Ubuntu 18.04 on Beelink Gemini J45 Mini PC (Fix and Review)

Windows Mini PC Benchmarks Comparison

When I recently reviewed the Beelink J45 (aka Beelink Gemini J), a mini PC that uses the slightly older Intel Apollo Lake Pentium J4205 processor, whilst Windows 10 Pro ran fine it was unsuitable for Ubuntu because after installation the system became unstable and problems were encountered when running anything that loaded the system. The main issue was that when connected via wired-ethernet performing a command like ‘sudo apt upgrade’ would cause the ethernet to drop after which only a reboot would restore the connection. At the time it, was unclear what the cause was however a solution to the issue was posted by ‘gambetta’ on the Beelink forum. Basically it consists of installing the r8168 module which is the Linux device driver released for RealTek RTL8168B/8111B, RTL8168C/8111C, RTL8168CP/8111CP, RTL8168D/8111D, RTL8168DP/8111DP and RTL8168E/8111E Gigabit Ethernet controllers with PCI-Express interface. To paraphrase the ‘README.Debian’ file, you use ‘r8168-dkms because the in-kernel […]

A Look at Ubuntu on MINIX NEO G41V-4 and J50C-4 Mini PCs

Mini PC Comparison

MINIX Technology Limited recently released two new Gemini Lake mini PCs running Windows 10 Pro namely the MINIX NEO J50C-4 actively-cooled mini PC with an Intel Pentium Silver J5005 processor and the MINIX NEO G41V-4 fanless mini PC powered by an Intel Celeron N4100 processor. Whilst each mini PC comes with 64GB of eMMC with pre-installed Windows 10 Pro together with 4GB of RAM they also support the addition of an optional 2280 M.2 drive and the MINIX NEO J50C-4 allows optional memory upgrades. Prior to testing their performance under Ubuntu, I established a comparison baseline by updating Windows to version 1903 and then running my standard set of benchmarking tools first with the default configuration of each mini PC and then repeated having installed the official MINIX 2280 M.2 240GB drives for each device together with adding an extra 4GB RAM to the MINIX NEO J50C-4. The results can […]

EEPD Launches AMD Ryzen Embedded NUC Boards & Mini PCs

EEPD SBC Profive follows embedded NUC Standard Electronic Equipment Production and Distribution, also known as EEPD, has just released its latest Embedded SBCs based on the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 and V1000 platforms. Respectively they are the SBC Profive NUCR and NUCR both designed for industrial uses. The NUCv has 4 variants with 2 different V1000 series CPUs to choose from, while the NUCR has two R1000 variants. eNUC and Integrated Graphics All variations and types of SBCs and BoxPCs use the embedded NUC standard utilizing the AMD Ryzen embedded platform and series with Radeon Vega Graphics integrated into the system. SBC Profive NUCR specifications AMD Series R1000 Processors – R1606G / R1505G Integrated GPU – AMD Radeon Vega 3 Graphics Up to 32 GB dual-channel DDR4 memory 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports (Intel I210 with IEEE1588) 1x MicroSD card slot 3x M.2 Type B, Type E, Type M sockets M.2 SATA […]

Testing NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit with and without Fan

Jetson Nano 52Pi-ICE Tower Cooling Fan

A few weeks ago I received NVIDIA Jetson Nano for review together with 52Pi ICE Tower cooling fan which Seeed Studio included in the package, and yesterday I wrote a getting started guide showing how to setup the board, and play with inference samples leveraging the board’s AI capabilities. I’ll now test the board with the stock heatsink in both 5W and 10W modes, and see if thermal throttling does occur, and then I’ll fit the tower cooling fan to find out if we can extract more performance that way and how much lower the CPU temperature is. Jetson Nano Stress Tests with Stock Heatsink Let’s install SBC-Bench testing utility,

check it’s properly installed,

and run it in 5W mode:

The temperature never went over 44.5°C, and no throttling occurred. tegrastats during 7-zip multi-core test:

