CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Particle Tracking System Offers Software, Hardware LTE IoT Module and Tracker in Turnkey Solution

Particle’s first cellular M2M module was launched in 2015 when the company was still called Spark IO. Since then they’ve offered new modules and boards supporting recent standards like NB-IoT and/or LTE Cat-M with product likes Boron and E series castellated modules. The company found out that most of their customers used their boards for asset tracking despite many off-the-shelf products already available, and the main reason was the ability to customize the solution. To help their customers, the company has now launched the Particle Tracking System combining a software suite with LTE IoT system-on-module and Tracker One reference product to ease the development and deployment of customized asset tracking solutions. Particle Tracking System is comprised of three main components relying on the existing Particle IoT platform: Particle Tracking Services software suite with geolocation services (mapping and geodatabase), fleet-wide device management, an open device firmware application framework to integrate with […]

April 30, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

QEMU 5.0 Supports Recent Armv8.x Features, Cortex-M7 CPU, Host Directory Access, and More

QEMU (Quick EMUlator) is an open-source emulator that’s great to run programs on various architectures such as Arm, RISC-V, and many others when you don’t own proper hardware. The developers have now released QEMU 5.0.0 will plenty of new features and such as support for Armv8.1 to Armv8.4 architectures, Arm Cortex-M7 processor, various changes to MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390… architectures, support for accessing a directory on the host filesystem from the guest using virtiofsd and more. There have been over 2800+ commits from 232 developers, so the list of changes to too long to write here, but some of the highlights include: Support for passing host filesystem directory to guest via virtiofsd Support for ARMv8.1 VHE/VMID16/PAN/PMU, ARMv8.2 UAO/DCPoP/ATS1E1/TTCNP, ARMv8.3 RCPC/CCIDX, ARMv8.4 PMU/RCPC Added ARM Cortex-M7 CPU support New Arm boards: tacoma-bmc, Netduino Plus 2, and Orange Pi PC Allwinner SoC model now wires up the USB ports TPM support for […]

April 30, 2020July 31, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Features a 12MP Sensor, Supports Interchangeable Lenses

The Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced the first official Raspberry Pi camera in May 2013. The $25 camera module came with a 5MP sensor and connected via the board’s MIPI CSI connector. Then in 2016, the company launched version 2 of the camera with an 8MP sensor. The foundation has now launched a much better camera called Raspberry Pi HQ Camera (High-Quality Camera) with a 12MP sensor, improved sensitivity, and support for interchangeable lenses both in C- and CS-mount form factors. The module itself is equipped with a Sony IMX477 sensor, a milled aluminum lens mount with integrated tripod mount and focus adjustment ring, a C- to CS-mount adapter, and an FPC cable for connection to a Raspberry Pi SBC. RPi HQ camera specification: Sensor – 12.3MP Sony IMX477R stacked, back-illuminated sensor; 7.9 mm sensor diagonal, 1.55 μm × 1.55 μm pixel size Output – RAW12/10/8, COMP8 Back focus – Adjustable […]

April 30, 2020April 30, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

“New” Raspberry Pi 3B v1.2/v1.3 May be Incompatible with Cases with Embedded Heatsink

As we’ve recently seen with Raspberry Pi 4 v1.2, the Raspberry Pi Foundation will sometimes provide new revisions of their boards with small differences or fixes that most users won’t notice, so they will not make announcements about those minor revisions. Somebody on the RPi forums noted there may be a “new version of Raspberry Pi 3B“, and the discussion points out there are actually two such revisions that are mass-produced from various companies. It turns out the Foundation also posted PCN (Product Change Notices) on the product page of their boards, so we can know exactly what has changed and when. The fist PCN for v1.2 board is dated November 1, 2018, and explains the SoC has changed switching from BCM2837 to BCM2837B0 found in Raspberry Pi 3B+ but with frequency limited to 1.2 GHz. The PCN further explains the timing of the change: The new part will be […]

