CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

October 11, 2014July 7, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 143 Comments

MXQ S85 Android TV Box (Amlogic S805) Review

MXQ S85 (aka MXQ OTT TV box) and EM6Q-MXQ are two main Full HD H.265 Android media players based on Amlogic S805 currently selling on Chinese online stores. I’m lucky enough to have received both, and I’ve already completed the review for EM6Q-MXQ, so today I’ll complete MXQ S85 review and compare both devices. I’ve already taken picture of the device, accessories, and checked out the board’s components in my unboxing post, so in this post, I’ll focus on the user interface, evaluate performance, and test most hardware features of this media player. First Boot, Settings and First Impressions I’ve started by a quick test of the IR remote control, and it works as expected after inserting two AAA batteries, before switching to Mele F10 Deluxe air mouse for convenience. I’ve connected all ports of the device except the S/PDIF output: Ethernet cable, HDMI and AV cables, micro SD card, […]

October 10, 2014October 10, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Allwinner H8 Octa-core Processor is Designed for Game Consoles and OTT Boxes

Allwinner Technology has just introduced its new octa-core H8 System on Chip (SoC) for “high-end” gaming consoles and video OTT (over-the-top) boxes, right before the Hong Kong Electronics Fair taking place on October 13-16. The processor feature eight Cortex A7 cores clocked at up to 2.0 GHz, coupled with Imagination Technology PowerVR SGX544 GPU @ 700 MHz with support for OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, OpenCL 1.1 APIs. Other key features includes: Multi-format 1080p@60fps video processing including H.265/HEVC codec. HDMI video output up to 1080P@60fps, with HDCP 2.0 support; support HDMI CEC Integrated 8M image signal processor USB – USB Host, and USB dual-role interfaces Gigabit Ethernet MAC Three SD/MMC controllers SmartColor technology to deliver higher image quality and better visual effects Manufactured with 28nm HPC (High-Performance Compact) process by TSMC. We don’t have the full details, but it does look very similar to Allwinner A83T announced last month, but except of […]

October 10, 2014November 23, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

ZSun Wireless USB Flash Drives Add up to 32GB to Your Mobile Device

Yesterday, I wrote about the Egg personal cloud storage device which allows you to easily store and share your files without having to rely on cloud services, and also includes a touchscreen display. But it might be possible to achieve the main selling point of that product, that is keeping your data private, while accessing it from anywhere, at a fraction of the cost, by using a Wireless USB flash drive instead. Some well known companies such as Kingston (rather expensive), and Sandisk (much more affordable) already offer such products, but I’ve been informed Zsun, a Chinese company, was also manufacturing such devices with up to 32 GB capacity. The company calls its wireless flash drive “Apple Disks” showing how much money you could save with their device, by showing the ridiculous price different between apple devices with difference storage capacity, but they can also work with Android devices, as […]

October 10, 2014October 10, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Android L x86 64-bit Developer Preview Emulator Image Released

Several weeks ago Linaro posted instructions to run Android L ARM 64-bit in QEMU which takes some efforts to setup, and at the time lacked OpenGL support (not sure about the status now). Google has now releases their own 64-bit Android L preview image for the x86 emulator, and hopefully they’ll release a 64-bit ARM image and NDK sometimes in the near future, as 64-bit mobile devices are expected for Q1 2015. That means developers can now test the 64-bit version of their apps build for x86 using Google emulator. Java only apps should most probably work without issues, but apps relying on native code (C/C++/assembler) will certainly require a little bit more work. The latest Android NDK (r10b) support 64-bit code, and apps can be built with x86_64 build target, or using APP_ABI=all64 in Application.mk. 64-bit support increases addressable memory space, provides a larger number of registers, and new instruction […]

October 9, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Camera Not Working on Your Smartphone? No problem, Massage It!

I bought ThL W200 last year as my main (and only) phone, and my review was rather positive, because after testing the phone for a week or so I did not encounter some of the issues. After a short while I found GPS was not working very reliably, so I had to find instructions to fix GPS on Mediatek phones, then the first battery died after about 8 months, maybe that’s normal for my usage, but I was expecting it to last longer. Finally, after a while both front and rear cameras started to have issues such as green screen, color lines, or simply refusing to work with the message: “can’t connect to camera”. In all of this the good news (for me) was I was not alone, and I saw some instructions saying, you had to terminate the camera app, clear all data, and restart the phones. It seemed […]

October 9, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Linux 3.17 Released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.17 on Sunday: So the past week was fairly calm, and so I have no qualms about releasing 3.17 on the normal schedule (as opposed to the optimistic “maybe I can release it one week early” schedule that was not to be). However, I now have travel coming up – something I hoped to avoid when I was hoping for releasing early. Which means that while 3.17 is out, I’m not going to be merging stuff very actively next week, and the week after that is LinuxCon EU… What that means is that depending on how you want to see it, the 3.18 merge window will either be three weeks, or alternatively just have a rather slow start. I don’t mind getting pull requests starting now (in fact, I have a couple already pending in my inbox), but I likely won’t start processing […]

October 8, 2014October 8, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Kaiboer Q8 Android Media Player Features USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 2.5″ SATA Bay

Kaiboer Q8 may look like an alarm clock radio, but it’s definitely an upcoming Android media player powered by Mstar 9810 SoC with 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and an internal 2.5″ SATA bay. The company had previously launched three MSO9810 Android STBs, two of which did not support hard drives, and one with a 3.5″ SATA bay, so this new product fills the void for 2.5″ hard drives. Kaiboer Q8 specifications: SoC – Mstar MSO9180D1R Quad core ARM Cortex A9 @ 1.5GHz with a quad-core ARM Mali-450MP GPU. System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 16 GB eMMC + microSD card slot + internal SATA bay for 2.5″ drives Video I/O – HDMI in, HDMI out (All models) Audio I/O – HDMI in/out, optical S/PDIF Video Codecs – Up to 4K. MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, DivX, H.264, H.265 VC-1, H.263, Real Media, MVC, etc… Audio Formats – […]