Only two Cortex-A57 cores are used even under load, and power […]

AI inference using Images, RTSP Video Stream on NVIDIA Jetson Nano Devkit

Jetson Nano RTSP Stream Inference

Last month I received NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit together with 52Pi ICE Tower Cooling Fan, and the main goal was to compare the performance of the board with the stock heatsink or 52Pi heatsink + fan combo. But the stock heatsink does a very good job of cooling the board, and typical CPU stress tests do not make the processor throttle at all. So I had to stress the GPU as well, as it takes some efforts to set it up all, so I’ll report my experience configuring the board, and running AI test programs including running objects detection on an RTSP video stream. Setting up NVIDIA Jetson Nano Board Preparing the board is very much like you’d do with other SBC’s such as the Raspberry Pi, and NVIDIA has a nicely put getting started guide, so I won’t go into too many details here. To summarize: Download the […]

ROCK PI N10 RK3399Pro SBC Sells for $99 and up

Rock Pi N10 RK3399Pro SBC

Rockchip RK3399Pro processor is based on the popular Rockchip RK3399Pro hexa-core Arm Cortex-A72/A53 processor plus an embedded neural processing unit (NPU) delivering up to 3 TOPS for AI acceleration. So far you had to spend over $200 to get either Toybrick RK3399Pro board or 96Boards RK3399Pro development kit to get started with the processor. Some other companies announced their own RK3399Pro SBC such as Pine64  RockPro64-AI, or Khadas Edge board, but those are not available yet. But there’s now a more affordable Rockchip RK3399Pro SBC courtesy of Radxa’s  Rock Pi N10 available on Seeed Studio in three variants: $99 model A with 4GB RAM (3GB for CPU/GPU + 1GB for NPU), 16GB eMMC flash $129 model B with 6GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 2GB for NPU), 32GB eMMC flash $169 model C with 8GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 4GB for NPU), 64GB eMMC flash Rock Pi N10 specifications: […]

Orange Pi 4/4B Board with RK3399, 4GB RAM Launched for $50 and Up

Orange Pi 4

Orange Pi 4 is yet another Rockchip RK3399 SBC with 4GB RAM, while Orange Pi 4B adds Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801A AI Accelerator. Both models were announced about 10 days but were not for sale just yet. The company has now launched the board on both Aliexpress and their newly opened Amazon store with three options: Orange Pi 4 with no eMMC flash – $49.90 Orange Pi 4 with 16GB eMMC flash – $59.90 Orange Pi 4B with 16GB eMMC flash, Gyrfalcon NPU – $69.90 Quick reminder of Orange Pi 4/4B specifications: SoC – Rockchip K3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two Arm Cortex A72 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.1 support, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL and DX 11 System Memory – 4 GB LPDDR4 Storage – Optional 16 GB eMMC flash, micro SD card NPU (Orange Pi 4B only) – Gyrfalcon […]

NanoPi NEO2 Black Arm Linux SBC for Headless Applications Launched for $20 and Up

NanoPi NEO2 Black CNC Metal Case

NanoPi NEO2 Black is an Allwinner H5 SBC designed for headless applications that improves on the existing NanoPi NEO2 board by adding an eMMC flash module support, and higher memory capacity (up to 1GB RAM). The board was announced last month, but it’s now available for purchase for $19.99 plus shipping on FriendlyElec website. Here’s a reminder of the specifications: SoC – Allwinner H5 quad-core Cortex A53 processor with an ARM Mali-450MP GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – MicroSD card slot, eMMC flash module connector Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet (via RTL8211E-VB-CG chip) USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x micro USB OTG port, 1x USB via headers Expansion headers 10-pin header with I2C, UART, GPIOs, and power signals (5V in/out + GND) 6-pin header with 1x USB, Line Out (stereo), 1x GPIO Debugging – 2-pin unpopulated header for serial console / debugging Misc – Power and system […]