April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Connect up to 32 Relays to Raspberry Pi with a Stackable 4-Relay Board (Crowdfunding)

People have been playing with off-the-shelf relays on Raspberry Pi boards ever since it was released in 2012, and over the years, some companies have maybe Raspberry Pi-specific relay boards such as Strawberry4Pi and Pi-OT. Two years ago, Sequent Microsystems introduced a stackable 8-Relay board enabling up to 64 relays to be connected to a single Raspberry Pi board. The 8-relay board only supported 24V/2.5A, and the company is now back on Kickstarter with a 4-relay board with 250V/10A line-switching relays that can offer up to 32 relays by stacking 8 boards connected to one Raspberry Pi board via the 40-pin I/O header. The board comes with four Songle 250V/10A relays, 3-pin pluggable connectors that accept 18 to 22 AWG wires, and a 5V/3A power supply is recommended. If you stack multiple relay board a beefier power supply may be required. Here are some power consumption numbers provided by the […]

April 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Power Sensors and Boards with Water using 5V/12V Micro Water Turbines

I follow some online IoT groups, and many of the projects are related to smart farming and greenhouses. People may want to monitor temperature and humidity and other environmental factors using battery-powered sensors. If there are many of those sensors, this can be cumbersome to either replace or recharge batteries, and that increases maintenance costs. But since plants usually need to be watered there should be some water pipes around, and I’ve just found out some low-cost micro water turbines that can generate 5V or 12V when connected to a water pipe and water flows. Micro water turbines specifications: Output Voltage 5V model 5 +/- 0.3 VDC water flow 10+ L / min 3 to 5 +/- 0.3 VDC Water flow 4L / min 3 +/- 0.25 VDC Water flow 3.5L / min 12V model 12 +/- 0.3 VDC water flow 10+ L / min 5 ～ 12 +/- 0.3 […]

April 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

BashTop is a Linux Resource Monitor for the Terminal

Neil Amstrong of BayLibre recently added ODROID-C4 support to Armbian, fired up Rosetta@Home on the Amlogic S905X3 SBC, and took a screenshot of some kind of advanced htop program showing the Rosetta@Home and other processes running. And… Rosetta@Home starting ! pic.twitter.com/w10hjwppLR — Neil Armstrong @[email protected] (@Superna9999) April 27, 2020 The program used happens to be BashTop a recently released Linux resource monitor written in Bash and running in a terminal. Installing the script and running it is super easy:

git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop
cd bashtop
./bashtop

git clone https://github.com/aristocratos/bashtop

cd bashtop

./bashtop

I tried it in an AMD Ryzen 7 laptop running Ubuntu 18.04. You’ll need at least a 80×25 terminal window, but it looks much better in full screen. It shows CPU use in graphical and text forms, memory and storage usage, a list of processes, as well as network usage both in graphical and text forms. You can also select each individual process to get more information or kill it. […]

April 28, 2020April 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Rockchip RK3588 8K TV Box Triples as 5G & WiFi 6 Router, Home Automation Gateway

Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor was only expected in the second half of 2020 for IoT and vision/AI applications, but at least one company is working on a 3-in-1 product based on Rockchip high-end processor with a “5G AIoT 8K TV box” that also works as a 5G and WiFi 6, and with features such as Zigbee can also act as a home automation gateway. “5G AIoT Android TV Box” preliminary specifications: Main SoC – Rockchip 3588 octa-core processor with 4x Cortex-A76 and 4x Cortex-A55 cores in dynamIQ configuration, Arm “Natt” GPU (i.e. NOT Mali-G31 MP2), NPU 2.0, 8K H.265/AV1 video decoder, 4K video encoder System Memory – 4GB DDR4 Storage – 32GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card slot up to 64GB?! Video Output – HDMI 2.1 up to 8K resolutions Audio – SPDIF audio output, HDMI audio Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 via Qualcomm QCA6391 WiSoC 1x […]