Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board to Sell for as low as $39

Rock Pi X 1.0

Most low cost (sub $100) single board computers are based on Arm processors because Intel processors are normally more expensive, but there are some exceptions with AAEON Up Board and Atomic Pi both powered by an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 processor and selling for $99 and $35 respectively. The former follows Raspberry Pi form factor and is easy to use, but the latter requires some more work to wire power supply unless you buy an extra baseboard. There should however soon be a third option for low-cost Intel SBCs with Radxa Rock Pi X board powered by an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail processor and is expected to sell for as little as $39. Rock Pi X just showed up in Hackerboards database, and there will be two models, namely Rock Pi X model A and Rock Pi X model B with the following specifications: SoC – Intel Atom x5-Z8300 “Cherry […]

UpSwift – Manage IoT & Embedded Linux Devices Easily & Quickly

UpSwift

UpSwift offers a GUI based management interface to their customers to update, manage, control & diagnose IoT and embedded devices. The solution also supports OTA updates to any device which is running the Linux operating system including Raspberry Pi board and other Arm SBC’s. Because of the pull-based, client/server architecture, the client-side binary looks for updates in configurable frequent interval and executes the changes and updates. The communication between the client and the server is established over secured REST API’s. By monitoring the applications logs and other device parameters, UpSwift’s Cloud-Smart engine is capable of behaving intelligently by sending email alerts to the administrator. UpSwift Basic WorkFlow Post-registration and package selection with UpSwift Cloud-based dashboard, customers can start adding their devices into UpSwift dashboard. Depending upon the selected plans (number devices connected, features, etc.. will vary depends on the plan chosen), customers will be able to manage their products remotely. […]

PIS2 DIY Handheld PS2 Game Console Uses Raspberry Pi 2 SBC as SMB Server

It’s a Handheld PS2 Game Console The PIS2 is a handheld PS2 game console that has the chopped-up insides of PS2 game system stuffed into a small console, along with a display, controllers and a Raspberry Pi 2 to access the games from the Ethernet to load directly to the hardware.  Sony has officially discontinued all handheld PSs as of March 2019, so these DIY consoles are popping up regularly. This one is quite an accomplishment. It Took a Long Time The creator of the PIS2, a hacker named Darkwing, started work on the unit in 2013. He stopped for some time, then started documenting his work on the system in 2017.  The ambitious first design specs looked like this PS2 scph-79002 5.6″ Dalian Good Display and VGA chip Genius MaxFire Blaze 2 controller 11.1V 6200mAh made of 6 ncr18650a cells Texas instrument ptn78020 switching regulator IBM Lenovo 05K5494 Laptop […]

Khadas VIM3 Linux Benchmarks and Comparison to Raspberry Pi 4

Khadas VIM3 Heatsink Fan

I received Khadas VIM3 Amlogic A311D SBC in early July and started testing it with Android running some benchmarks and playing games last month. I was impressed by graphics performance and overall benchmark results in Android, especially the results I got with a heatsink matched Khadas own results with heatsink + fan. So I installed the latest Ubuntu 18.04 available at the time (July 19) in order to repeat benchmarks in Linux and see how it goes. System info in Ubuntu 18.04:

I decided to install armbianmonitor to draw some nice temperature charts as I did with Raspberry Pi 4:

But I had some error during installation:

And while I can load the webpage with top menu appearing, it won’t show any data, as its name implies it may only work in Armbian. SBC Bench on Khadas VIM3 Let’s download SBC bench:

Note that I had […]

Real-Time Performance and Health Monitoring Using Netdata

Netdata

Netdata is a real-time open source monitoring tool, that generates hundreds of metrics of performance and health monitoring parameters. Netdata is capable of  visualizing this data with real-time capabilities along with alerts and notifications. This monitoring agent can be installed in all variant of Linux systems, Mac OS, FreeBSD and in Raspberry Pi . Netdata provides options for archiving the metrics to a remote server by using TimeSeries Databases and processing engines, and can be visualized using Grafana or other tools. Architecture Overview Metrics collector Fetches various system &  health monitoring parameters (uptime, CPU load, CPU usage, RAM utilization, disk usage etc.) . Fetches application metrics including web servers, databases, containers, etc… Netdata’s Internal plugins  collect  most of the metrics from standard Linux system parameters such as /proc, /sys and other Linux kernel sources External plugins contains ready to use plugins developed by using other programing language and interfaced to […]

Pi-oT Raspberry Pi Add-on Board Targets Commercial & Industrial IoT Automation (Crowdfunding)

USA Based Startup Builds RPi Add-on  Pi-oT, a Cleveland based startup has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Raspberry Pi add-on for commercial and industrial IoT automation. The unit is a full mountable chassis with fan and DIN-rail that extends the Pi’s GPIO with 26-pin terminal connectors and provides 5x relays, 8x ADCs, and power outputs. We have reported on a variety of uses for the Raspberry Pi SBC, from home automation to development in IoT, to hobby projects, and in education settings.  It is not surprising to see an automation module developed for IoT industrial applications around the popular and powerful SBC. The Choices The Kickstarter campaign has passed its low initial target and is set to ship at the end of October. There is an early launch discount on the unit’s price of $40 for commercial and $50 for industrial backers. That early bird type special is 15% […]

Using Sony PS3 Eye Camera as an Inexpensive Microphone Array

PS3 Eye

Almost exactly two years ago to the day, we published an article showing how microphone arrays performed against a single USB microphone, and the latter started to have a poor wake word detection success rate at around 3 meters array even in a silent room, and it got worse with white noise or background music, while the microphone arrays would pick up the wake word with a much higher success rate in all conditions. The price of smart audio development kits varies a lot from $500 for Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit to $129 for an Allwinner R18-based 3-Mic Far-Field Amazon AVS Development Kit, and $99 for ReSpeaker Core v2. If you’ve already got a Raspberry Pi 3/4 board, you can get cheaper options such as ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for $25, but nothing beats the price of Sony PS3 Eye camera that comes with a 4 microphone array and sells […]

CutiePi Open Source Tablet uses Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3

The announcement of the CutiePi, an open source tablet-based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 comes a bit late for the Pi-based tablet/laptop space. We have reported on some of the more versatile tablets using the Raspberry Pi platform, the Diskio Pi 13.3” DIY Tablet and the RasPad tablet kit, with a few more Raspberry Pi-based tablet/laptop kits also listed in the same article. Timeline and Pricing CutiePi Tablet has no firm release date, but the company is saying late 2019 for launch. The development team is also saying everything is subject to change, but look for the pricing to be USD $150 – $250. Click to Enlarge How CutiePi is Different The tablet is different in its thinner design and in the software designed specifically to use Linux Raspbian OS for a touch screen platform. There are readily available source code and case plans for the ambitious developer […]

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