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July 16, 2024 by Debashis Das - 1 Comment

Recore A8 – An Allwinner A64-powered 3D printer control board with TMC2209 stepper drivers

Recore A8 all in one desktop 3D printers control board

The Recore A8 is an all-in-one 3D printer control board built around the Allwinner A64 SoC. The board includes six soldered TMC2209 stepper motor drivers, cooled by an 8-layer PCB for durability. To make the connection better the board features industry-standard JST PH connectors for secure cable connections. Most of the connectors are flexible and support end-stops, Neopixels, servos, inductive probes, and BLTouch. Two Expansion headers on the board allow for two additional stepper motor drivers. Additionally, the board supports various temperature sensors, including regular thermistors, thermocouples, and PT100/PT1000 sensors (PT100 requires an extra board). Elias Bakken has been working on this board since 2019 and in our post about the earlier Recore A5, we have seen how Elias leverages Allwinner A64’s 300 MHz AR100 core to control real-time I/Os. Recore A8 specifications: SoC – Allwinner A64 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor running at 1 GHz, with AR100 32-bit core @ 300 MHz, Mali-400MP2 […]

July 10, 2024July 10, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Microchip PIC64GX is a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V microprocessor for real-time processing

Microchip has introduced its first 64-bit RISC-V microprocessor family with the PIC64GX pin-to-pin compatible with the company’s PolarFire SoC FPGA devices and designed for edge designs for the industrial, automotive, communications, IoT, aerospace, and defense segments. The PIC6GX MPU supports asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) to run Linux, real-time operating systems, and bare metal in a single processor cluster with secure boot capabilities. The company further claims the PIC64GX MPU is “the first RISC-V multi-core solution that is AMP capable for mixed-criticality systems”. The first member of the PIC64GX RISC-V family is the PIC64GX1000 microprocessor. Microchip PIC64GX1000 specifications: CPU Quad-core SiFive U54 64-bit five-stage, single-issue, in-order pipeline RISC-V (RV64GC) processor at up to 625 MHz with AMP and deterministic latencies, PMP and MMU units Single-core SiFive E51 64-bit RISC-V (RV64IMAC) monitor processor core at up to 625 MHZ with PMP unit Cache L1 memory subsystem with Single-Error Correct, Double-Error Detect (SECDED) Flexible […]

March 1, 2024March 1, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Embedded Open Source Summit 2024 schedule – Embedded Linux, Zephyr OS, and Real-time Linux

The Embedded Open Source Summit 2024 (EOSS 2024) will take place on April 16-18 and the Linux Foundation has already announced the schedule with conference sessions, lightning talks, and birds of a feather (BoF) sessions covering embedded Linux, Zephyr OS, and real-time (RT) Linux. While I won’t be attending in person, I still find it interesting to check out the schedule as we may learn more about the current status of embedded Linux. So I’ve created my own little virtual schedule out of the available talks. Tuesday, April 16 – Day 1, Embedded Open Source Summit 2024 9:05 – 9:45 – No, It’s (Still) Never Too Late to Upstream Your Legacy Linux-Based Platforms by Neil Armstrong, Linaro Nearly 7 years ago, Neil already spoke about this subject in Berlin, and it’s still very true. Do you maintain or used to maintain a Linux-based board or SoC off-tree? Then there are […]

September 27, 2023September 27, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Microchip PIC18-Q20 low-pin count MCU comes with up to two I3C interfaces

Microchip PIC18-Q20 is a new family of microcontrollers (MCUs) with a low-pin count (14 and 20-pin packages) that integrates up to two I3C interfaces as well as multi-voltage I/O (MVIO) interfaces. MIPI I3C was first teased in 2014, then officially announced in 2017, and the first MIPI I3C specification was released the following year, as a backward compatible update to I2C with lower power consumption, and higher bitrate allowing it to compete against SPI. We’ve seen it used in a few application processors and microcontrollers, but it’s the first time I3C can be found in a lower-cost, low-pin count microcontroller. Microchip PIC18-Q20 specifications: Core – PIC18 8-bit RISC microcontroller core @ 64 MHz Memory – 1KB to 4KB RAM Storage – 16KB to 64KB with Memory Access Partition (MAP) support, 256B EEPROM Peripherals Up to 2x I3C device interfaces Adhere to MIPI I3C Basic Specification 1.0 Support Target Reset Action […]

May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

EPIC-ADS7-PUC Alder Lake-S embedded system is made for robotics, automation, healthcare imaging

AAEON EPIC-ADS7-PUC is an embedded system based on an up to 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700E Alder Lake-S processor and designed for robotics, automation, and healthcare imaging applications. The embedded computer supports up to 32GB DDR5 and two SATA III storage devices, offers three 4K video outputs via HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, one 2.5GbE and three Gigabit Ethernet ports, along with Intel TCC support, up to six USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two RS232/422/4485 COM ports, and some SKUs support Intel Time Coordinated Computing (TCC) for real-time control. Key Features: SoC – Intel Core Alder Lake-S processor, up to the 12-core (8P+4E) Core i7-12700E processor clocked at up to 4.8 GHz with Intel UHD Graphics 770; TDP: 65W Chipset – Intel 600 Series Desktop Chipset (R680E/Q670E/H610E) System Memory – Up to 32GB DDR5 4800 via 2x SODIMM socket (16GB max each) Storage – 2x SATA 3 with +5V onboard SATA […]

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Imagination unveils IMG RTXM-2200 32-bit RISC-V real-time “Catapult” CPU

Imagination IMG RTXM-2200 32-bit RISC-V real-time CPU core is the first member of the company’s Catapult family comprised of four distinct RISC-V families for dynamic microcontrollers, real-time embedded CPUs, high-performance application CPUs, and functionally safe automotive CPUs. The company says it’s a highly scalable real-time, deterministic, 32-bit embedded CPU, that is feature-rich and flexible in design for mainstream devices, but, excuse the pun, leaves most of the details to your imagination… The new core will mostly be used as a helper core (aka co-processor) in more complex SoCs for 5G modems, cellular base stations, networking solutions for data transfer, packet management, and storage controllers, but may also find its way into smart meters. In all fairness, we do have some limited technical details with L1 cache sizes up to 128KB, I/D TCM sizes up to 128KB, and PMA regions. The real-time core will also include optional features such as single-point […]

April 22, 2022April 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” released

Canonical has just released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” right on schedule. The new version of the Linux operating system provides cloud confidential computing, a new real-time kernel for industrial applications, Arm optimization, support for Raspberry Pi SBCs, as well as support for enterprise Active Directory, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FIPS, and FedRAMP compliance. Confidential Computing aims to improve data protection and privacy in public clouds without requiring any changes to existing application deployments, and Ubuntu 22.04 supports Azure Confidential VMs. Speaking about cloud computing, Canonical also says they optimized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS images for AWS Graviton for greater performance on Arm servers. The new real-time PREEMPT_RT kernel is currently in beta and available for both x86 and Aarch64 architectures. It is designed for telco (5G gateways) as well as other latency-sensitive applications such as industrial automation and robotics. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also the first long-term support release with Ubuntu Desktop […]

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 […]