Raspberry Pi News - Page 123 of 152 - CNX Software

July 25, 2016July 26, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Raspberry Pi Club Battery / UPS Kit Assembly Guide and Review

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a Raspberry Pi battery kit with a 3,800 mAh battery, a battery control board, an acrylic enclosure, and an heatsink + fan set that I found on DealExtreme for about $22. I decided to buy it once I got confirmation the battery was included, and so today I’ll write about my experience assembling the kit, and running it with a Raspberry Pi 2 board. If you are only interested in the “RPi PowerPack” battery control board and battery, you can find them on Banggood for $11.93. Raspberry Pi Club Battery Kit Unboxing DX put all the accessories inside a zip bag, and shipped it in a bubble envelop. It contains a white box with the RPi PowerPack V1.0 battery and battery, several screws, spacers, and bolts sets, a fan with screws, an acrylic case with three layers, an heatsink set with two […]

July 19, 2016July 19, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Raspberry Pi Bootloader License Precludes it to Run on Competing Broadcom BCM283x Boards

Yesterday I wrote about ArduCAM Raspberry Pi compatible module, that packs most of the features of Raspberry Pi Zero or Pi Compute module into a 24x24mm board, and is based on Broadcom BCM2835 processor. One person also started a thread on Raspberry Pi forums about the tiny module, and one of the Raspberry Pi engineer and forum moderator replied that will would breach the bootloader license. The important part is the sentence highlighted above: This software may only be used for the purpose of developing for, running or using a Raspberry Pi device. ArduCAM module is only Raspberry Pi compatible, so it would indeed breach the license, and you can get into troubles if you planned to use that module in a commercial project, especially in countries where IP protection is taking seriously. This raises a few questions. First why did the Raspberry Pi foundation chose that restrictive license? The […]

July 18, 2016July 18, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

ArduCAM has designed a Tiny Coin-Sized Raspberry Pi Compatible Module

Now you can design your own custom hardware and leverage Raspberry Pi software, by integrating Raspberry Pi Compute module (and soon Raspberry Pi 3 Compute module) into your custom designed baseboard. But if you’d like something more compact, and even more compact than a Raspberry Pi Zero or RPi Compute module, ArduCAM has been developing a 24x24mm Raspberry Pi compatible system-on-module powered by Broadcom BCM2835 processor. ArduCAM has also designed a small adapter board “UC-343 Rev. A” for the module with the following specifications: SoC – Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 Processor @ 700 MHz (or 1GHz?) with Videocore IV GPU System Memory – 256MB/512MB LPDDR2 Storage – micro SD card slot USB – 2x micro USB ports including one for power only Camera – 1x MIPI CSI connector supporting 5MP or 8MP Pi cameras (dual camera support) Expansion – AV output header 16-pin and 8-pin headers (unpopulated) with GPIOs, 2x I2C, […]

July 7, 2016July 8, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 93 Comments

Smaller & Faster than Raspberry Pi Zero: Meet NanoPi NEO ARM Linux Development Board

Raspberry Pi Zero has two noticeable attributes compared to other Raspberry Pi boards: it’s smaller and it’s cheaper. FriendlyARM has now designed another model for their NanoPi family, that about 12% smaller, although not quite as thin at all due to its Ethernet jack and USB connector, and much faster than Raspberry Pi Zero, with NanoPi NEO board powered by Allwinner H3 quad core processor. NanoPi NEO specifications: SoC – Allwinner H3 quad core Cortex A7 @ 1.2 GHz with an ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU up to 600 MHz System Memory – 256 or 512 MB DDR3 Storage – micro SD card slot Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet USB – 1x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG port, 2x USB via headers Expansion headers 24-pin header with I2C, 2x UART, SPI, PWM, and power signals 12-pin header with 2x USB, IR pin, microphone and Line OUT signals Debugging – 4-pin […]

July 6, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

$99 MATRIX Creator Raspberry Pi Add-on Board Features Plenty of Sensors, a 2.4 GHz Radio, and More

