CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

April 24, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Smart Tweezers Colibri ST-5S Integrates LCR Meter, Identifies SMD Components

Soldering SMD components normally require a pair of tweezers, and since those components are so small it may be hard to read the value on them if any. That means if you’d like to double-check the value of an SMD component you may have to use a multimeter first, before placing it on the board and solder it. There’s a better way: Ideal-Tek Smart Tweezers Colibri ST-5S with a built-in LCR meter that can help you automatically identify SMD components and read their values in a convenient tweezers form factor. Smart Tweezers Colibri ST-5S key features & specifications: Built-in high-precision LCR probe Display – OLED Display Ranges Resistance (R) – 0.05 Ohm to 9.9 MOhm Capacitance (C) – 0.5 pF to 4999 uF Inductance (L) – 0.5 uH to 999 mH Quality Factor (Q) – 0.001 to 1,000 Dissipation Factor (D) – 0.001 to 1,000 AC test mode Test frequency […]

April 24, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Panfrost Gets First 3D Renders on Bifrost GPU (Mali-G31) including Basic Texture Support

Collabora has been working on Panfrost open-source Arm Mali GPU driver for over a year. The drive aims to support both Midgard and Bifrost families. But so far, the company had mostly focused on Midgard (Mali-T6xx/T7xx) GPUs with for example experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support announced last February. Collabora engineers, such as Alyssa Rosenzweig, have now started to work on Bifrost support, and some good progress has been made since they managed to have Panfrost render the first 3D graphics with basic texture support using a platform with an Arm Mali-G31 GPU. Alyssa notes that while Midgard and Bifrost have a similar command stream requiring a few changes, the Bifrost instruction set is completely different and required building a new compiler from scratch. This leads to changes to the Intermediate Representation (IR), 16-bit data support, a different register allocation mechanism due to adapt to irregular vector architectures, and the latter […]

April 23, 2020May 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Released – What’s New?

Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver” was released nearly exactly two years ago, and that means it’s time for another LTS (Long Term Support) release with Canonical officially releasing Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal Fossa” today. There are a few changes to the graphical user interface, Amazon Icon is now gone, a recent Linux 5.4 kernel is used by default with Wireguard VPN backport, and snap becomes a first citizen in Ubuntu 20.04. This is also the first LTS version of Ubuntu that does not provide 32-bit x86 images. Ubuntu 20.04 ISO files will soon be found on Ubuntu website, and if you already a machine with Ubuntu 18.04 or 19.10, you should be able to upgrade with the following commands:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt dist-upgrade 
sudo apt install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

sudo apt update

sudo apt dist-upgrade

sudo apt install update-manager-core

sudo do-release-upgrade

It’s possible the release has not been pushed to your mirror, so you may need to wait for a little while, or use the command to install the development release :

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

1	sudo do-release-upgrade -d

[…]

April 23, 2020April 24, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 107 Comments

$50 ODROID-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM

Hardkernel has just launched an update to its ODROID-C2 board, with ODROID-C4 SBC equipped with a 2.0 GHz Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor combined with up to 4GB RAM, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 video output, and the usual 40-pin I/O header. That makes it a worthy competitor to Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM, especially since it supports Ubuntu 20.04, CoreELEC, Android 9, and LineageOS operating systems, and comes with a proper heatsink for cooling for just $50 plus shipping. ODROID-C4 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ 2.0GHz with Arm Mali-G31MP2 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenCL 2.0 System Memory – 4GB DDR4 Storage 1x eMMC connector (8/16/32/64GB modules available) 1x Micro SD slot with support for DS/HS mode up to UHS-I SDR104 Video & Output – HDMI 2.0 port up to 4K@60Hz with HDR, CEC, EDID Audio – Digital […]

April 23, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

HDHomeRun QUATRO 4K ATSC 3.0 Streamer Comes with Four ATSC Tuners (Crowdfunding – US)

