Khadas VIM2 Board Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Dual Tuner Board

Khadas VIM2 board is the successor of Khadas VIM board, replacing Amlogic S905X by a slightly more powerful Amlogic S912, but that’s the connectivity features that really makes it stand apart from the first version with Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2. It also exposes a few extra I/Os via pogopins. and among the three variants, two comes with 3GB RAM, and up to 64 GB storage. The company (Shenzhen Wesion) sent me one of the boards, together with various accessories, and I’ll start the review of the board by checking out the hardware and accessories, before testing the board further in another post. I received two packages: one book-like with Khadas marked on top, and another one with various other items. The first package includes the board, a USB to USB type C cable, and a card showing the main specifications, and supported operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, Android […]

Khadas VIM2 Amlogic S912 Development Board Sells for $75 and Up

Khadas VIM2 is the only low cost development board powered by Amlogic S912 octa-core processor that I know of, but when we first wrote about the board it was not available yet. The three versions of the boards are now being sold on GearBest with the Basic version going for $74.99, the Pro version for $94.99, and the Max version for $109.99. [Update: You can get VIM2 Max for $99.99 by using GBVIM2MAX coupon code for the first 100 boards daily, and the five first boards are sold for $49.99 daily at 9:00 UTC until August 28th. Details on promotion page.] Khadas VIM2 Basic/Pro/Max specifications: SoC –  Amlogic S912 octa core ARM Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5 GHz with ARM Mali-820MP GPU System Memory Basic – 2 GB DDR4 Pro/Max – 3 GB DDR4 Storage micro SD card and 2MB SPI flash eMMC Flash – Basic: 16GB; Pro: 32GB; Max: […]

Linux 4.12 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.12: Things were quite calm this week, so I really didn’t have any real reason to delay the 4.12 release. As mentioned over the various rc announcements, 4.12 is one of the bigger releases historically, and I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits. And 4.9 was big at least partly because Greg announced it was an LTS kernel. But 4.12 is just plain big. There’s also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree – it’s all just normal development, just more of it that usual. The shortlog below is obviously just the minor changes since rc7 – the whole 4.12 shortlog is much too large to post. In the diff department, 4.12 is also very big, although the reason there isn’t just that there’s a lot of development, we have the added bulk of a lot of new  header files […]

The First Amlogic S912 Development Board is Coming Soon with Khadas VIM2

We have a decent choice of Amlogic S905 development boards like ODROID-C2 or NanoPi K2, but I was recently asked whether I knew of any Amlogic S912 development boards. I’m sure Amlogic has one for internal development, but those are hard to get, and probably expensive, and while you could probably get an S912 TV box board those lack I/Os, and software support may truly be a challenge. So I’m pleased to announce that Shenzhen Wesion will soon provide an update to their Khadas VIM Pro board with Khadas VIM2 powered by Amlogic S912 octa-core processor. The company will actually offer three variants of Khadas VIM2 boards (Basic/Pro/Max) specifications with highlights in bold showing differences with Khadas VIM Pro board: SoC –  Amlogic S912 octa core ARM Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5 GHz with ARM Mali-820MP GPU System Memory Basic – 2 GB DDR4 Pro/Max – 3 GB DDR4 Storage […]

Khadas Vim Amlogic S905X Development Board Gets Android 7.1 Firmware and SDK

Khadas Vim is a development board powered by Amlogic S905X quad core processor that officially supports Ubuntu 16.04, OpenELEC and Android 6.0. Shenzhen Wesion Technology , the maker of the board, has now released Android 7.1 firmware image and SDK for the board. As we’ve seen before Amlogic Android 7.1 SDK still relies on Linux 3.14.29, but Linux 4.4 is also in the works. If you want to give it a try on your board, download Vim_Nougat_170321.7z directly, or from the firmware download page. The current image installs to the eMMC flash via USB or a bootable micro SD card (Windows methods only), so it will wipe whatever OS you have already on the board. The firmware is based on the features of their Android 6.0.1 image, but upgraded to Android 7.1.1 with Chrome and Gapps (for Google Play Store support). Source code for the Android 7.1 SDK can be […]

Review & Quick Start Guide for Khadas Vim Pro Development Board with Ubuntu 16.04

Khadas Vim is the only Amlogic S905X development board I’m aware of. There are 4 or 5 versions of the board, but currently only two models are sold: Khadas Vim with 8GB flash and single band WiFi + BLE 4.0, and Khadas VIM Pro with 16GB flash, and dual band WiFi + BLE 4.2. SZWesion, the company behind the board, has sent Khadas Vim Pro for evaluation. Today, I’ll take a few pictures of the board and its accessories, and report my experience playing with Ubuntu 16.04.2 on the board. They’ve also released Android, LibreELEC, and dual boot Android/Ubuntu (for Vim Pro only) images, which you can find in the firmware resources page. Khadas Vim Pro Unboxing and Photos My parcel included Khadas package that looks like a book, an HDMI cable, and the same IR remote control sent with GeekBox, the first board made by the company, and powered […]

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