ESP32-C6 SoC, supports ESPHome or Zigbee firmware

Seeed Studio IoT Button is an inexpensive ESP32-C6 button powered by a rechargeable 18650 battery and designed to easily and quickly control Smart Home devices over WiFi 6 or Zigbee wireless protocol. It will be especially handy to Home Assistant users since the device is pre-flashed with ESPHome firmware for easy integration (over WiFi), and the company also provides a Zigbee firmware for Zigbee Home Assistant (ZHA) integration. The hardware is pretty basic with a button, three LEDs, and a USB-C port for charging the replaceable 18650 battery. Seeed Studio IoT Button specifications: SoC – ESP32-C6FH4 CPU Single-core 32-bit RISC-V clocked up to 160 MHz Low-power RISC-V core @ up to 20 MHz Memory – 512KB SRAM, 16KB low-power SRAM Storage – 320KB ROM, 4MB flash Wireless – 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0 LE/Mesh (somehow not used here), 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee 3.0 and Thread. Matter compatible. USB – […]

April 10, 2025April 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

PiEEG kit – A Raspberry Pi 5-based bioscience lab in a suitcase (Crowdfunding)

Yesterday we wrote about using quantum sensors for brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and other biomedical applications. But that’s the future, and if you want to experiment with brain-computer interface technology and bioscience, the PiEEG kit has everything you need to get started, with all components fitting in a suitcase easy to carry around between your home and university or school. The bioscience home lab is based on the PIEEG Shield for Raspberry Pi introduced in 2023, and features a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, a 9-inch display, a sensor board, EEG electrodes and cables for brainwave measurement, and electrodes for EMG (muscles), EKG (heart), and EOG (eye) signal recording. The PiEEG kit is comprised of the two main custom boards with the following specifications/features: PiEEG Shield on top of the Raspberry Pi 5 ADC – Texas Instruments ADS1299 Analog-to-Digital Converter for biopotential measurements Host interface – 40-pin GPIO header with SPI protocol […]

April 5, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Huginn is a self-hosted, open-source alternative to IFTTT and Zapier

IFTTT and Zapier automation tools enable users to create automated workflows connecting various apps, services, and devices. They are relatively easy to use, but their free tiers are now rather limited, and you have to rely on the cloud. Huginn is a self-hosted, open-source alternative to IFTTT or Zapier that can work on your own network without cloud connectivity. Andrew Cantino released the first version of the project 12 years ago (in 2013) by Andrew Cantino, but it now has a larger community of developers and users. Somehow, I only found out about Huginn when XDA Developers wrote about it earlier this week. Let’s have a look. Developers describe Huginn as a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online, and view it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier hosted on the user’s server with full control over the data. Here are some of the […]

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

TinyBeast FPGA – A Microchip PolarFire MPF300T/MPF100T FPGA PCIe reference design (Crowdfunding)

TinyBeast FPGA is a compact module based on Microchip PolarFire MPF100T or MPF300T FPGA with up to 300K logic elements and a hard PCIe interface that is suitable for automation, measurement, and robotics applications. Two versions of the module are available: the TinyBeast FPGA P mini PCIe module designed for integration with embedded systems, and the TinyBeast FPGA S with B2B connectors designed to be connected to a carrier board. TinyBeast FPGA P TinyBeast FPGA P specifications: FPGA – Microchip PolarFire FPGA TinyBest FPGA P-300 – MPF300T-1FCVG484E FPGA with 300K LE, 10.6 Mbit embedded RAM, 924 DSP blocks TinyBest FPGA P-100 – 100K LE, 5.2 Mbit embedded RAM, 288 DSP blocks System Memory – 4 GB DDR4 memory Storage – SPI flash Host interface – PCIe x1 Gen2 as EP via mini PCIe edge connector Expansion – Samtec SS4-30-3.00-L-D-K I/O connector for GPIOs and up to 12.7 Gbps transceivers Debugging […]

March 30, 2025March 31, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 Preview – Part 2: Debian 12 – What works, what doesn’t

I went through an unboxing and Debian 12 installation on the Radxa Orion O6 at the end of January, but decided to work on other reviews since software support still needed to be worked on. Since then, there’s been some work done, but no new image released. After waiting for almost two months, I’ve decided to carry on with the review by testing the Debian 12 image in a way similar to the Rock 5B SBC preview I did with Debian 11 in 2022 to check what works and what doesn’t on the Orion O6 at the time of the review. That will involve testing all ports, including 5GbE networking and the PCIe slot with an (old) NVIDIA graphics card, running some benchmarks, and also trying the Debian 12 image with a self-built Linux 6.13 kernel using ACPI instead of UEFI for the default image. Orion O6 SBC benchmarks on […]