If your country broadcasts free-to-air TV channels over ATSC, and you want to watch 4K HDR channels, you’d need to hardware compatible with the latest ATSC 3.0 standard. One way to achieve this is to connect an ATSC 3.0 USB TV tuner to a computer or laptop, or get a set-top box with one or more built-in tuner. ATSC 3.0 trials will start this year in the US, and SiliconDust has just introduced HDHomeRun QUATRO 4K streamer that comes with four ATSC tuners, two of which support ATSC 3.0 standard, as well as one Ethernet port. The company did not exactly release the complete specifications for the device, but here’s what we know so far: Four ATSC Tuners all using QAM256/64 modulation: 2x ATSC 3.0 & 8VSB (ATSC 1.0) tuners 2x 8VSB only tuners RF input for roof or indoor antenna 100Mbps Ethernet (enough to stream four channels at once) […]

April 23, 2020April 23, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Qt for MCUs 1.1 Adds Support for more STM32 and NXP i.MX RT Boards, FreeRTOS

The first stable version of Qt for MCUs was released in August 2019 in order to bring Qt graphical toolkit to microcontrollers such as STMicro STM32F7, Renesas RH850, or NXP i.MX RT1050. Qt for MCUs would run bare metal on supported boards, and software engineers would develop graphical interface using QML and C++. Qt for MCUs 1.1 has just been released with the addition of more STM32 and i.MX RT boards, support for FreeRTOS real-time operating system, and more. Qt for MCUs 1.1 highlights: Five new supported boards: NXP i.MX RT 1064 EVK, STM32 H750B-DK, STM32 F469i-disco, STM32 L4R9i-disco, and STM32 L4R9i-eval Asset management Optional PNG compressions for assets to lower storage footprint Option to read data directly from flash memory for lower RAM consumption, or copy to RAM for better performance, at the cost of higher RAM consumption. FreeRTOS support (technology preview) to run background tasks without blocking the […]

April 22, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More…

When in 2018, Blu posted a guest post entitled “Baikal T1 MIPS Processor – The Last of the Mohicans?” I thought maybe it was too pessimistic with regard to the future of MIPS architecture. At the time, MIPS belonged to Imagination Technologies, but soon the company had its own financial problems and had to sell MIPS assets to Wave Computing. The latter eventually announced the launch of MIPS Open Initiative early last year, so there was some hope as interest might pick up to compete against RISC-V and Arm again. But in recent months, MIPS related news has not been so good. First, Wave Computing decided to end MIPS Open Initiative in November 2019, then Paul Burton and Ralf Baechle removed themselves from the Linux kernel MIPS maintainer list in February 2020, as their work with MIPS ended leaving Thomas Bogendoerfer as the only maintainer. But this month, things turned […]

April 22, 2020July 3, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

AAEON Compact Fanless Embedded Box PC Features NVIDIA Jetson Xavier-NX or Nano SoM

NVIDIA Jetson Xavier-NX module was officially launched about a week ago, and at the time we noted several carrier boards and mini PCs were launched or announced from companies like D3 Engineering, Diamond Systems, and Connect Tech. We should expect many new Jetson Xavier-NX embedded mini PC announcements over the next few weeks and months, and AAEON has now announced two new similar compact fanless embedded box PCs namely Boxer-8221AI and BOXER-8251AI with the same designed but powered by respectively Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier-NX modules. Both models should share the same specifications except for the module: SoM Boxer-8221AI – NVIDIA Jetson Nano with quad-core Arm Cortex-A57 processor @ 1.43 GHz, 128-core Maxwell GPU, 4GB LPDDR4, 16GB eMMC flash Boxer-8251AI – NVIDIA Jetson Xavier-NX with 6-core NVIDIA Carmel ARM v8.2 64-bit CPU, a 384-core NVIDIA Volta GPU with 48 Tensor Cores, 2x NVDLA deep learning accelerators (up to 21 TOPS […]