Raspberry Pi News - Page 120 of 151 - CNX Software

November 2, 2016July 31, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 80 Comments

Orange Pi Zero Allwinner H2+ Board with WiFi and Ethernet is Up for Sale for $7 and Up

Orange Pi Zero development board powered by Allwinner H2+ quad core Cortex A7 processor with 256 to 512MB RAM, Ethernet, and USB ports is now available for sale on Aliexpress for just $6.99, with shipping adding $3.39 in my case bringing the total to $10.38. Orange Pi Zero specifications: SoC – Allwinner H2(+) quad core Cortex A7 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU @ 600 MHz System Memory – 256 to 512 MB DDR3-1866 SDRAM Storage – micro SD card slot Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet + 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (Allwinner XR819 WiFi module) with u.FL antenna connector and external antenna USB – 1x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG port Expansion headers – Unpopulated 26-pin “Raspberry Pi B+” header + 13-pin header with headphone, 2x USB 2.0, TV out, microphone and IR receiver signals Debugging – Unpopulated 3-pin header for serial console Misc – 2x LEDs Power […]

November 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

RabbitMax Flex IoT Board for Raspberry Pi Supporting up to Five I2C Sensors Launched on Indiegogo for 20 Euros and Up

RabbitMax Flex is an add-on board, compatible with HAT specifications, for Raspberry Pi 2 /3 boards and other Raspberry Pi models with a 40-pin GPIO header. It includes headers for up to 5 I2C sensors, as well as an RGB LED, a buzzer, a relay, a button, infrared receiver and transmitter, and an optional LCD display, and as we’ve seen in my RabbitMax Flex getting started guide, a nice way to learning about hardware programming using either C or Python, or to used in home automation or IoT projects. The project has just been launched on Indiegogo. RabbitMax Flex specifications: Relay – Songle SRD-05VDC-SL-C supporting 125V/250VAC up to 10A, 30VDC up to 10A Storage – EEPROM with some system information for identification IR – IR LED, IR receiver Misc – Buzzer, Button, RGB LED Expansion Header for LCD character display + potentiometer for backlight adjustment 5x 4-pin headers for I2C […]

October 30, 2016December 10, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Getting Started with RabbitMax Flex IoT and Automation Hat for Raspberry Pi

At the beginning of the month I showed how to assemble RabbitMax Flex, a Raspberry Pi HAT compliant add-on board for Raspberry Pi boards with 40-pin header, that targets IoT and home automation project with its relay, IR transmitter and receiver, I2C headers for sensors, buzzer, RGB LED, and more. Since I’ve already described the hardware, I’ve spend some time this week-end following the user’s guide to play around with the board using a Raspberry Pi 2 board, and try various features. The user’s manual explains that you need the latest version of Raspbian, but I’d not played with my Raspberry Pi 2 board for a while, so the kernel and firmware were quite old:

uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.1.7-v7+ #817 SMP PREEMPT Sat Sep 19 15:32:00 BST 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd version
Sep 23 2015 12:12:01 
Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom
version c156d00b148c30a3ba28ec376c9c01e95a77d6d5 (clean) (release)

uname -a

Linux raspberrypi 4.1.7-v7+ #817 SMP PREEMPT Sat Sep 19 15:32:00 BST 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd version

Sep 23 2015 12:12:01

version c156d00b148c30a3ba28ec376c9c01e95a77d6d5 (clean) (release)

So the first thing I had to do was to upgrade Raspbian. There are basically two options to upgrade, either downloading and dumping the latest Raspbian firmware image to your micro SD card, and […]

October 27, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Quirky Linux 8.1 Lightweight Linux Desktop Distribution Released for Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3

