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April 18, 2022April 30, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

FOMO (Faster Objects, More Objects) enables real-time object detection on low-end embedded systems

FOMO used to stand for “Fear Of Missing Out” in my corner of the Internet, but Edge Impulse’s FOMO is completely different, as the “Faster Object, More Objects” model is designed to lower the footprint and improve the performance of object detection on resource-constrained embedded systems. The company says FOMO is 30x faster than MobileNet SSD and works on systems with less than 200K of RAM available. Edge Impulse explains the FOMO model provides a variant between basic image classification (e.g. is there a face in the image?) and more complex object detection (how many faces are in the image, if any, and where and what size are they?). That’s basically a simplified version of object detection where we’ll know the position of the objects in the image, but not their sizes. So instead of seeing the usual bounding box while the model is running, the face position will be […]

April 4, 2022 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 1 Comment

Beelink SER4 Review – Windows 11, Ubuntu 20.04, and “overclocking” AMD Ryzen 7 4800U SoC

Beelink has released the SER4 which is the latest in their ‘SER’ mini PC series and it features a Zen 2 AMD mobile processor. Beelink kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at performance running both Windows and Ubuntu and dabbled with ‘overclocking’. Beelink SER4 Hardware Overview The Beelink SER4 physically consists of a 126 x 113 x 40mm (4.96 x 4.45 x 1.57 inches) square metal case. As an actively cooled mini PC, it uses AMD’s 7 nm Zen 2 Ryzen 7 4800U Renoir processor which is an eight-core 16-thread 1.8 GHz mobile processor boosting to 4.2 GHz with Radeon Graphics. The front panel has an illuminated power button, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a Type-C USB 3.1 port with Alternate Mode, dual USB 3.1 ports, and a reset pin-hole ‘CLR CMOS’. The rear panel includes a gigabit Ethernet port, a USB 3.1 port and a USB 2.0 port, […]

March 21, 2022March 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 5.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.17: So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good. And that calm last week can very much be seen from the appended shortlog – there really aren’t a lot of commits in here, and it’s all pretty small. Most of it is in drivers (net, usb, drm), with some core networking, and some tooling updates too. It really is small enough that you can just scroll through the details below, and the one-liner summaries will give a good flavor of what happened last week. Of course, this means […]

March 15, 2022March 15, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Doom ported to Raspberry Pi RP2040

Doom has been ported to all sorts of platforms, including ESP32 platforms with 4MB PSRAM but “RP2040 doom” port of Doom to the Raspberry Pi RP2040 is more challenging, since RAM is limited to the measly 264KB built-in into the microcontroller, and for boards with only 2MB flash like the Raspberry Pi Pico, storage capacity becomes an issue. But Graham Sanderson solved all those issues by compressing the data, changing the code to use less RAM, making full use of the two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores, both overclocked at 270 MHz, in order to run Doom (DOOM1.WAD) on Raspberry Pi Pico at 320×240 resolution @ 60 fps, and the full Ultimate Doom and DOOM II WADs expected to fit into Raspberry Pi RP2040 boards with 8MB SPI flash. The port was based on Chocolate Doom, OPL2 emulation for audio support was derived from the emu8950 project, and sound effects were compressed […]

February 26, 2022February 26, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Codasip L31 and L11 RISC-V cores for AI/ML support TFLite Micro, customizations

Codasip has announced the L31 and L11 low-power embedded RISC-V processor cores optimized for customization of AI/ML IoT edge applications with power and size constraints. The company further explains the new L31/L11 RISC-V cores can run Google’s TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers (TFLite Micro) and can be optimized for specific applications through Codasip Studio RISC-V design tools. As I understand it, this can be done by the customers themselves thanks to a full architecture license as stated by Codasip CTO, Zdeněk Přikryl: Licensing the CodAL description of a RISC-V core gives Codasip customers a full architecture license enabling both the ISA and microarchitecture to be customized. The new L11/31 cores make it even easier to add features our customers were asking for, such as edge AI, into the smallest, lowest power embedded processor designs. The ability to customize the cores is important for AI and ML applications since the data types, […]

February 4, 2022 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 5 Comments

Beelink GTi11 modding – PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 slot, tweaking power limits, and eGPU

Previously I reviewed Beelink’s new GTi11 Intel Tiger Lake mini PC running Windows 11 and Ubuntu 20.04, so in this final part of the review, I’ll cover in more detail some of the features only briefly highlighted before. Specifically, I’m going to look at the PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 slot, dabble in ‘overclocking’ and explore eGPU options. Hardware Recap The GTi11 is a 168 x 120 x 39mm (6.61 x 4.72 x 1.54 inches) actively cooled mini PC and the review model has an i5-1135G7 Intel Tiger Lake quad-core 8-thread 2.50 GHz Core processor boosting to 4.20 GHz with Intel’s Xe Graphics. The review model also included a 500GB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 SSD drive with Windows 10 Pro installed, two sticks of 8GB DDR4 3200 MHz memory, a soldered WiFi 6 (or 802.11ax) Intel AX201 chip, and dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports. Interestingly there are another two key […]

January 13, 2022January 13, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to leverage zswap to run on Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM

Canonical used to recommend Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 4GB RAM to run Ubuntu Desktop, but Ubuntu 22.04 LTS should run more smoothly on the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB as the company has enabled zswap by default to allow the Linux operating system to run better on systems with less memory. Canonical explains that zswap is essentially a compression tool. When a process is about to be moved to the swap file, zswap compresses it and checks whether the new, smaller size still needs to be moved or if it can stay in your RAM. It is much quicker to decompress a ‘zswapped’ page than it is to access the swap file so this is a great way of getting more bang for your buck from systems with smaller amounts of RAM. The good news is that you don’t even need to wait for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to come […]

January 10, 2022February 1, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 5.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.16: Not a lot here since -rc8, which is not unexpected. We had that extra week due to the holidays, and it’s not like we had lots of last-minute things that needed to be sorted out. So this mainly contains some driver fixes (mainly networking and rdma), a cgroup credential use fix, a few core networking fixes, a couple of last-minute reverts, and some other random noise. The appended shortlog is so small that you might as well scroll through it. This obviously means that the merge window for 5.17 opens tomorrow, and I’m happy to say I already have several pending early pull requests. I wish I had even more, because this merge window is going to be somewhat painful due to unfortunate travel for family reasons. So I’ll be doing most of it on the road on a laptop […]