SPOKE capacitive touch sensor board targets interactive computer interfaces (Crowdfunding)

Spoke capacitive touch sensor controller

SPOKE is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based capacitive touch sensor board for interactive computer interfaces. It is designed to simplify the integration of touch-based control into various projects. SPOKE features up to 27 sensor inputs and can “turn almost any conductive material into a sensor” to control almost any computer input. Potential applications include music making, video game controlling, typing, and general software controlling. The board was designed by Tom Fox, an educator, maker, and musician in the UK. According to him, the board is accessible to beginners getting started with touch sensing while retaining enough power and customizability for professional use. It works with several conductive materials, including copper pipes, conductive paint, aluminum foil, pencils, conductive filaments, fruits, fabrics with conductive threads, and metallic surfaces. It can also be used with a non-conductive material (such as plywood) if a conductive material (e.g. tinfoil) is behind it. The fully-featured SPOKE capacitive […]

Waveshare ESP32 robotic arm kit with 5+1 DoF supports ROS2, LeRobot, and Jetson Orin NX integration

RoArm M3 Pro and RoArm M3 S High Torque Serial Bus Servo Robotic Arm Kit

Waveshare has recently released the RoArm-M3-Pro and RoArm-M3-S, a 5+1 DOF high-torque ESP32 robotic arm kit. The main difference between the two is that the RoArm-M3-Pro features all-metal ST3235 bus servos for durability and longevity, on the other hand, the RoArm-M3-S uses standard servo motors which are less durable for long-term use. These robotic arms feature a lightweight structure, a 360° omnidirectional base, and five flexible joints, which together create a 1m workspace with a 200 grams @ 0.5m payload. A 2-DOF wrist joint enables multi-dimensional clamping and precise force control. It integrates an ESP32 MCU, supporting multiple wireless control modes via a web app, it also supports inverse kinematics for accurate positioning, curve velocity control for smooth motion, and adaptive force control. The design is open source and with ROS2 compatibility, it allows secondary development via JSON commands and ESP-NOW for multi-device communication. Compatible with the LeRobot AI framework, […]

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

Orange Pi AIPro (8T)

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 […]

Stackable HAT brings high-resolution 24-bit ADC to Raspberry Pi (Crowdfunding)

24 bit ADC 8 layer Stackable HAT on Raspberry Pi

Sequent Microsystems’ “Eight 24-bit ADC 8-layer Stackable HAT” is a Raspberry Pi expansion board designed for home automation projects. It is compatible with all Raspberry Pi models with a 40-pin GPIO header and features a stackable design that provides scalability for more complex setups. It includes eight independent 24-bit ADC channels, providing ultra-high resolution for measuring small analog signals accurately. It also features programmable gain amplifiers on each input channel for amplifying weak signals and optimizing the ADC’s input range. It is stackable up to eight layers, allowing for up to 64 differential analog inputs. It provides 4A continuous and 5A peak power to the Raspberry Pi via the GPIO header. It sends data via the I2C lines, leaving all other pins free for use. Also, it supports isolated RS485 communication for long-distance connectivity. The 8-layer Stackable HAT for Raspberry Pi is suitable for precision data acquisition applications, including industrial […]

Adafruit’s PioMatter library adds HUB75 RGB LED Matrix support to the Raspberry Pi 5

HUB75 RGB Matrix Raspberry Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 5 brought a more powerful CPU and GPU and faster I/Os compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, as well as some incompatibilities. While the transition from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Raspberry Pi 5 is usually painless for most applications, Adafruit notes that the ability to drive HUB75 RGB LED matrices was lost on the Raspberry Pi 5 which now relies on the Raspberry Pi RP1 peripheral control to drive GPIOs instead of the Broadcom processor directly controlling them. The company has now addressed that by using the PIO (Programmable I/O) block in the RP1 chip, yes that’s the same PIOs as found in the RP2040 or RP2350 microcontroller, to drive HUB75 RGB LED matrices from the Raspberry Pi 5, and their work can be found on the Adafruit-Blinka-Raspberry-Pi5-Piomatter repository on GitHub. The instructions to install the Adafruit Blinka Raspberry Pi 5 PioMatter library (or just […]

FlashMyPico – Raspberry Pi Pico / Pico 2 code editing and firmware flashing from a web browser

FlashMyPico RP2350 web editor

FlashMyPico website allows you to write C code, build the firmware, and flash it to your Raspberry Pi Pico, Pico W, Pico 2, or Pico 2 W directly from a web browser instead of having to check out the code from GitHub, build it in a terminal, and then manually copy the resulting binary. I’ve given it a quick with a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board. The first step is to head over to flashmypico.com from your computer or even an Android smartphone. You’ll need a web browser that supports WebUSB, so for example, Firefox is not an option, and I eventually had to use Google Chrome instead. There’s a detect device link on the bottom left, so I clicked on that first, and my Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was detected as “RP2350 Boot” after I put it in bootloader mode. But it just told me that my board is […]

Radxa ROCK 5T SBC packs ROCK 5 ITX mini-ITX motherboard’s features onto a 110x80mm PCB

ROCK 5T

Radxa ROCK 5T is yet another Rockchip RK3588 SBC whose main selling point is to pack most features of the ROCK 5 ITX mini-ITX motherboard (170x170mm) into a much smaller 110x80mm board. The board features up to 32GB RAM, M.2 2280 sockets for NVMe SSDs, four independent display outputs via HDMI, USB-C, and MIPI DSI, HDMI input and camera interfaces, two 2.5GbE RJ45 jacks, on-board WiFi 6/6E and Bluetooth 5.x, and an M.2 Key-B socket for cellular connectivity. Radxa ROCK 5T specifications: (with differences highlighted in bold or strikethrough) SoC – Rockchip RK3588 or RK3588J (industrial grade) CPU – Octa-core processor with four Cortex-A76 cores @ up to 2.2 GHz (industrial) / 2.4 GHz (commercial), four Cortex-A55 cores @ up to 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU VPU 8Kp60 10-bit H.265 / VP9 / AVS2  / AV1 decoder, 8Kp30 H.264  decoder 8Kp30 H.265 / H.264 encoder AI accelerator […]

CPico RP2350 is another Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternative with USB-C, 8MB flash, 2MB PSRAM, BConnect I2C & debug ports

iLabs CPico RP2350

iLabs CPico RP2350 is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternative with the same form factor, still based on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller but equipped with a USB-C port, 8MB flash, 2MB PSRAM, a Reset button, and Bconnect I2C and debug ports. Apart from that, the CPico RP2350 retains the other features of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 including the two 20-pin PGIO headers, and BOOT button. It joins other Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternatives like the Waveshare RP2350-Plus adding battery support. CPico RP2350 specifications: SoC – Raspberry Pi RP2350 CPU Dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 @ 150 MHz with Arm Trustzone, Secure boot Dual-core RISC-V Hazard3 @ 150 MHz Up two cores can be used at any given time Memory – 520 KB on-chip SRAM Security 8KB of anti-fuse OTP for key storage Secure boot (Arm only) SHA-256 acceleration Hardware TRNG Fast glitch detectors Package – QFN-60 Memory – 2 MP […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design