Barry Kauler, the creator of Puppy Linux, may have retired from maintaining Puppy Linux a few years ago, but he appears to be still active, as he’s just released Quirky Linux 8.1 for Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 boards, a lightweight Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04, and including LibreOffice & Inkscape to have the same out of the box experience as Raspbian, but with a 360 MB download size instead of 1.3 GB for Raspbian. A build for ODROID-XU4 development board should also be coming soon. The image has been designed for 8GB micro SD card, and needs to extracted and dumped onto the card with the usual Win32DiskImager or dd tools. There are three mirrors for quirky-pi2-sd-8gb-xerus-8.1.img.xz firmware: iBiblio.org, nluug.nl, and archive.org. You can read the full release notes if you want more details. In case you don’t have a spare micro SD card, […]

October 17, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3) and Compute Module 3 Lite (CM3L) Datasheet Released

Last week NEC announced they were going to use Raspberry Pi Compute 3 Module in some of their presentation and digital signage displays. This led to a longish discussion in the blog post, during which one commenter left a link to Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 datasheet, so let’s have a look. There will actually be two version of the Broadcom BCM2837 based Compute Module with CM3 with a 4GB eMMC, and CM3 Lite (CM3L) without eMMC, but SD card signal are available to the baseboard. Apart from storage differences, both modules shared the same specifications: SoC – Broadcom BCM2837 quad core Cortex A53 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Videocore IV GPU System Memory – 1GB LPDDR2 Storage CM3 Lite – SD card signals through SO-DIMM connector CM3 – 4GB eMMC flash 200-pin edge connector with: 48x GPIO 2x I2C, 2x SPI, 2x UART 2x SD/SDIO, 1x NAND interface (SMI) […]

October 14, 2016October 16, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 39 Comments

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 to be launched by the end of the year, used in NEC displays

Eben Upton had already mentioned the Raspberry Pi Foundation was working on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 based on the same Broadcom BCM2837 quad core Cortex A53 processor and 1GB LPDDR2 RAM used in Raspberry Pi 3 board earlier this year, but few details had been provided at the time. The module is still not available, but NEC Display Solutions Europe has already announced they are working on integrating Compute Module 3 into commercial displays starting with 40″, 48″ and 55″ models in January 2017, and up to 98″ by the end of next year, used for digital signage and presentation platforms. The Raspberry Pi Foundation goes on to say they’ve been working on NEC project for over a year now, and they expect to release Compute Module 3 to the general public by the end of the year. Price and complete technical details have not been released yet. […]

October 7, 2016October 7, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

RabbitMax Flex IoT & Home Automation Board and Kit for Raspberry Pi

RabbitMax Flex is an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi boards with 40-pin headers, namely Raspberry Pi Model A+ and B+, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 0, destined to be used for Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation applications thanks to 5x I2C headers, a relay, an LCD interface and more. I’ve received a small kit with RabbitMax Flex boards, a BMP180 temperature & barometric pressure I2C sensor, and a 16×2 LCD display. RabbitMax Flex specifications: Relay – Songle SRD-05VDC-SL-C supporting 125V/250VAC up to 10A, 30VDC up to 10A Storage – EEPROM with some system information for identification IR – IR LED, IR receiver Misc – Buzzer, Button, RGB LED Expansion Header for LCD character display + potentiometer for backlight adjustment 5x 4-pin headers for I2C sensors Dimensions – Raspberry Pi HAT compliant The assembly of the kit is child’s play as you don’t even need […]

October 4, 2016May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Linux 4.8 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has officially released Linux 4.8 last Sunday: So the last week was really quiet, which maybe means that I could probably just have skipped rc8 after all. Oh well, no real harm done. This obviously means that the merge window for 4.9 is open, and I appreciate the people who already sent in some pull requests early due to upcoming travel or other reasons. I’ll start pulling things tomorrow, and have even the most eager developers and testers hopefully test the final 4.8 release before the next development kernels start coming 😉 Anyway, there’s a few stragging fixes since rc8 listed below: it’s a mixture of arch fixes (arm, mips, sparc, x86), drivers (networking, nvdimm, gpu) and generic code (some core networking, with a few filesystem, cgroup and and vm things). All of it pretty small, and there really aren’t that many of them. Go forth and test, […]