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July 13, 2021July 13, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Station M2 business-card sized Android 11 mini PC, also supports Ubuntu & Buildroot

After introducing Station P2 Rockchip RK3568 mini PC in March of this year, Firefly has now launched another, cheaper model with the ultra-thin Station M2 computer based on the company’s ROC-RK3566-PC single board computer equipped with Rockchip RK3566 SoC. Station M2 is only slightly larger than a business card, but packs up to 8GB RAM, M.2 SSD storage, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 3.0/2.0 ports. Station M2 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 with a quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.8GHz. Arm Mali-G52 2EE GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2. OpenCL 2.0. Vulkan 1.1, 0.8 TOPS AI accelerator, 4K H.265/H.265/VP9 video decoder, 1080p100 H.265/H.264 video encoder. System Memory – 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4 (8GB optional) Storage – 32GB or 64GB (128GB eMMC optional), M.2 PCIe 2.0 socket for 2242 NVMe SSD, MicroSD card socket Video Output – 1x HDMI port up to 4Kp60 Audio – 3.5mm headphone jack, […]

July 1, 2021July 1, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Vecow ABP-3000 AI Edge gateway combines Hailo-8 AI accelerator with Intel Whiskey Lake processor

We first discovered Hailo-8 AI accelerator with claims of up to 26 TOPS performance and 3TOPS/W efficiency in October 2020. Since then, we’ve seen several integrate an Hailo-8 M.2 module into their design including EdgeTuring Edge AI camera and Vecow VAC-1000 gateway with a 24-core Foxconn processor. Vecow has now integrated the Hailo-8 AI accelerator into another gateway, but instead of relying on an Arm processor, the Vecow ABP-3000 AI computing system features an 8th generation Intel Core Whiskey Lake processor. Vecow ABP-3000 specifications: SoC – Intel Core i7-8665UE or i3-8145UE quad-core Whiskey Lake processor with Intel UHD Graphics 620; 15W TDP System Memory – 2x DDR4 2400MHz SO-DIMM, up to 64GB Storage – 1x M.2 Key B Socket (PCIe x2/SATA) AI Accelerator – Hailo-8 AI Processor, up to 26 TOPS with TensorFlow, ONNX frameworks support System IO chip – IT8786E Video Output – 2x DisplayPort up to 4096 x […]

June 24, 2021June 25, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

NVIDIA TAO Transfer Learning Toolkit (TLT) 3.0 released with pre-trained models

NVIDIA first introduced the TAO (Train, Adapt and Optimize) framework to eases AI model training on NVIDIA GPU’s as well as NVIDIA Jetson embedded platforms last April during GTC 2021. The company has now announced the release of the third version of the TAO Transfer Learning Toolkit (TLT 3.0) together with some new pre-trained models at CVPR 2021 (2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition). The newly released pre-trained models are applicable to computer vision and conversational AI, and NVIDIA claims the release provides a set of powerful productivity features that boost AI development by up to 10 times. Highlights of TAO Transfer Learning Toolkit 3.0 Various computer vision pre-trained models for Computer vision: Body Pose estimation model that supports real-time inference on edge with 9x faster inference performance than the OpenPose model. Emotion recognition Facial landmark License plate detection and recognition Heart rate estimation Gesture recognition Gaze estimation […]

June 18, 2021June 18, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

TI AM64x 7-core processor is made for PLC’s, motor drives, industrial robots

Texas Instruments AM64x is a family of 64-bit Arm processors with functional safety designed for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), motor drives, remote I/O, and industrial robots. The top-end processor of the family, AM6442, comes with seven cores including two Cortex-A53 application cores, four Cortex-R5F real-time cores, and one Cortex-M4F isolated core. AFAICT, while the documentation is dated January 2021 and TI announced the processor in February in a blog post with a cryptic title, it was only first picked up by Embedded Computing in early May. Besides the processor itself, TI also provides an AM64x starter kit and a full-featured AM64x evaluation kit, and several companies are already preparing development boards and modules as we’ll see further below. TI AM64x processor AM64x key features & specifications: CPU cores Dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.0 GHz with 256KB L2 shared cache with SECDED ECC, 32KB L1 D-cache, 32KB L1 I-cache Up […]

