tools News - Page 11 of 13 - CNX Software

November 3, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

How to Use Nextion Serial Touchscreen Displays – Part 1: Standalone Mode

Itead Studio launched an Indiegogo campaign earlier this year for their Nextion TFT displays that can be connected to external board such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi via the serial interface, or even a standard computer provided you have a USB to TTL debug board. The campaign was successful with over 1,700 backers, and the company recently sent me two samples for review: a 2.4″ display and a 5″ display. In this post, I’ll look at the boards, and make a small standalone demo with Nextion Editor in Windows. Nextion NX3224T024 2.4″ Display The first item is a 2.4″ TFT display called NX3224T024_011N (non-touch) or NX3224T024_011R (Resistive touch) with 65536 color, 320×240 pixel resolution, LED backlight and up to 200nit brightness. It ships with a cable for the serial connection (5V, Tx, Rx, and GND). The back of the display features the serial connector, a micro SD used to load the […]

August 25, 2015August 26, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

USB123 USBee AX PRO is a $10 USB Logic Analyzer Clone Compatible with Sigrok

A few months ago, I wrote about low cost logic analyzers selling for $75 and up, but yesterday, I stumbled upon an even cheaper, and admittedly lower end, logic analyzer called USB123 USBee AX PRO, allegedly a clone of the original USBee AX PRO minus the analog inputs, that sells for $9.99 on Dealextreme. [Update: It can also be bought for $5.60 on Aliexpress including shipping to most countries] USBee AX PRO specifications: Sampling rate – 24Msps Sample rate – 24MHz @ 8 channels Input voltage range: 0~5V Digital channel: 8 Low input voltage: < 0.8V; High input voltage: >1.4V Supported Protocols – SPI, IIC, UART, SMBus, I2S, CAN, Parallel, Custom, Search, Async, 1-Wite, PS/2 Dimensions – 5.4 cm x 2.7 cm x 1.8 cm Weight – 60 grams The tool ships with 10 Dupont cables and a USB cable to transfer data to your PC. DealExtreme also provides CDROM […]

August 11, 2015August 11, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

ee203 Real-time Current Monitor Supports 1 μA to 1A Range, Outputs Data to Oscilloscope

Measuring current can be tricky, as I found out during my various attempts at measuring power consumption of TV boxes, as when the current gets too high, your measurement setup impedance may be too high (cables or multimeter), and the voltage delivered to the device under test too low for it too keep running, while accuracy may be an issue while measuring very low currents. EE Equipment ee203 Current Monitor solves some of these issues for people working on low power embedded systems as it can measure currents between 1 μA and 1A, and even output data to an oscilloscope to see real-time power consumption of the devices. Key features for ee203 current monitor: 6 Decades of Current Range: 1 μA – 1 A (2A fuse) No Range-Switching Interruptions or Delays Wide System Voltage Range 1.5V – 5.5V (12V Max) USB interface for calibration, control, and data logging View Current […]

August 8, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Tronsmart Orion R68 RK3368 TV Box Firmware and Android SDK Released

Tronsmart Orion R68 is an Android 5.1 TV box powered by Rockchip RK3368 octa core ARM Cortex A53 processor with 1 or 2GB RAM, and 8 or 16GB eMMC flash depending on model, most probably based on Beelink i68 hardware. The goods news is that the company has now released the stock firmware as well as the Android SDK for the device. The firmware is version 100L1100_0720, dated July 20th, with the following changelog: OTA firmware updates support USB audio support Remote control function via smartphone In case you need to flash the firmware manually, you’ll need a Windows PC, a toothpick and a micro USB cable, and download Updating_instruction&Drivers&Flashing_Tools.zip which contains instructions, and the latest version of two Windows based utilities: DriverAssitant v4.3 – Program used to install the USB drivers for your version of Windows. FactoryTool v1.39 – The tool that does the flashing. If OTA is working, […]