MATRIX Creator is a round-shaped add-on board for Raspberry Pi boards with various sensors, a microphone array, an LED array, a Xilinx FPGA, an Atmel Cortex-M3 MCU, wireless connectivity via Z-Wave, ZigBee, Thread, and NFC, as well as various I/Os…. MATRIX Creator specifications: FPGA – Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA MCU – Atmel ATSAM3S2C Cortex-M3 MCU Connectivity – ZigBee, Thread, Z-Wave and NFC Sensors – Ultraviolet, pressure, humidity, temperature, 3D accelerometer, 3D gyroscope, 3D magnetometer Audio – 8x MEMs microphone array with Alexa support Expansion – 2x ADC, 17x digital GPIOs, SPI, I2C, UART; 40-pin connector for Raspberry Pi 2/3 Misc – 35x RGBW LEDs array, IR Rx/Tx, infrared ring for the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera I can’t think of the single application that would make use of all features of this board, but the least we can say is that it’s extremely versatile. The developers are providing MATRIX OS based […]

July 5, 2016July 6, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

RisingHF IoT Discovery is a LoRaWAN Evaluation Kit for Raspberry Pi

There are many current and upcoming long range low power wireless protocols for the IoT, but this morning I learned that South Korea launched a LoRa network (aka LoRaWAN), after another launch in the Netherlands earlier this year. While there are also some LoRa hobbyist kits such as LoraONE and LoPy being worked on, I decided to look on Aliexpress, but only got two products were listed: a LoRaWAN temperature and humidity sensor, and a LoraWAN USB modem. Both of them are made by a company called RisingHF. Among the products offered by the company, there’s a potentially interesting development kit called RisingHF IoT Discovery with the following components: 1x Raspberry Pi board 1x RHF0M301 LoRa Gateway based on Semtech SX1301 1x RHF4T002 adapter for Raspberry Pi and RHF0M301 1x RHF3M076 LoRaWAN USB AT Modem End point to connect to computer. It operates at 434MHz, 470MHz,868MHz, and 915MHz 3x RHF76-052 […]

June 29, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

FFmpeg 3.1 adds support for OpenMAX encoding on Raspberry Pi, VA-API H.264 & H.265 Encoding, and more

FFmpeg is an open source multimedia framework used by many open source, as well as closed source, projects to handle audio and video containers parsing, hardware or software video decoding / encoding, and more. I also used it a few months ago to test H.265 hardware encoding with an Nvidia GPU using the development branch, but the developers have now released FFmpeg 3.1 “Laplace”, so it’s possible to use a stable release to perform H.265 hardware encoding. Some of the most noticeable features of the new version include: Generic OpenMAX IL H.264 & MPEG4 encoders for Raspberry Pi VA-API accelerated H.264/HEVC/MJPEG encoding VAAPI-accelerated format conversion and scaling Native Android MediaCodec API H.264 decoding CUDA (CUVID) HEVC & H.264 decoders CUDA accelerated format conversion and scaling DXVA2 accelerated HEVC Main10 decoding on Windows Many new muxers/demuxers A variety of new filters The complete list of changes for FFmpeg 3.1 can be […]

June 28, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Raspberry Pi Zero Based Google’s Project Bloks Aims to Teach Programming to Young Children

Visual programming development tools such as Scratch or Blockly are now becoming more popular to introduce school children to programming, and Google Research is now working on bringing the software visual programming concept to physical blocks “programming” though Project Bloks targeting younger children who may not be able to write or read yet. It might also help older children grasping programming concepts faster than when programming by typing on a keyboard. Project Bloks is comprised of three main hardware components connected together: Pucks – Those are the buttons, dials, switches, and other inputs from the project. Pucks have no active electronics, and even a piece of paper with some conductive ink could be a Puck. Base Boards – They read a Puck’s instruction through a capacitive sensor, and forward a Puck’s command to the Brain Board. Each Base Board is also fitted with a haptic motor & LEDs, and can […]