May 5, 2021May 5, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

SigmaStar SSC33x Camera SoCs are pin-to-pin compatible with Hisilicon Hi3516/Hi3518 processors

We’ve been writing a fair amount of posts about SigmaStar SSD201/SSD202D processors for smart displays in recent times. But the company also has various camera SoC’s with SSC333, SSC335, SSC336, SSC337, SS338, and SSC339 parts. Those processors feature one or two Cortex-A7 core, embedded RAM, as well as an optional AI accelerator called DLA (Deep Learning Accelerator). The chips manufactured using a 28nm or 22nm process, with the latter being used for parts with the AI accelerator. Most of the Sigmastar SCC33x processors also happen to be pin-to-pin compatible with HiSilicon Hi3516 or Hi3518 SoC that are found in a wide range of IP cameras. Let’s take SSC336D/SSC336Q processor as an example since it comes with the AI accelerator and we have a datasheet courtesy of linux-chenxing.com. SigmaStar SSC336D/SSC336Q camera SoC key features & specifications: CPU – Dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ 1 GHz with Neon and FPU Embedded Memory […]

May 2, 2021May 10, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Allwinner D1 RISC-V processor SDK & Documentation

We published information about Allwinner D1 SBC and processor a few weeks ago. The news was pretty interesting as it’s the first RISC-V processor from the company, and one of the first affordable RISC-V SBC. But all we had at the time was hardware information from a leak, or rather from China-only Allwinner developer website. But now the company has added more information to its open-source development website with the release of documentation, now only in Chinese, as well as the Allwinner D1 Tina SDK. Eventually, there should be a better SDK via linux-sunxi community and some are already working on the Allwinner D1 SBC, but let’s try to get the SDK from Allwinner and build the code from source using the documentation. First, you’d need to register on Allwinner open-source website and click on signup. You’ll probably want to select Email registration. Now fill your username, select a country, […]

April 14, 2021April 14, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Perf-V Beetle board features GAP8 multi-core RISC-V AI MCU

GreenWaves Technologies introduced the GAP8 low-power RISC-V IoT processor optimized for artificial intelligence applications in 2018. The multi-core (8+1) RISC-V processor is especially suitable for image and audio algorithms including convolutional neural network (CNN) inference. The same year, the company launched the GAPUINO development kit that sold and (still sells) for $229 with QVGA camera and a multisensor board with four microphones, an STMicro VL53 Time of flight sensor, an IR sensor, a pressure sensor, a light sensor, a temperature & humidity sensor, and a 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope. But there’s now a much more affordable solution to evaluate GAP8 multi-core RISC-V MCU with PerfXLab Perf-V Beetle board. Perf-V Beetle board specifications: MCU – GAP8 IoT Application Processor with 8x RISC-V compute cores, 1x RISC-V fabric controller core delivering up to 200 MOPS at 1mW and >8 GOPS at a few tens of mW System Memory – 64 Mbit SPI SRAM (LY68L6400SLIT) […]

March 5, 2021March 5, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

STM32WL based LoRa-5E development kits go for $19.90 and up

The LoRa-E5 STM32WL module we covered last month can now be found in two LoRaWAN development kits from Seeed Studio with the ultra-compact LoRa-E5 mini board, and the Arduino UNO shaped LoRa-E5 board with more I/Os. Both boards support the LoRaWAN protocol with global frequencies and can achieve a transmission range of up to 10 km with ultra-low power consumption. LoRa-E5 and LoRa-E5 mini specifications: LoRa connectivity LoRa-E5 modules based on STM32WLE5JC SoC with Arm Cortex-M4 MCU @ 48 MHz with 256 KB flash memory, 64 KB SRAM, SX126x LoRa radio Modulations – LoRa, (G)FSK, (G)MSK, BPSK Operating frequencies – 868/915MHz (EU868, US915, AU915, AS923, KR920, IN865) Output power – up to +20.8 dBm at 3.3V Rx sensitivity – -116.5 dBm to -136 dBm Protocol – LoRaWAN SMA-K and IPEX antenna connectors USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming I/Os LoRa-E5 mini – 2x 12-pin through-hole and […]