April 10, 2015May 6, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

How to Compare Systems Benchmarked with Phoronix Test Suite

Phoronix Test Suite is an open source benchmark for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows & BSD operating systems, but in practice it’s mostly used for Linux OS since other benchmarks solutions are available in Windows, while choices are more limited in Linux. There are many benchmarks to choose from, and you can select the ones you want by running a “batch-benchmarks” from the command line. I’ve done so when testing performance of ODROID-XU3 Lite and Cubieboard4 boards in Ubuntu, and once the tests are completed, the results will be automatically uploaded to openbenchmarking.org. From there, it’s quite easy to compare recent results as you’ll get an “add to comparison” option on the site, and you can pick a few results. You can select a few systems, and then click on “Compare Results” to get a side-by-side comparison. If you want to compare your system to an existing system, you […]

April 6, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

JYE Tech DSO138 is a $23 DIY Oscilloscope Kit

Back in 2012, I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered they made Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO) for less than $200, and today, you can find several oscilloscopes for less than $100, albeit with limited performance, such as DS201. But if you don’t need a high speed DSO and just want to have some fun, JYE Tech DSO138 is a single channel oscilloscope DIY kit that you need to assemble yourself, and sells for just $23 on Banggood, or about $30 on Aliexpress, or Ebay. DSO138 key specifications: MCU – STM32F103C8 ARM Cortex-M3 processor Display – 2.4 -inch color TFT display Analog bandwidth – 0 – 200KHz Sampling rate – 1Msps max Sensitivity – 10mV/Div – 5V/Div Sensitivity error – < 5% Vertical resolution – 12-bit Timebase – 10us/Div – 500s/Div Record length – 1024 points Input impedance : 1MΩ Maximum input voltage : 50Vpp (1:1 probe), 400Vpp (10:1 probe) Built-in […]

April 3, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

miniSpartan3 is a $25 Xilinx Spartan 3A FPGA Board with HDMI Output

Last year, Scarab Hardware launched miniSpartan 6+, a low cost FPGA board featuring Xilinx Spartan6 LX9, on Kickstarter. Since the, they’ve made a third iteration of the board with either Spartan6 LX9 or LX25 and an extra HDMI port, and developed miniSpartan3, a smaller and cheaper FPGA board called miniSpartan3 powered by Xilinx Spartan 3A XC3A50 or XC3A200 FPGA. miniSpartan3 specifications: FPGA – Xilinx Spartan 3A XC3A50 (50K logic gates) or XC3A200 (200K logic gates) Storage – 4Mbit SPI Flash Video / Audio Output – HDMI USB – Micro USB OTG port Debugging – On-board USB JTAG programmer; on-board USB to Serial Interface I/Os via breadboard friendly through holes 4-channel ADC running at 200 KSPS with 8 bit resolution. 41 Digital I/O pins. Misc – 3 LEDs for debugging; 2 DIP switches. Dimensions – 6.35 x 4.06 cm They have not provided much details about development tools, but it’s quite […]

April 3, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

ESP8266 Wi-Fi Module is Now Supported in Arduino IDE

ESP8266 revolutionized the IoT world by offering an ultra low cost Wi-Fi solution either standalone or connected to a micro-controller board via SPI or UART. There are plenty of tutorials on the web to play with the Wi-Fi module, but it’s only recently an Arduino IDE has added support for ESP8266. If you want to try it, you can download the binary for Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X. Since my computer is running Ubuntu 14.04, I download and extracted arduino-1.6.1-linux64.tar.xz to install it in my PC. Now simply run the arduino script to start the IDE, and select to Tools->Board->Generic ESP8266 board. I don’t own an ESP8266 module myself, but Olimex tried it on their ESP8266-EVB: They connected a serial debug board and selected Tools->Port->/dev/ttyUSB0 in the IDE Selected Tools-> Programmer->esptool Loaded Blink example, and modified it to turn on and off the relay on their evaluation board. If […]